TV’s creepy new low: Dementia-stricken Wendy Williams is reduced to a sideshow freak as family members creep into her fading spotlight. And, says MAUREEN CALLAHAN, it’s a heartless and cynical violation, even by Hollywood’s sordid standards

Wendy Williams built a career on saying terrible things, reveling in the misfortunes of others, and satirizing celebrities even though she tried to be one.

But no one, not even Williams, deserves her most terrible fate.

Ahead of a two-part docuseries airing this weekend on Lifetime, Williams’ diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia and primary progressive aphasia at age 59 has been publicly announced.

The timing feels callous and cynical, even by Hollywood standards.

Just look at Williams’ legal guardian, named by TMZ as Sabrina Morrissey, who has reportedly filed a lawsuit against Lifetime’s parent company.

The lawsuit is under seal, but Morrissey has also filed a temporary restraining order, which could attempt to prevent the network from airing the series.

Perhaps the lawsuit was triggered by the pre-publicity barrage we saw this week.

“The Fight to Save Wendy Williams” is People magazine’s cover story, with the banner “Addiction, Health Struggles, a Family in Turmoil.”

Meanwhile, Williams’ niece Alex Finnie — an otherwise little-known local news anchor from Miami — is getting a taste of the big news and making the rounds on “Good Morning America” ​​and “The View.”

It all feels dirty. As anyone who loves someone with dementia knows, the first thing to be lost is their personal dignity.

It is particularly horrifying to have that debunked so publicly – when it appears that Williams does not have the knowledge to agree to it.

“Where’s Wendy Williams?” began filming in August 2022, just weeks after she was fired from her talk show. Williams was 57 at the time and lost the only things that seemed important to her: her influence, her wealth, her fame.

The documentary was a last-ditch effort to salvage her reputation, shattered after a prolonged public crisis with severe substance abuse; a mid-air collapse while dressed as the Statue of Liberty; her husband’s long-term extramarital affair, which produced a child; being photographed drunk in a Louis Vuitton store; a grim period in a dilapidated communal sober house; and reports that employees of her show often found liquor bottles all over the set, even under the ceiling panels.

“All I know is how to be famous,” Williams says in the doc’s trailer. ‘I have no money.’

At her peak, Williams was making $10 million a year as the host of her titular talk show.

She had an unlikely fan in John Oliver, who called her “an oasis of truth in a world of lies” – even though she had exposed a famous rapper’s wife for having cancer (she hadn’t told some family members yet) or the like. celebrities as homosexual, or mock their appearance, weight and lack of intelligence.

“It sounds like she has a fifth-grade education,” she once said of Beyoncé.

While he was still alive, Williams falsely claimed that Tupac Shakur had been raped while serving a prison sentence.

She said the young men who claimed Michael Jackson had abused them were lying to “get money” and that a 14-year-old girl who claimed R. Kelly had sexually abused her had given her “consent.”

Sure, Williams could be terrible. Despicable even.

But her hideousness always seemed to stem from her own self-loathing: As a child, her parents were critical of her appearance and weighed her every day. She suffered from hyperactivity. She had clearly had multiple plastic surgeries and remained married to a man who blatantly cheated on her.

Her own celebrity was based on bile, on saying not only controversial but also remarkably hateful things. That bitterness consumed her.

Naturally Wendy Williams would just implode. Her utter lack of self-worth, of any core identity that didn’t need or rely on fame, was never going to keep her afloat.

“I have no friends,” she says in the documentary. It’s all too believable and sad.

Instead, she has a jeweler-cum-personal manager, who we see fishing a half-empty vodka bottle out of her bedroom as Williams demands to leave it alone.

“I love being famous,” she says. “But family is everything.” It feels like something she would rather believe than the truth. Her son Kevin Jr. sits in front of the cameras and denies claims he stole money from his mother.

Her ex-husband tormented her. Her mother died in December 2020. She has been estranged from her brother and father at various times.

Now her sister Wanda and her niece are opening up to People about her addictions and medical issues — and it’s all timed to this documentary, which stopped filming in April 2023 after the crew discovered Williams at home, with her eyes rolled back in her head .

It’s enough to make your skin crawl.

Williams was on the brink of her dementia diagnosis when she began filming this documentary, meaning she most likely had noticeable cognitive impairment long before then.

She also suffers from Graves’ disease and lymphedema. The cumulative effects often make her look and sound mentally ill.

So not only is Williams, with the apparent support of her family, portrayed here as a sideshow freak, but they also try to spin her crisis as Britney-adjacent: Williams’ legal guardian will decide whether she can ever leave the facility. houses her.

“Have you seen a neurologist?” an off-camera producer asks Williams in the doc.

“To find out if I’m crazy?” Williams responds. “Mmm-hmm.”

The kind of fame Williams built for himself was uniquely masochistic. How else can you describe her pulling out the cameras to document her own demise?

If only she had someone to protect her from herself. And who knows? Maybe she did and pushed them all away.

But to let family members creep into her fading spotlight, to sell a story that doesn’t have a happy ending, feels all too cruel.

“She sounds really good,” her niece Alex Finnie told “The View” on Thursday — even though she wouldn’t say the last time they spoke on the phone.

Finnie added that her aunt is “excited about her future.”

What!? Anyone who suffers from dementia has no future. That’s the kind of painful truth that Williams himself would have been the first to point out.

At least she has this last moment in the sun. But for someone who is in such a terrible decline, who can’t participate in her own publicity tour, it feels like a transgression – too far, perhaps, even for Wendy Williams.