If you watched Lifetime's Wendy Williams docuseries, which premiered over the weekend, and felt uncomfortable, you weren't alone.
“Where's Wendy Williams?” premiered over the weekend and featured numerous scenes in which the former talk show host was insecure, argumentative, confused and also drunk. Her manager regularly found bottles of alcohol hidden throughout her apartment, behavior that producers say made her uneasy during filming. However, they say they did not know at the time that Williams was suffering from dementia, which the public learned late last week.
“We were all very worried about her safety. “Honestly, I was very afraid that she was going to fall down the stairs, and for a lot of different reasons,” said Erica Hanson, an executive producer who can be seen and heard talking to Williams at certain moments in the series.
Hanson said that shortly after she and the filmmakers were told by Williams that her son had dementia, they turned off the cameras.
“We decided not to film as a team anymore. We continued to hope that she would get better, but it became clear to us that she was not getting better and that she really needed help,” Hanson said.
“Where's Wendy Williams?” debuted Saturday, two days after her care team released a statement saying she had been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia and frontotemporal dementia, the same condition that Bruce Willis suffers from. The two episodes aired after Lifetime's lawyers successfully fended off an attempt by Williams' guardian to stop the broadcasts.
In a review, Variety called the series “an exploitative depiction of her cognitive decline and emotional well-being.” Danie Buchanan, a radio DJ from Atlanta, posted a video reaction on Instagram in which she said: “I couldn't finish it…It was so hard to watch, it was so hard to see her like that,” she said.
Throughout the documentary, Williams appears unsteady on her feet and has difficulty walking without assistance. Her emotions fluctuate between sweet, suddenly irritable, belligerent, and tearful or frustrated. The former talk show host often admits to drinking alcohol. “I love vodka,” Williams, 59, says in the first episode.
She made her cocaine addiction public and was living in a “sober house” in 2019. Every time someone talks about her drinking on camera, Williams ends the conversation.
In April 2023, the film crew followed Williams to Miami to visit her son Kevin Jr. and other family members. During the trip, Williams' son told the filmmakers that his mother was suffering from alcohol-induced dementia.
“We didn’t find out about the diagnosis until Kevin Jr. shared it with us,” said Brie Bryant, senior vice president of unscripted programming at Lifetime.
After returning from Miami, the crew arrived at Williams' apartment to find her sobbing and seemingly drunk in her bed. This was the turning point – Hanson was filmed discussing her condition with Williams' manager Will Selby before filming on Williams stopped altogether. Shortly thereafter, her guardian placed her in a treatment facility.
“We kept asking ourselves, 'Should we be here?' Should not we? How can we tell this story sensitively? It touched us all deeply. It really did,” Hanson said.
The project was supposed to be a sequel to Lifetime's 2021 “Wendy Williams: What a Mess!” Documentary and biopic “Wendy Williams: The Movie.” Bryant said that both the network and Williams enjoyed their partnership and agreed to film Williams' next chapter.
The goal, Hanson said, is to document a woman making changes in her life, facing obstacles and coming out the other side. Williams' self-titled daytime talk show ended in 2022 due to ongoing health issues with Graves' disease, which kept her from filming. Sherri Shepherd, a guest host for Williams, got her own show.
This image released by Lifetime shows Wendy Williams, subject of the Lifetime documentary “Where is Wendy Williams?” (Calvin Gayle/Lifetime via AP)
“We thought we would film a woman at a real turning point in her life, starting a new career, while Wendy does a podcast…recovering from a very difficult divorce,” Hanson said. “Once we started filming it really went in a completely different direction.”
The producers ultimately say that what was filmed and broadcast was honest and unfiltered, like Williams himself.
“It's a painful truth, and it's a very sad truth,” added executive producer Mark Ford, “but Wendy is one of the most radical storytellers in the history of media.” Why shouldn't this documentary reflect that incredible legacy of openness ?”
Bryant says there is “no discussion” about filming more with Williams in the future. “The one thing we care about at Lifetime is that she had a platform to tell her story and that we feel we did so responsibly and that she gets well and hopefully at their family can be.”
The filmmakers hope the series will inspire people to take a closer look at guardianships. Because Williams' finances and medical care are managed by a third party, her family is unable to see her and have a say in her treatment.
“We hope people can understand why we aired it and produced it, and that the intent is to shine a light on the difficulties and mysteries of these guardianships,” Ford said.