Producers of Williams doc hope viewers see why they made it
If you watched Lifetime’s Wendy Williams docuseries that premiered last weekend and felt uncomfortable, you weren’t alone.
“Where is Wendy Williams?” featured scenes of the former talk show host unsteady, belligerent, confused and drunk. Her manager regularly found liquor bottles hidden throughout her apartment, behavior that producers say unnerved them while filming. But they say they didn’t know at the time that Williams had dementia.
“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.
Hanson said soon after she and the filmmakers were told Williams had dementia, 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 said.
“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.
Variety called the series “an exploitive display of her cognitive decline and emotional well-being.”
Throughout the documentary, Williams appears unsteady on her feet and has trouble walking without assistance. Her emotions fluctuate between sweet to suddenly irritable to belligerent to weepy. 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.
In April 2023, the film crew followed Williams to Miami to visit her son Kevin Jr. During the trip, Williams’ son told them his mother suffers from a form of dementia caused by alcohol.
After returning from Miami, the crew arrived at Williams’ apartment to find her sobbing, seemingly inebriated. This was the tipping point — Hanson was filmed speaking with Williams’ manager about her condition before they stopped filming Williams altogether. Shortly after, she was placed in a treatment facility.
“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 said.