Over the weekend, Lifetime premiered its Where Is Wendy Williams? documentary following the life of the daytime talk show queen since her show was canceled due to a slew of ongoing health issues.
Viewers watch on as Williams, often confused and sometimes a little cranky, tries to navigate her new reality as her new team focuses its efforts on getting her back onto television rather than resolving her health issues.
The documentary has been slammed as “hard to watch” and “exploitative,” but producer Mark Ford insists that his team were unaware of the fact that Williams’ had been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia and frontotemporal dementia in 2023.
“Over the past few years, questions have been raised at times about Wendy’s ability to process information,” the statement, released last week reads, “and many have speculated about Wendy’s condition, particularly when she began to lose words, act erratically at times, and have difficulty understanding financial transactions.”
Ford says the documentary came about after William’s manager, Will Shelby, reached out to Lifetime’s head of development, Pat Lambert.
“It was tough every single day, and there were conversations that we had, all of us, throughout the documentary,” he explained. “And there was no guarantee we would air this documentary if we weren’t happy with the content that we ultimately got and the editorial direction that we landed upon, which was the family’s point of view and illustrating what can happen when one of your family members is put into a guardianship outside of your control. We just happened to be there every day seeing the reality of this situation, and we just put the camera on it and captured it. There was no intention.”
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Ford explained that the team deliberated over what to include and what to leave out of the documentary, adding that at times, they were afraid to turn off their cameras.
Williams, who has also been diagnosed with Graves’ Disease and lymphedema, was not always coherent during filming, which troubled viewers. Her battle with alcoholism was captured by Lifetime cameras and is one of the main reasons for the rift between Williams and her family, namely her son, Kevin Hunter Jr. She regularly broke down in tears when recalling her breakdown with her only child.
All issues her supporters say should have been settled far away from public view.
“We tried to be as transparent as possible, and the making of the film is as much a story in some ways as Wendy’s story itself. And that’s why we intentionally left a lot of the questions in — we wanted people to understand the journey of the filmmakers and how upsetting it was for all of us in certain instances and also how outrageous in some ways the situations were. Like, Wendy would be left alone without food, completely on her own in that apartment with stairs that she could easily fall down. There was no one there 24/7. So, these are just all the questions we had throughout. But, of course, if we had known that Wendy had dementia going into it, no one would’ve rolled a camera.
Ford insists the documentary was initially supposed to focus on Williams’ comeback, but once filming began, it was clear that “there was something ultimately disturbing going on in Wendy’s life.”
