The opening “warning” for any old
cheesy Life Alert commercial (“I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up”) cautions viewers about the impending calamity with the statement, “The following is based on reality --
you might be offended.”
Would that the Lifetime special “Where is Wendy Williams?” came with a similar alert.
Words like sad, exploitative,
unnerving just begin to explain this invasive piece of predation, a 4-hour docuseries on the former TV host’s despairing life since 2022.
Who thought this was a good
idea?
Ongoing Britney Spears-like battles between Wendy’s court-sanctioned guardian and her family members are all disclosed and add to the confusion. The fights
continued right up until airtime.
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That’s when Williams’ guardian requested a temporary restraining order to block the series’ release. A judge turned
down the request/
The guardian issue is a thorny one, never quite explained. But after two years of careening downward (during COVID, after Williams had lost her
mother, divorced her husband, and, suffered with undisclosed health and alcohol issues) she also lost her TV talk show, which had provided her a fat paycheck and pop cultural stardom for 13 years.
She was recovering in Florida with her son, Kevin Hunter Jr. and family members, and set her son up in a $2 million apartment. That’s when her bank, Wells Fargo,
determined that she was getting financially exploited. In June of 2022 she was forced to return to New York to live under a conservatorship with her accounts frozen. She could contact her family, but
they couldn’t contact her.
It’s hard to determine when she inked the deal with Lifetime, as this documentary itself is chaotic and disorganized, but she and her
son are listed as executive producers.
Apparently, the point was to highlight her “career comeback.”
Two days before release, the
radio and TV host’s “care team” issued the news that the formerly quotable TV host, famous for asking ”How you doin’?” had been diagnosed with progressive aphasia
and frontotemporal dementia, which affect the ability to form language, linguistic behavior and cognitive function.
That certainly sheds light on her radically sad
appearance and erratic language and behavior, all documented in the series. None of it should have seen the light of day.
Unfortunately, we get a ton of footage showing her
holed up in her lavish but disheveled downtown apartment, lying in bed, looking grim from Graves’ disease (which causes eye bulging, and hers is severe) lymphedema (resulting in loss of
sensation in her swollen and misshapen feet, which she is eager to show the camera) and alcoholism. She’s scarily thin.
Many mornings, the documentary crew arrives,
and the producer complains that she’s either drunk or sleeping, and her manager yells at her to get up. In an interview with her son, from whom she’s estranged part of the time, because he
hates her drinking, he says that doctors had told him in Florida that she had “alcohol-related dementia.” But it’s never otherwise discussed.
Nonetheless,
Wendy seems determined to get back on television or to start a podcast. Poignantly, she maintains, “I love being noticed. I love being famous.”
By the third
episode, she’s shown being essentially kidnapped by her publicist, Shawn Zannoti, to go to LA to meet with NBC Universal producers about a new TV show. This move was not sanctioned by the
guardian or Wendy’s manager. She’s shown standing on her star on the Walk of Fame, with the crew and random fans gathering around her. She tells everyone that she’s coming back and
going to a meeting at Paramount.
She’s in such a sad haze about what’s real and what’s fantasy by this point that she reminds me of Norma Desmond, the
Gloria Swanson character in that classic oldie “Sunset Boulevard.” When surrounded by camera lights because the police are at her mansion to arrest her for murder, Desmond announces,
“I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille.”
This publicist should be sanctioned for her enabling behavior, but apparently, she’s still in the payroll.
When asked about watching Wendy drink, she replies that she has never seen “my client impaired.” This is inexcusable. She spins something similar about Wendy problems with memory and
speech.
They go through with the (imaginary?) meeting at Universal. Wendy says it went great, but she and her publicist never hear back.
During
the four episodes, she’s sent off to rehab several times, but she comes back, clinging to the liquor. By episode four, her sister speaks, and says that Wendy is in an undisclosed facility and
doing “much better.” There’s a feeling that the family will regain guardianship.
The Lifetime network was established in 1984 and was one
of the first to focus on women. But rather than getting into the documentary business, it soon favored dramas in the “women in jeopardy” vein, a formula that was manipulative, addictive,
and revenue-producing.
But at least that was fiction. The making and showing of “Where is Wendy Williams?” is far worse -- a true crime.