Paige Davis Returned to Trading Spaces

Paige Davis — perky as ever, but older, wiser and with darker, straighter hair — thought long and hard before agreeing to return to TLC's Trading Spaces, the genre-establishing home-makeover show that made her famous in 2001 and then abruptly fired her in 2005 because producers wanted the show to go in a different direction. Which it did — straight down the ratings tubes. Now Davis is back and the new season premieres tonight at 10 pm/ET.

When new management took over at TLC last year, one of their first priorities was revitalizing Trading Spaces, which at its peak drew as many as nine million viewers and was consistently Saturday night's top-rated cable show. Brant Pinvidic, TLC's new senior vice president of programming, decided the only way to save the franchise was to get Davis back in the fold. It wasn't easy. "We felt like the bad boyfriend who had dumped her at the prom," Pinvidic says, "and now we're asking for a second chance."

Davis, who has spent most of the intervening years doing musical theater (including a Broadway run of Chicago) after a development deal with CBS for possible talk shows and a sitcom didn't pan out, was interested — but with conditions. She wanted the old gang back together again: original designers Doug Wilson, Hildi Santo Tomas, Laurie Hickson-Smith and Frank Bielec. And she insisted the show return to its original low-budget premise — two rooms, two days, for $1,000 or less — a format that had been tinkered with to the point of unrecognizability as the show tried to keep up with the wave of more, shall we say, "extreme" makeover shows that had flourished in its wake.After leaving TLC, Davis signed a development deal with King World/CBS, which included work on a daytime TV show that never aired. "It was a lot of fun for me and I got a paycheck, which was awesome, and I learned a lot." She also returned to her theatrical roots, performing as Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway and in a national tour of Sweet Charity. She also wrote and staged a solo cabaret show.