Producers say they didn’t know Williams had dementia while filming most scenes
If you watched Lifetime’s Wendy Williams docuseries that premiered last weekend and felt uncomfortable, you weren’t alone.
“Where is Wendy Williams?” featured numerous scenes of the former talk show host unsteady, belligerent, confused and also drunk. Her manager would regularly find 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, which the public learned late last week.
“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 said.
“Where is Wendy Williams?” debuted Feb. 24, 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.
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 find out the diagnosis until Kevin Jr. shared that with us,” said Brie Bryant, Lifetime’s senior vice president of nonscripted programming.
After returning from Miami, the crew arrived at Williams’ apartment to find her sobbing in her bed, seemingly inebriated. This was the tipping point — Hanson was filmed speaking with Williams’ manager, Will Selby, about her condition, before they stopped filming Williams altogether. Shortly after she was placed in a treatment facility 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 said.
The project was intended 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.