DISNEY CHANNEL/CAROL KAELSONIs Wilmer Valderrama getting ready to spill the secrets about his past relationships with starlets like Lindsay Lohan and Mandy Moore?
The former That '70s Show star has signed a deal with MTV to produce Baby Dolls, a new scripted comedy that Valderrama likens to The Office.
"Basically, it's the life of Young Hollywood told through the eyes of a celebrity female assistant," Valderrama said yesterday, during a recording session for the final episode of season two of his animated Disney Channel kid's show, Handy Manny. "We're going to make it a single-camera, badass half-hour. I am really going to get a chance to talk about some of the cheesy bulls--t that I see."
He's also making a return in front of the cameras with The Emancipation of Ernesto. Valderrama stars in the hourlong Fox comedy pilot as a young man who spent his early years growing up in a Mexican prison with his jailbird mom and is now on a quest to find his father in Los Angeles.
"I wasn't considering coming back to TV for a long time," says Valderrama. "I was really burnt out. I did eight years, 200 episodes [of That '70s Show]. But enough time has gone by, and I got enough of a break. This came along, and I read it, and it's so smart and funny."
What about that much-talked-about movie adaptation of CHiPS, in which Valderrama is supposed to star as Ponch, the womanizing highway motorcycle cop originally played by Erik Estrada? Production was first delayed by the writers' strike and then by the potential actors' strike, explains Valderrama. "We're slated to do it," he says, "if not early next year, then the summer of 2009."
—Additional reporting by Alexis Brunswick