If you viewed Lifetime’s Wendy Williams docuseries that premiered over the weekend break and really felt uneasy, you weren’t alone.
“Where is Wendy Williams?” premiered over the weekend break and included countless scenes of the previous talk program host unstable, hostile, overwhelmed and likewise intoxicated. Her supervisor would consistently discover alcohol containers concealed throughout her home, habits that producers state tense them while recording. But they state they really did not understand as Williams had dementia, which the general public found out late recently.
“We all became very concerned for her safety. To be honest, I was so concerned she would fall 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 moments in the series.
Hanson said soon after she and the filmmakers were told Williams had dementia by her son, they turned the cameras off.
“We decided to stop filming as a team. We kept hoping that she was going to get better but it became apparent to us that she was not and that she really needed help,” Hanson stated.
“Where is Wendy Williams?” debuted Saturday, two days after her care team released a statement saying she has been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia and frontotemporal dementia, the same disease Bruce Willis has. Its two episodes aired after attorneys for Lifetime successfully fended off an effort by Williams’ guardian to stop the broadcasts.
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In a review, Variety called the series “an exploitive display of her 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 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 she has trouble walking without assistance. Her emotions fluctuate between sweet to suddenly irritable to belligerent to weepy or frustrated. Many times the former talk show host admits to drinking. “I love vodka,” Williams, 59, says in the first episode.
She has been public about her cocaine addiction and lived in a “sober house” in 2019. Each time someone brings up 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. 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 medical diagnosis up until Kevin Jr. shared that with us,” stated Brie Bryant, Lifetime’s elderly vice head of state of non-scripted shows.
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After returning from Miami, the team came to Williams’ home to discover her sobbing in her bed, relatively intoxicated. This was the oblique factor — Hanson was recorded consulting with Williams’ supervisor, Will Selby, concerning her problem, prior to they quit recording Williams completely. Shortly after she was put in a therapy center by her guardianship.
“We questioned all the time, ‘Should we be here? Should we not? How can we tell this story sensitively?’ It touched all of us deeply. It really did,” Hanson stated.
The job was meant to be a follow-up to Lifetime’s 2021 “Wendy Williams: What a Mess!” 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 objective, said Hanson, was 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 because of ongoing health issues with Graves’ disease that kept her from filming. Sherri Shepherd, a guest host for Williams, was given 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,” said Hanson. “Once we started filming, it really went into a very different direction.”
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Producers say ultimately what was filmed and aired is honest and unfiltered, like Williams herself.
“It is a painful truth, and it’s a very sad truth,” added executive producer Mark Ford, “but Wendy is one of the most radically honest storytellers in the history of media. Why would this documentary not echo that incredible legacy of of openness?”
Bryant says there is “no conversation” about filming more with Williams in the future. “The only thing that 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 gets to be with her family.”
The filmmakers say they hope the series makes people take a closer look at guardianships. Because Williams’ finances and medical care are managed by a third party, her family says they are unable to see her and have a say in her treatment.
“We hope that people can see why we aired it, and produced it, and that the intention is to shine a light on the difficulties and the secrecies in these guardianships,” Ford stated.
https://time.com/6835677/wendy-williams-dementia-documentary-producers/