I Watched the New Wendy Doc. Don't Be Like Me.

Wendy forever.

"How you doin’?!" "She's got a point. She's an icon. She's a legend. And she *is* the moment. Now, c'mon now." "Should she suffer? Clap if you think she should suffer." "Dula Peep." "Clap if you've ever wanted to kill somebody." "Death... to all of them." "Life could be worse. No, not really. This is the worst, yeah. Anyway!" "Oh she passed away? Awww. Hmm. Alright." "Here I am. Here we are. Yes! Another week." "What was that? Okay. James?" “No one opens the door… for a native New Yorker… here I go.” The list goes on and on. Wendy's impact on culture is unmatched.

[Sips mug] [Dabs tear with tissue] [Faints] [Burps]

“I’m crying in a good way,” Wendy Williams says in the opening minutes of Where Is Wendy Williams?, a four-part docuseries filmed between August 2022 and April 2023 that premiered over two nights on Lifetime over the weekend. Moments later, the self-described queen of all media is asked how she feels about being at the center of so much gossip, rumor and innuendo. She smiles, no sign of tears, and in what feels like the way of the Wendy Williams millions of viewers welcomed into their homes for 12 seasons on her hit talk show, she simply replies, “Gorgeous. Sexy. And fabulous.” If only it could be believed.

I’m beyond troubled by this show, I told a friend. “Ugh, I haven’t watched,” he responded. “I wouldn’t,” I told him. “I really wouldn’t.” I haven’t seen anything this exploitative in nearly two decades — not since 2005’s one-two punch of Being Bobby Brown and Britney and Kevin: Chaotic. It’s both shocking and appalling what this documentary was able to capture and that its producers decided to share it with the world — a decision they maybe regret? “If we had known that Wendy had dementia going into it, no one would’ve rolled a camera,” producer Mark Ford told the Hollywood Reporter the Monday after the episodes aired in their entirety. Though he claimed the doc was shaped “in a way that we felt could benefit Wendy, her family and the world at large,” it’s troubling to hold that quote up against scenes where Wendy tells her publicist that she wishes she would get liposuction and another in which her manager pulls out an empty vodka bottle from her nightstand. Who’s benefiting from this? Williams’s court-appointed guardian (who is mentioned throughout but does not appear and has now been identified as Sabrina Morrissey) filed a sealed lawsuit against Lifetime’s parent company, A&E Television Networks, trying to block the series from airing. She was unsuccessful.

And yet I must admit that there are, albeit few and far between, some incredibly powerful moments in this documentary, particularly one with Angela White AKA Blac Chyna, that emphasize the tenderness of loving someone living with dementia. Angela doesn’t placate or infantilize. Wendy will say it’s the fame she misses the most, but Angela gives her something else she’s missing: friendship. “It’s gonna be good,” Angela tells her, cuddling up to her friend and adding, “Everything is gonna be good.” Wendy looks off into the distance: “I know. It’s gonna be great.”

Williams herself, if you can believe, as well as her son and her jeweler-turned-manager, are all credited as executive producers (this is believed to be the third in a three-picture deal Williams inked with Lifetime years ago — though Lifetime claims “this was not part of that”), so perhaps this was a last resort option for her amidst her financial guardianship, one her family tries to situate as the root cause of her undoing. In fact, toward the end of the show, her niece Alex explains her hope that when people watch this, they walk away thinking, “How was it that the court was involved, she has a guardian that’s supposed to be managing her day to day, her finances, all of that… How is that happening and Wendy’s life just fell through the cracks?” It’s a valid question. But it’s one of many left unanswered.

Is there hope of a Britney Spears-esque intervention set into motion by activating a fandom? Perhaps so. One has to, or at least wants to, believe that this can’t be the last resort. 

Further complicating and confusing matters, Wendy Williams (or Team Wendy Williams, whoever that is these days) went public with her dual diagnoses of primary progressive aphasia and frontotemporal dementia (which impacts language, communication, behavior and cognitive function) just two days before the doc premiered. (Williams previously revealed her battle with Graves’ disease in 2018.) What that revelation — which is brought to the forefront in Part 4 of the doc — fails to hold accountable is her very clear alcoholism on display throughout the documentary. Her family portrays the guardianship as the problem, but in Part 3, we watch as Wendy escapes to Los Angeles without letting her guardianship or her manager know. “I’ve never witnessed her being drunk in her life,” her publicist Shawn, who accompanied her on the trip, says at one point as Wendy sits having Grey Goose next to her at lunch.

It’s a murky area, not dissimilar to the recent discussion we had about Ozempic, of how to talk about a person’s health — a person who we do not know, but who seemingly chose to make a documentary to reveal their struggles… although they may have intended to reveal their financial/legal struggles and not the struggles that we end up seeing in the doc. Or maybe both? Or maybe they don’t have enough cognitive function to make any such decisions and are being exploited. But exploited by whom? Again, it’s all very confusing.

It’s hard to know what the truth is despite this firsthand account. It’s also hard to know where things are in the present day. Williams, according to the Hollywood Reporter, is said to be in an undisclosed facility where her cognitive issues are being treated. But without proof of that reality, it’s hard to trust, well, anything really. There was and remains a lot of speculation and concern since Williams abruptly ended her tenure on The Wendy Williams Show in 2022. This documentary did little to assuage that. 

Let’s get into it.