More experiences are being known regarding the ending of The Wendy Williams Show. In The Hollywood Reporter’s most recent lead story, the power source tinges the continuing days of the long-running partner show, which came amid a move from its namesake host’s clinical issues. ET reached out to Williams’ rep for information on THR’s story.
At the time the decision was made in February 2022 to cancel The Wendy Williams Show, in which the host did not appear for the final season, Debmar-Mercury co-chairs Mort Marcus and Ira Bernstein made it known to the source of energy that they received a movement of calls from Williams considering the completion of his program.
Those calls, Marcus and Bernstein say, came after a long period of silence from Williams, during which she was out of range.
“I told him, ‘We haven’t heard from you and we were waiting to make a decision.’ We should have done one in November, but we pushed it to January or February, and by then, at that point, it was like, ‘Make up your mind or waste your time,'” says Bernstein. “She said, ‘Sure, what’s going to be on at 10 o’clock?’ I told him, ‘Sherri will air at 10 o’clock.’ ‘Subsequently, could she come anytime at 11?’ I said, ‘We would really need to work with you, and there are many ways and many buyers, but you really need to come back, and we really need to know that you’re okay.’ You can’t just call after nine months and say, ‘I’m ready.’”
Marcus agreed, recounting his call with Williams: “We said, ‘Wendy, we need a conclusion from a trained professional, whether it’s the television stations, an association or another producer, anyone who works with you, then you didn’t show up for a year, he needs to know that you’re okay. [Without that assurance,] no one will gamble with money or cash.’”
In a meeting with ET, Lacey Rose, the executive television editor for The Hollywood Reporter who created the lead story on the power source, further realizes: “This is a woman who has been undercover for a whole year. They should try to understand that she was okay. They were expecting the finding of an expert and a note saying that she was good at performing reliably and that was something, as my sources showed, that she was either unprepared or hesitant to give.”
To this point, Williams hasn’t put forth a powerful end to side effects, which include nonlinear speech, frontal cortex fog, mental degradation, and psychic flights, but she has been open about her battles with Graves’ disease and lymphedema.
The show’s downfall came after Marcus and Bernstein fought to keep it alive amid Williams’s upheavals, which generally began in 2017 when he passed out on live. For the next two or three years, Williams contributed energy to a fine-quality recovery in Florida, staying in a lucid-living office and walking through a wall.
“Everyone on that staff and at the meeting saw a lot of stuff,” a source from the show tells the power source, with another adding that staff members would “find limits.” [of alcohol] on roof tiles and other surprising places in the work environment.”
“It hasn’t been surprising that Wendy has struggled with obsession over time anyway, right now Wendy is going straight into recovery and retouching her stubborn illnesses and past grievances,” he tells THR. Williams’ agent, Shawn Zanotti. “What we can’t deny is that Wendy has a lingering mess-ridden past that she has been blunt about.”
Regardless, Bernie Young, Williams’ then-boss, was confident that, with the help of a trained professional, his client would have the option of returning to his show. Before long, however, Williams missed a promo session and contracted COVID-19, causing the show’s in-season run to be delayed. Once again, therefore, it was postponed.
Then, during a September 2021 meeting, which Williams attended via Zoom, an insider lets the source know that the host “started to be unclear” when she went off script for her arranged talk that was expected to happen. calm down the staff members of your program.
“It hung on for more than two or three minutes, and it wasn’t pretty,” says Lonnie Burstein, executive vice president of programming for Debmar-Mercury. “People were pretty lost. She was offering expressions like, ‘Thoughtful, I can hardly stop, I’ll come back to you quite a bit,’ but it was obvious to anyone watching that she wasn’t coming back completely.”
Meanwhile, Rose tells ET that the meeting “did the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do, which silenced feelings of fear from the staff.”
After the sad social occasion, guests were recruited to keep the show alive. “For the underlying four, five, six, two months, we accept that we’re putting a Band-Aid on it and Wendy coming back,” Burstein tells THR.
It was in November 2021 that “things got really soft,” according to Young, who lost touch with Williams at the time. “Her family expected her to be overwhelmed and make her her ideal exercises for her and with her,” she says, “and it’s like, ‘Great, okay. Obvious, I disagree, she watches the trailer…’”
Then the show was canceled and those Williams calls were made. Around this time, Young read in the press that he was finished. While he was never told to agree, Williams’ camp tells THR that Young certainly gave up. William Selby has served as Williams’ boss from that point on.
Just as Williams saw a sneak peek for the series finale, she chose another phone. “She called me, like, ‘Wait a second, what do you mean she fell? What do you mean?’” Marcus says.
“No matter how many people could have told her, you could have told her, I could have told her, she’s thinking, ‘I’ll be ready in a week and I’ll go shoot.'” Selby tells of Williams’ call to Marcus. “In this sense, it happened out of the blue for her, despite the way he was relaxing before her eyes.”
Meanwhile, Rose tells ET that the repeated updates Williams received about her show dropping were “perhaps the most unbelievably horrible thing” to become apparent in the middle of her list.
Thereafter, Williams’ show’s YouTube channel and social records were removed, which Debmar-Mercury’s senior vice president of marketing, Adam Lewis, tells THR was supposed to be a “rights and wrongs issue.” slack”.
Within the last few days #ElShowWendyWilliams
Wendy Williams was one of the most successful personalities of the day. Then one day she left. Now, experts reveal for the first time what really happened https://t.co/6j99lTpzj0 pic.twitter.com/vD2n6ZBxBr
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) August 17, 2022
Selby is right now helping Williams with a restaurant delivery and webcast. However, in the midst of Selby’s work, Williams has had a series of strange encounters, which he says were “unpredictable to some extent”.
“I think her live show on a lot of these shows had all the makings of being annoying to a lot of people who considered her,” Rose tells ET.
Regarding ongoing requests regarding Williams’ intimate status, she said she married an NYPD officer, which Selby perpetually denied, despite her client’s interest, Selby sticks to her version of the facts.
“She is an adult. I can’t bring her into a house and tell her: ‘Don’t move, don’t look out the window.’ This is not a prison,” she tells THR. “Going through such endless things, she will have [moments]. It doesn’t mean she’s passing away, it doesn’t mean she’s going crazy, it essentially suggests she might not feel amazing today.”
Considering how it all happened, Rose believes “there’s no one associated with The Wendy Williams Show who is excited about how it ended.”
“This was a show that had been communicating with genuine energy for a long period of time, there was a love for Wendy herself, so it was upsetting to see that she wasn’t there with the mind to be there,” Rose told ET, adding that, even as of now, “tensions over [Williams’] prosperity are massive”.