[ad_1]
If you watched Lifetime Wendy Williams docuseries that premiered over the weekend and you felt uncomfortable, you weren’t alone.
“Where is Wendy Williams?” premiered over the weekend and featured numerous scenes of the unstable, belligerent, confused, and also drunk former talk show host. Her manager regularly found bottles of liquor hidden throughout her apartment, behavior that the producers said made them nervous during filming. But they say they didn’t know at the time that Williams had dementia, something the The public found out late last week..
“We all care a lot about their safety. To be honest, I was very worried about him falling down the stairs and for numerous different reasons,” said Erica Hanson, an executive producer who can be seen and heard speaking to Williams at certain points in the series.
Hanson said that shortly after her son told her and the filmmakers that Williams had dementia, they turned off the cameras.
“We decided to stop filming as a team. We kept hoping she would get better, but we realized that she wasn’t and she really needed help,” Hanson said.
“Where is Wendy Williams?” She debuted on Saturday, two days after her care team issued a statement saying she had been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia and frontotemporal dementia, the same disease that Bruce Willis has. Its two episodes were broadcast after Lifetime’s lawyers successfully defended themselves an effort by Williams’ guardian to stop the transmissions.
In a review, Variety called the series. “an exploitative display of their cognitive decline and emotional well-being.” Danie Buchanan, a radio DJ in Atlanta, posted a video reaction on Instagram saying, “I couldn’t finish it… It was very hard to watch, it was very hard to see her like that,” she said.
Throughout the documentary, Williams appears unsteady and has trouble walking without assistance. Her emotions fluctuate between sweet, suddenly irritable, belligerent, tearful, or frustrated. Many times the former talk show host admits to drinking. “I love vodka,” Williams, 59, says in the first episode.
He has been public about his cocaine addiction and lived in a “sober house” in 2019. Whenever someone mentions his alcohol use on camera, Williams ends the conversation.
In April 2023, the film crew followed Williams to Miami to visit his son Kevin, Jr. and other family members. During the trip, Williams’ son told the filmmakers that his mother suffers from a form of dementia caused by alcohol.
“We didn’t discover 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 team arrived at Williams’ apartment and found her sobbing in her bed, apparently drunk. This was the turning point: Hanson was filmed speaking to Williams’ manager, Will Selby, about her condition, before they stopped filming Williams entirely. Shortly after her guardianship placed her in a treatment center.
“We ask ourselves all the time: ‘Should we be here? We should not? How can we tell this story sensitively?’ She touched us all deeply. It really was,” Hanson said.
The project was intended to be a follow-up to “Wendy Williams: What a Mess!” Lifetime’s 2021 documentary and biopic “Wendy Williams: The Movie.” Bryant said both the network and Williams enjoyed their partnership and agreed to film Williams’ next chapter.
The goal, Hanson said, was to document a woman making changes in her life, facing obstacles and coming out the other side. Williams’ eponymous day the talk show ended in 2022 due to ongoing health issues with Graves’ disease that prevented him from filming. Sherri Shepherd, Williams’ guest host, hosted her own show.
“We thought we were going to film a woman at a real turning point in her life, embarking on a new career with Wendy doing a podcast…recovering from a very difficult divorce,” Hanson said. “Once we started filming, she really went in a very different direction.”
Producers say that ultimately what was filmed and broadcast is honest and unfiltered, like Williams herself.
“It’s a painful and very sad truth,” added executive producer Mark Ford, “but Wendy is one of the most radically honest storytellers in media history. Why wouldn’t this documentary echo that incredible legacy of openness?
Bryant says there is “no conversation” about filming more with Williams in the future. “The only thing we care about at Lifetime is that she had a platform to tell her story, and that we felt like we did it responsibly, and that she recovers and hopefully can be with her family.”
The filmmakers say they hope the series will make people take a closer look at conservatorships. Because Williams’ finances and medical care are managed by a third party, her family says they cannot see her or have a say in her treatment.
“We hope that people can see why we broadcast it and produce it, and that the intention is to shed light on the difficulties and secrets of these conservatorships,” Ford said.