Hollywood Exclusive by Marilyn Beck & Stacy Jenel Smith

Melissa Rivers Puts Sweat, Tears and House into 'Joan Knows Best'/Hayley Kiyoko Opened for Justin Bieber and Lived To Tell

Melissa Rivers reports, "There's going to be a second season" of "Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?" reality show for WE tv. Her feeling about that: "Oh, Lord. We haven't even finished the last one."

The younger part of the mother-daughter TV team, who's also an executive producer on the show, says she'd like to get into production on Season 2 while her 10-year-old son, Cooper, is still in school.

"Seeing my mom trying to do math homework with him the other night was really funny," she adds.

"Joan Knows Best," for the uninitiated, takes viewers into the household shared by Melissa; her boyfriend, Jason Zimmerman; and Cooper — now that the 77-year-old comedy icon is "staying" with them in a regular way. Joan's luxurious $25 million New York City apartment is famously on the market, but of course, whether she actually gives it up remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, reports Melissa, "In her mind, she's just staying with me, but she's here full time when she's not on the road. I love having my mom around. She and Jason get along really well. No one feels they have to entertain the other, or be 'on' or be someone they're not."

Cooper's relationship with his grandmother is "the best part of the whole thing," Melissa goes on. "My mom freaked out a little at first when she'd come back from a club date, and he'd sort of look up and 'Hello, Grandma' — when she was used to a level of excitement like, 'Oh, my God! Grandma's here!'

I told her, 'This shows you're part of the fabric of his life, as you should be.'

"Me, on the other hand, I don't think of her as an ordinary part of things. Everyone else seems to be completely content with this situation."

Not only is Melissa's home more crowded these days, she's found that using it for the production is full of challenges.

"It caught me by surprise that I couldn't actually run my house at the same time. We would wrap at 10 o'clock at night, and afterwards, I'd try to catch up on everything and prep another show, then get ready to go to bed, and there would be one damp towel. You couldn't run the washer or have the vacuum or dishwasher going because it interfered with the audio. I didn't factor all that in when thinking about people working in the house."

She managed with some extra household help and such ploys as sending laundry out to the laundromat. A retaining wall next to her swimming pool came down during production, but construction work to repair it had to wait until Season 1 shooting wrapped at summer's end.

"The other problem we encountered was, when the cameras were up, they'd use up all the wireless monitors, and it shut down our Internet," she says. Zimmerman, who works in finance, "spent a lot of time at Starbucks. Luckily, he has an office he can go in to."

Her own commitment was such that when Melissa got sick, "They captured it for the show," she lets us know.

" They followed me to the bathroom. I was down; I was green."

But even with all the long hours and soldiering on through difficulty and stress, Melissa says, "I feel like a slacker compared to my mother."

BRAVE GIRL: Serving as the opening act for Justin Bieber — the female opening act, mind you — might seem to be one of the most thankless jobs on the planet right now when you think of all those thousands of girls breathlessly awaiting their teen idol crush. But Hayley Kiyoko, who'll be seen starring in the Disney Channel original movie "Lemonade Mouth" come April 15, insists that she and her band mates in the girl pop group the Stunners had a great time.

"A lot of times when you're an opening act, you play to 20 percent full arenas," points out the guitarist and drummer, who's been seen on "Wizards of Waverly Place." But with the Beib, she says, "We'd see girls lined up outside the venues at 2 o'clock for a 7 o'clock show. By the time the lights went up and we came out, they were so anxious to see anything, they were happy."

Touring with Bieber was truly a baptism by fire. As Kiyoko notes, she and her band "went from playing for 20 people at CityWalk to playing for crowds of 17,000 — no warm up, nothing in between."

Fortunately, "Everyone in Justin Bieber's camp is wonderful," she says. "He's extremely talented and a really nice kid."

Kiyoko, who's been accepted into the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at New York University, just loves to perform. Going out in front of arena crowds, she says, "The best analogy I can come up with is it's like that feeling when you're on a roller coaster, at the very top, when it slows down, and you know you're about to go down, but you don't know when. I was like, 'This is it. This is what I love to do.'"

And as if doing 20 concerts with Bieber wasn't enough of a rush, she was also getting ready to film the "Lemonade Mouth" movie about a group of less-than-popular high schoolers that comes together to form a powerhouse band. As she puts it: "The great thing was that, in between the travel days, I would fly to New Mexico for preproduction on 'Lemonade Mouth.' It was pretty rock star."

FUNNY GIRLS: Comic Kathleen Madigan insists: "I don't have any goals. Whenever Oprah says you have to set goals and all this (expletive), I say, 'No, you don't.' I walked into an open-mic night, and that started my career," says the popular headliner, who's also written and produced for the likes of Lewis Black and Garry Shandling.

It helps if you happen to be naturally funny. If you're from a funny Irish-American family, so much the better.

"I don't think we thought we were funny until my sister dated a German," she tells us. "He couldn't tell a story; he couldn't tell a joke. We'd be like, 'Scott, what are you talking about?'"

Wendie Malick doesn't mind admitting that she was taken by surprise at the success of "Hot in Cleveland" — as were cast mates Betty White, Valerie Bertinelli and Jane Leeves.

"We all knew it would be a long shot because there were so few pieces about mature women out there," she says. "But you have to know eventually something would shift. I'm a baby boomer. With so many of us out there who are reinventing ourselves, there has to be something on television for us to relate to."

To find out more about Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith and read their past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2011 MARILYN BECK AND STACY JENEL SMITH

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