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Wendy Williams wants to return.
“I’m bored,” she says, looking at her pink hosting chair from “The Wendy Williams Show,” which she moved into her New York apartment.
“I want to go back to television and stay there for years,” he says in the second installment of the documentary “Where is Wendy Williams?”
The final episode of the story, which aired Sunday on Lifetime, shows Williams energized as people take pictures with her on the street in Los Angeles. The Jersey talent is excited to meet with NBC about a possible new show.
“I love being famous,” says the Asbury Park native, demonstrating how she likes to roll down a car window just to see if people recognize her.
But his family and his boss see another side.
The one they find in bed with vodka bottles. The mother, aunt, sister, daughter and friend who they say was diagnosed alcohol induced dementia long before 2023, but he continued drinking.
They say a financial guardianship, instituted by the New York court in 2022, failed to prevent Williams from getting hurt.
“Clearly, health-wise, he was getting worse and everyone knew it, everyone saw it,” says his sister Wanda Williams Finnie in the documentary, which was filmed in 2022 and 2023.
“Where is Wendy Williams?” was released shortly after Williams’ dementia and aphasia diagnoses became public.
“I think the guardianship system doesn’t work,” Williams Finnie says. “If that’s how it works, then it’s broken.”
Williams’ guardian, who declined to appear in the film, sued Lifetime’s parent company, A&E before the premiere of the documentary.
Williams Finnie says she had agreed to become her sister’s guardian when the court became involved, but was excluded when the decision was made to use a professional guardian.
She questions why her sister, despite apparently being under the care of a guardian, continues to do interviews with media outlets like TMZ, holding up her swollen foot for the camera, a result of her lymphedema.
Williams’ family watches as those around her continue to make decisions they consider questionable.
In March 2023, Williams flies to Los Angeles with her publicist, Shawn Zanotti. She does so without the permission of his guardian and without informing her jeweler-turned-manager, Will Selby.
Williams is making the trip to meet with NBC about a new show he thinks will be made, but before he gets to the most important meeting, he downs two vodkas at lunch. Zanotti watches as Williams orders the drinks and doesn’t try to stop her.
When Williams returns to New York, Alex Finnie, Williams’ niece, a television news anchor in Florida, visits her to check on her aunt.
Finnie is suspicious of Zanotti, who is relatively new to the Williams circle, and leaves the room, telling the producers that he refuses to film with her.
Williams tells Finnie that his financial guardian took all the money out of his Wells Fargo account. The producers say Williams couldn’t provide evidence of this, but Finnie uses his aunt’s claim to make a larger point.
“There have been random people around you getting money,” Finnie says.
“Stealing money from me,” says Williams, who grew up in Ocean Township.
“The people around you who get paid will tell you things that make you feel good,” Finnie says.
The old Wendy, the one who was all about telling it straight, would never let this happen, she says.
“Listen to the people in your life who don’t take a dime,” Finnie advises Williams, urging her to lean on her family.
Zanotti tells the filmmakers that Wendy is recovering, pointing to media coverage of her supposed return to television.
He claims he never saw Williams intoxicated.
But her family, including her son, Kevin Hunter Jr., insists she needs recovery, not work.
The documentary footage directly contradicts Zanotti’s claim about Williams’ well-being.
When they are in Los Angeles, Zanotti asks Williams, executive producer of the Lifetime documentary, if she wants to go to the Oscars that weekend.
“What are the Oscars?” Williams asks, looking genuinely confused.
When Zanotti tells him it’s an awards show, Williams says he’d like to go… and suggests he wear what he’s wearing: a T-shirt, jean shorts, and oversized furry boots.
NBC declined to comment on the meeting with Williams, but no offer for a show was made. After his return to New York, Selby says that he seems worse than before. Wendy’s friends like it Blac Chynaaka Angela White, are worried.
A trip to Miami to see her family is the recipe that both Selby and Williams’ loved ones believe can help her the most.
They have seen a video of Williams sleeping in a Louis Vuitton store, shortly after the conservatorship went into effect.
“It’s very clear that he has a problem with alcohol,” says his nephew, Travis Finnie. “If you mention alcohol around her, she gets defensive.”
Williams’ son fears the worst.
