Jenny McCarthy has a great personality but her show-business attributes extend beyond mere personality - the former Playboy centerfold exhibits such profound perkiness that Hollywood producers have ignored her meager rsum and inundated her with proposals for game shows, talk shows, and sitcoms. Just a few short years ago, McCarthy was scrambling for funds to finance her second year of nursing studies at Southern Illinois University. She decided to quit school and embark on a modeling career, only to be told she was too curvy. She realized that Playboy prefers full-figured women over waifs, and hand-delivered photographs of herself to the magazine's Chicago office. The editors liked what they saw and paid McCarthy $20,000 to pose as Miss October 1993. A few months later, she won the Playmate of the Year title and $100,000 in cash and prizes. Now a certified babe, McCarthy moved from her native Chicago to Los Angeles in search of stardom. Hollywood auditions proved difficult to come by, and it took incessant badgering from Ray Manzella, McCarthy's forty-seven-year-old manager and live-in boyfriend, to land an interview at MTV. The network's producer liked what they saw and hired McCarthy to co-host Singled Out, which debuted in the summer of 1995.

MTV was eager to retain its hot property and coughed up a $500,000, one-year contract that promoted McCarthy to full-fledged VJ and gave her carte blanche to create a program of any format that best suited her talents. McCarthy subsequently bowed out of her host responsibilities on Singled Out to concentrate her attention on creating a new MTV sketch-variety series, The Jenny McCarthy Show. She also developed a (quickly cancelled) sitcom for NBC called Jenny, in which she portrayed an East Coast grocery clerk who inherits a Hollywood mansion. As for big-screen outings, McCarthy appeared as "blonde nurse" in Things To Do in Denver When You're Dead (1995) and, later, portrayed her first substantive screen character (a neurotic movie star) in The Stupids (1996), opposite Tom Arnold. It seems McCarthy is heeding and exceeding advice that her mother proffered years ago: "Be like Vanna White."