Richard Chamberlain is hoping to return to the weekly-TV scene -- in drag. 

The veteran star makes an appearance on Wednesday's episode of The Drew Carey Show, playing Mrs. Wick, the mother of Carey's boss, and would love to see his character spun into a weekly show. 

"They say you have to reinvent yourself every five or six years, and this would definitely be a reinvention," notes the man known as the heartthrob of such miniseries as The Thornbirds and Shogun. "This character is very funny -- and semi-shocking." 

Chamberlain had actually written a sitcom in which he would have played several characters, "including a very extravagant woman," he says. It never went anywhere, but when his agent heard that the Carey people were looking for a man to guest as a woman on the show, he told Chamberlain about the gig. "It was something I had never tried but would love to do," he says. "Now I'm just hoping they want to make Mrs. Wick the basis of a weekly series. I'd rather not work so hard, but it would be such fun." 

Right now, Chamberlain is at his home in Hawaii, heavy into work on a book he describes as "a philosophical memoir, about life, about love, about living one's life with complete honesty." 

The lifelong bachelor says the tome, due to publishers in June, is going under the title Toward Love and is "fairly deep." He also lets us know that it involves physical love and what he describes as "unconditional love." The latter, he says, "is a term I try not to use" but is, he says, "something I have brushed against, tasted -- and which is part of my life now."