If political correctness is your bag, NBC's Whoopi ain't your sitcom. Whoopi Goldberg holds little sacred in her self-titled comedy (debuting Sept. 9 at 8 pm/ET). She chain-smokes her way through the pilot — starting in the opening scene — then takes potshots at everything from Dubya to hysterical terror alerts to white people who aspire to be ghetto-fabulous. "What you're going to get," the Oscar winner says, "is what people aren't saying out loud."

On the show, Goldberg plays Mavis Rae, a has-been singer running a Manhattan hotel. The colorful cast includes comic Omid Djalili, who plays Nasim, her loveable, if neurotic, Iranian handyman. The duo has a lot of wacky chats about (mis)perceptions of Americans of Middle Eastern descent. And they're not afraid to work words like "towelhead" into the conversation. Can you say "Yikes!", kids?

"The bottom line is, people who look a certain way are afraid of how people are going to perceive them," Goldberg explains. "More than anything, we want to make sure people aren't painting everyone with the same blush. We're trying to maintain a one-on-one and get some insight from both sides.

"We're not making jokes about terrorism," she adds. "We are guided by what's going on with the terror alerts. How you fly nowadays, how you look at the person who's driving you in the car... These are all realities. Because it's part of the world that I live in, it's the world I can comment on."

The Whoopster is also fond of pointing out Bush's foibles, including his pronunciation of "nuclear" as "nucular." Does she ever fear getting the Dixie Chicks treatment for mocking the commander-in-chief? "I don't think of it as mocking him," she says. "I think it's my right as a comic to point things out. We're all patriots and we all want the world to be a better place. Any question of my patriotism seems ridiculous. I will continue to have as much fun with our president as every comic has since comedy began.

"I feel very fortunate to put this out there and see if it flies," Goldberg says of her show in general. "We may be blowing smoke, because the public may not be ready. But I believe they are — and NBC believes they are — ready for something beyond the norm."

TV Guide Online: Are you all happy with the way your teams were portrayed on the show?
Kelly: It was dead on!

TVGO: It didn't bother you or Jon that you were kind of the villains of the series?
Jon: I don't necessarily think we were villains; I think we were the comic relief. David and Jeff and Chip and Reichen aren't funny at all. (Laughs).
Kelly: You know what it was? Jon and I were ourselves and that got us in a lot of trouble. We crack on people we like and we crack on people we don't like. You can't click with everybody, but we clicked with 99 percent of the teams on the show. Also, Jon knows he has to get me through certain situations, and he was doing whatever he could to get me through it. Laughter was the best key.

TVGO: How about you, David and Jeff? You were sort of anonymous in the beginning but you came into your own in the final legs.
Jeff: I guess from an editing standpoint, we didn't create any drama early on, and because we were going to make it to the last leg, why bring us in early? Other teams had drama between them that are getting eliminated earlier. I'd say from India on they were showing who David and I really were. In the first episodes, they were showing a lot of mistakes, like exaggerating the fact that we got lost in Dodgers stadium. Everyone made multiple mistakes each leg, and they seemed to highlight us.

TVGO: What teams did you bond with during the race?
David: The clowns were great guys. They were very generous to us, like when they gave us food on the train in India. That's one of the reasons we waited for them after the ice river challenge in South Korea. You want to do good for people who have done good for you. Plus, they would have been thoroughly screwed if we had left.
Jon: For us, we bonded with Reichen and Chip the most. We also spent a lot of time with David and Jeff. The clowns were great, too. I think everyone was wishing they would win. We actually thought if it ever even came down to us and the clowns running to the finish line, we would take a dive. That's how much we liked them and how much we thought they could use the money more than anyone else.

TVGO: What was your best asset as a team?
Kelly: Our humor.
Jon: My ass.
Kelly: Yeah, I sure looked at it a lot! He was always ahead of me.
Jon: I kept on trying to distract Reichen and Chip with it, but it didn't work.

