The number of weekday talk-show hosts is about to go up, thanks to two very familiar faces.

"Will & Grace" alumna Megan Mullally and Food Network staple Rachael Ray will launch widely syndicated talk shows Monday, Sept. 18. While they both have lively personalities, the women will take different approaches with their programs.

"The Megan Mullally Show" will be a traditional talk-variety show trading heavily on its host's penchants for comedy and music, while "Rachael Ray" will be more of a how-to lifestyle guide frequently placing Ray in -- surprise, surprise -- the kitchen.

"On Food Network," Ray says, "I've done travel shows, and 'Inside Dish' with celebrities, and '30 Minute Meals.' This show is like all of that smushed together, then you add the live audience and the participation of the home viewer, and that's sort of the hybrid that built this. It's not a celebrity-driven show, but when celebrities come on, it will be the same sort of 'Inside Dish' vibe where you're leaning on your elbows and hanging out with them."

Conversely for Mullally, who just won her second and final Emmy Award for "Will & Grace," the more celebrities, the merrier. She reflects, "Remember Dinah Shore's talk show? At one point, she was dating Burt Reynolds and she was doing a cooking segment, and she went over to put a pie in the oven and opened it up, and Burt Reynolds was in it! I want Sean (Hayes, who played Jack to Mullally's Karen on 'Will & Grace') to be in the oven. I want Sean to be curled up in a drum as it's being played. We have a lot of ideas."

Mullally's idea of having her own talk show began in earnest in 2003, when she pinch-hit for David Letterman while he was off his weeknight CBS program, recuperating from a bout with shingles.

"I just had so much fun," Mullally recalls. "I was totally relaxed, and I felt really comfortable. I wasn't nervous at all. I took a nap for an hour right before the show, which was crazy. After that, I got a lot of really great response from people and I started thinking, 'Huh ... .' It was a big turning point."

For Ray, the biggest incentive to move into syndication came from a major mentor: Oprah Winfrey, whose Harpo firm is co-producing her new show Winfrey is scheduled to appear on the show during its first week. Being a cottage industry unto herself, she undoubtedly appreciates the same quality in Ray, who also has an eponymous magazine (in addition to being a best-selling author, turning out several cookbooks per year).

"Oprah has been a huge and continuing factor," Ray reports, "in that she tells me to be myself and keep being myself. As Popeye said, 'I am what I am.' I go to work, I work as hard as I can, I do the best job I can, and then I go home.

"It's very much up to the people we ask to come on the show whether they want to play. There's nothing serious going on, nothing too heavy. It's a very relaxed environment, and I hope people will feel that when they watch the show, very much a part of everything that's going on. That accessibility factor is hugely important to me."

And the same goes for Mullally, who may invoke the hyper-high-pitched sound of her famous sitcom character only occasionally but still wants to generate an overall atmosphere of fun.

"I always said I would play Karen until I fell over dead in my Manolo Blahniks," she says. "It was such a great gift to be able to play a character that was so well-drawn. It's like how nobody knew Karen before 'Will & Grace' started, then people would watch an episode or two, and they'd get to know her. Kind of the same rule applies to this show. If they don't know me in any other way, they'll see the show and they'll get to know me."

The weekday program also is a big commitment for Mullally since she won't be as available for acting jobs, which she has done since the early 1980s. She claims no regrets on that count, though.

"One of the funny transitions with this is that I felt this might be a venue in which I have more to offer than I do as an actress, in a weird way. Having said that, Jerry Seinfeld is doing an animated feature that he wrote and is producing and doing a lead voice in, and he asked me to do a cameo in it. I'm doing that, so that will be fun."

Meanwhile, Ray simply wants to remain the personality she's always been known as, to the extent that she says the No. 1 rule on her new show is "no crying. I don't like finger-wagging. I don't like a lot of 'experts.' We have 'content buddies,' people who are actual friends of mine who are good at one thing or another in life. They'll come on all the time.

"I like the whole concept of this being a forum," Ray adds, "because people love that sense of community when you get advice from a peer rather than an expert. I consider everything I do akin to being a waitress. I try to figure out what people want and expect, then I try to fill the order for them."