If you viewed Lifetime’s Wendy Williams docuseries that premiered more than the weekend and felt uncomfortable, you weren’t by itself.
“Where is Wendy Williams?” premiered over the weekend and featured several scenes of the previous communicate exhibit host unsteady, belligerent, baffled and also drunk. Her supervisor would consistently come across liquor bottles hidden in the course of her apartment, actions that producers say unnerved them even though filming. But they say they didn’t know at the time that Williams experienced dementia, which the public learned late very last week.
“We all grew to become quite concerned for her security. To be straightforward, I was so involved she would drop down the stairs and for a lot of unique causes,” reported Erica Hanson, an government producer who can be viewed and read speaking to Williams at certain times in the series.
Hanson stated quickly after she and the filmmakers ended up explained to Williams had dementia by her son, they turned the cameras off.
“We determined to cease filming as a group. We held hoping that she was going to get superior but it turned evident to us that she was not and that she actually required aid,” Hanson reported.
“Where is Wendy Williams?” debuted Saturday, two days right after her care team introduced a statement expressing she has been diagnosed with main progressive aphasia and frontotemporal dementia, the similar sickness Bruce Willis has. Its two episodes aired soon after lawyers for Life span effectively fended off an effort by Williams’ guardian to stop the broadcasts.
In a evaluation, Variety called the sequence “an exploitive show of her cognitive decline and emotional effectively-becoming.” Danie Buchanan, a radio DJ in Atlanta posted a movie response on Instagram saying, “I could not end it … It was so really hard to view, it was so difficult to see her like that,” she claimed.
In the course of the documentary, Williams seems unsteady on her ft and she has issues walking with out help. Her thoughts fluctuate between sweet to quickly irritable to belligerent to weepy or pissed off. Numerous periods the previous converse present host admits to ingesting. “I like vodka,” Williams, 59, claims in the very first episode.
She has been public about her cocaine habit and lived in a “sober house” in 2019. Every single time somebody delivers up her drinking on digicam, Williams finishes the discussion.
In April 2023, the film crew followed Williams to Miami to check out her son Kevin, Jr. and other family members. In the course of the trip, Williams’ son explained to the filmmakers that his mother suffers from a kind of dementia induced by alcoholic beverages.
“We did not obtain out the prognosis until eventually Kevin Jr. shared that with us,” said Brie Bryant, Lifetime’s senior vice president of non-scripted programming.
Immediately after returning from Miami, the crew arrived at Williams’ condominium to uncover her sobbing in her bed, seemingly inebriated. This was the tipping issue — Hanson was filmed talking with Williams’ manager, Will Selby, about her condition, in advance of they stopped filming Williams entirely. Shortly right after she was placed in a therapy facility by her guardianship.
“We questioned all the time, ‘Should we be below? Should really we not? How can we explain to this story sensitively?’ It touched all of us deeply. It genuinely did,” Hanson claimed.
The project was intended to be a follow-up to Lifetime’s 2021 “Wendy Williams: What a Mess!” documentary and biopic “Wendy Williams: The Film.” Bryant reported both of those the network and Williams appreciated their partnership and agreed to movie Williams’ subsequent chapter.
The goal, said Hanson, was to document a lady building changes in her lifetime, facing hurdles, and coming out the other aspect. Williams’ self-titled daytime communicate display finished in 2022 for the reason that of ongoing well being concerns with Graves’ disorder that saved her from filming. Sherri Shepherd, a guest host for Williams, was provided her very own display.
“We thought we were heading to film a girl at a serious turning point in her everyday living, embarking on a new vocation with Wendy accomplishing a podcast … recovering from a pretty tricky divorce,” claimed Hanson. “Once we started filming, it seriously went into a pretty diverse path.”
Producers say in the long run what was filmed and aired is genuine and unfiltered, like Williams herself.
“It is a agonizing reality, and it’s a quite sad fact,” extra government producer Mark Ford, “but Wendy is a person of the most radically truthful storytellers in the history of media. Why would this documentary not echo that extraordinary legacy of of openness?”
Bryant states there is “no conversation” about filming more with Williams in the future. “The only point that we care about at Lifetime is that she experienced a system to notify her tale, and that we experience we did so responsibly, and that she receives properly and ideally will get to be with her spouse and children.”
The filmmakers say they hope the series makes men and women acquire a nearer look at guardianships. Due to the fact Williams’ funds and healthcare care are managed by a 3rd celebration, her family members states they are not able to see her and have a say in her procedure.
“We hope that folks can see why we aired it, and made it, and that the intention is to shine a mild on the issues and the secrecies in these guardianships,” Ford claimed.