TVGO: By the way, Jon, did you realize the camera was on when you made that orgasm comment at the Le Mans racetrack?
Jon: I forgot I said that. I had some friends over to watch that episode, and they had their little kids with them. And they're like "Earmuffs!" After I saw it, I was like, "Hmm, I hope my mom doesn't take offense."
Kelly: I have to defend Jon because he's a big analogy guy. Everything he does or says has to do with an analogy. And usually it's sports and sex; there's no in between. He had a sex one that day.

TVGO: Knowing what you know now, what's one thing you would do differently if you were to run the race over again?
David: I would drive that Mercedes right through those gates at Dodger stadium.
Jeff: Yeah, if they wanted drama, that would have done it. Just blasting through that gate, getting to the airport, making our mark.
Jon: I wouldn't really change much if we did it over again. I wish we had caught the first taxi cab in Phoenix, that's pretty much it.

TVGO: Was there a moment that we didn't see in the finished series that you wish had been included?
Kelly: You know when they showed us sleeping all the time in the airport? We would actually do our homework to a certain point. We had rules before we went on the race. One was that we didn't take connections that were less than 20 minutes. We're very well traveled and we knew that was usually fairly impossible to do. So that was really the only thing. Everything else was so freaking true that it's scary.
David: I thought it was pretty funny when I talked about 15 girls into giving me their lunch money in the subway in Vienna. We needed money, you know? That was pretty classic. I don't know why it wasn't in there, because it was caught on tape and everything. Maybe it was just too distasteful.

TVGO: Finally, what are you all up to now?
David: Jeff and I are both pretty entrepreneurial. Jeff is into real estate development in Manhattan Beach, developing and designing multiple properties. I own a company in L.A. and I did some acting previously. My manager is actually in touch with me; she gave me a call and said there are a handful of very big agencies that want to get together. So if that falls in my lap, I would obviously entertain the idea.
Kelly: I write children's books and I just finished one that CBS has to okay for me. It's about what I've taken away from the race, though not about the race itself. Hopefully, that will be out soon.
Jon: I work in real estate down in Miami Beach. So anyone who is looking to buy a multi-million dollar property, contact me. We've also set the date for our wedding. It's on our five-year anniversary in the spring.

Move over Matt and Ben. A newer newbie has written herself into a plum part in a critically acclaimed film. And talk about a modern-day Cinderella story...

Once upon a time, 13-year-old Nikki Reed was busy living out her misspent youth with a vengeance. Then, Daddy's ex-girlfriend — production designer Catherine Hardwicke — encouraged her to put her wild child experiences down on paper. Together, they co-wrote the script for Fox Searchlight's Thirteen. Hardwicke got behind the camera to direct, and though she'd never acted before, Reed landed a huge co-starring role.

Hollywood's prodigy du jour insists she never actually expected Thirteen to be made. "We wrote it so that we could improve my acting. Catherine was trying to expand the areas that I was interested in," Reed, now 15, tells TV Guide Online. "We were planning on just writing it, and then going through all the scenes together so that she could coach me on acting."

As it happens, Tracy — the character based on Reed's life — was cast with former Once and Again regular Evan Rachel Wood. Reed herself got to let loose in the role of Evie, a popular, "experienced" girl who schools Tracy in sex, drugs and crime. "I got to be totally wild and say whatever I wanted," she laughs. "And I was like, 'Hey, I'm in character.'"

Now, Reed's basking in her rave reviews, though some significant people in her life have yet to express their opinions. "Neither of my parents have really said anything to me about the film," she admits. "And I think the lack of comments [from them] is what got the movie made. If they had said something — or if they had asked me what is real and what is not — that would have made it a lot harder for me."

Though Reed's fairy tale has a seemingly happy ending, has she any regrets about baring her secrets to the world? "I didn't know [my story] was going to get out there," she says. "I think if I knew from the start that all of this was going to happen, and that I would be going on Last Call with Carson Daly talking about my life, then I wouldn't have done this at all, because it has been really difficult. I don't regret it, but I am so happy that I walked in blindfolded."