“I’m afraid he might die,” says Hunter, another executive producer of the documentary.
When Hunter and Finnie meet Williams in Miami after eight months apart, they are visibly bewildered when she claims that her podcast effort, which has not yet debuted, is doing well and making money.
“She looked confused and thin,” Hunter says.
“It’s clear that my aunt needs help,” Finnie says. Other people, he says, are using Williams to advance their own interests.
However, there are glimpses of the Wendy they knew.
The one who fondly remembers buying her parents an apartment in Florida when she was 27 years old. The one where she sits and reminisces with her father, Thomas Williams Sr., looking at old family photos and talking about how she misses her mother Shirley Williams, who died. in 2020.
Then there’s Wendy who can’t seem to recognize that she has a drinking problem or health problems beyond Graves’ disease, hyperthyroidism, and lymphedema.
“Kevin hates that I like liquor,” Williams says.
“He is very important to me,” she says through tears.
Hunter says the last time Williams visited Florida, doctors diagnosed him with dementia.
“They basically said that because he was drinking so much, it was starting to affect his mental space and his brain,” he says.
The documentary notes that this mention by Hunter was the first time anyone said anything about dementia during the film’s production.
Williams, who continually tells those around her about her intention to return to television, arrives for dinner with her father and brother.
“Kevin, I’m really glad you’re here,” he tells his brother Tommy. His father seems concerned about the confusion, which Williams does not correct.
As a result of her previous visit to Miami in 2021, Williams appeared healthier, her son says, gaining up to 30 pounds as she was weaned off alcohol and pursued better health.
At the time, Williams had taken a break from “The Wendy Williams Show,” which was canceled and replaced by “Sherri” in 2022.
The family wanted her to extend her stay and the program wanted her back.
“Our priority wasn’t just to dust it off and put it back on stage,” says Travis Finnie. “It was really about focusing on long-term recovery.”
Once again, the family says it’s not just Williams’ alcohol addiction but also the conservatorship that stands between them and helping Wendy.
“I still see glimpses of my mother very often,” says Hunter, who was removed from Williams’ power of attorney in 2022. “She still has the opportunity to live a good, healthy life, but she needs to want to live it. I feel like if you don’t stop her, she won’t do it for anyone.”
Williams’ family says his progress was derailed after he was ordered to return to New York.
He was due to appear in court for guardianship in 2022.
Hunter says Miami was better for his mother because “she couldn’t self-sabotage.”
“She needs to heal, that’s what needs to happen, because she’s not feeling well right now,” Williams’ brother says.
“Right now she is weak and vulnerable and needs to be around people who won’t take advantage of that.”
Hunter wants his mother to extend her last stay in Miami, but she returns to New York, where she admits she is lonely. She prefers to have the film crew close to her because it means there will be people there.
Just a few days after her return home, producers go to her apartment to film an interview for the documentary and find her crying and intoxicated, apparently having consumed part of a mimosa.
“I miss my family,” Williams says through tears.
A producer says this is the fourth time they’ve shown up for an interview with Williams and they had to cancel it because he was in that state.
The filmmakers stopped following Williams in April 2023 due to “concerns for his well-being,” the documentary says.
Selby, who is also an executive producer on the documentary, says it’s clear that leaving Williams alone won’t work.
He says he went to her apartment and when she was telling him to wait, he walked in and found an empty liquor bottle.
“He locked himself in his apartment, surrounded himself with alcohol and decided: ‘This will be my destiny,'” he says in the documentary.
When the film ended, Williams was living in a medical facility. The New York apartment was emptied of her belongings.
While you can call your family, they do not know the location of the facility and cannot visit.
Williams Finnie says she hasn’t heard from the tutor in a year, but from what she hears on calls with her sister, Williams has improved.
“It’s almost like I’m talking to Wendy about the past,” he says.
Selby says Williams is sober, has gained weight and has stopped trying to work again.
“He even told me that he eventually wants to move to Miami,” he says.
Guardianship? It will have to be reviewed this year.
Hunter knows what he wants to see:
“I want the family to become guardians.”
“Where is Wendy Williams?“can be seen in Lifetime and is available for purchase at Amazon Prime Video.
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You can contact Amy Kuperinsky at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed in @AmyKup.