Few television experts pegged Wendy Williams as heir apparent to Oprah’s vacant daytime television throne but Williams never doubted what she was working with. Long before television cameras began rolling, Wendy Williams was carving a niche and compiling a faithful fan base that has followed her from the radio into television.
Before it became posh to discuss the private lives of urban celebrities, Wendy Williams was on it. In the early days of hip-hop’s ascension to pop culture dominance, it was hard to find gossip on Puff Daddy, Mary J. Blige and Lil Kim, unless you tuned into Wendy.
Back then, black radio jocks really didn’t dish dirt on the celebrities they encountered. Music industry parties and events thrived on an unofficial “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” policy but Wendy Williams ignored that unspoken rule.
If she saw celebs getting too close, especially if they had a ring on their finger, she blasted it on her New York radio shows first on KISS FM and then on the influential HOT 97, one of hip-hop music’s earliest partners. And she wasn’t scared of biting the hand that fed her either, as no one, even her HOT 97 colleague Angie Martinez whom she outed as dating Q-Tip in 1998, was off limits.
She became so popular that she even appeared on Martin as herself in 1992 and, when she was rumored to be blackballed in New York as retaliation from Sean “Puffy” Combs for circulating gay rumors about him, and exiled to Philly’s WUSL, her career still couldn’t be stopped.
Eventually, she landed back in New York at the legendary WBLS for The Wendy Williams Experience, which became a must-listen for those even outside New York that had to use the Internet. It became such a guilty pleasure VH1 taped the show and aired it, making Williams an early experiment for the urban format that largely drives its high ratings today.
So Wendy Williams is not putting on; she has always been more akin to a mixture of Jerry Springer sans the fights, Maury Povich and Page Six than Oprah and it has served her well. On the radio, she took her cues from Howard Stern and won legions of fans by shying away from cutesy interviews and asking the questions they really wanted answers to and she did it in a brash, in-your-face, The Real Housewives of New Jersey, sort of way.
While Anderson Cooper and soon Katie Couric vie to fill Oprah’s shoes, Wendy Williams has kept close to the style that brought her to the dance. Other shows may thrive on guests, but at The Wendy Williams Show, Wendy Williams’ larger-than-life, proud Jersey persona, fake boobs, endless wigs and all, is the show. Frankly, her willingness to get messy is why her fans love her.
To be honest, guests, unless they are high-profile like T.I. or Charlie Sheen, are a nuisance. Like Oprah, Wendy Williams’s fans feel a kinship with her. Her “Ask Wendy” segments are full of people revealing their own tabloid-worthy messiness, such as a recent guest who asked Wendy how to break the news to her friend, who was unsuspectingly godmother to her half-brother resulting from an affair she had with her friend’s father. It’s stuff that makes even Wendy’s jaw drop.
Yes it’s ‘ghetto’, hood or whatever you want to call it but the kicker is Wendy Williams is far from that. She, by her own admission, grew up solidly middle-class in an intact family with parents who are still together. While interviewing Dule Hill regarding his role in Alicia Keys’ Broadway play Stick Fly, she shared that she hailed from a Martha Vineyard family so there was no question that Wendy Williams would go to college.
This is not the background that many would associate with Wendy Williams’ well-known loud personality. But more than a style that fueled a successful radio career for 23 years, resulting in her induction in the National Radio Hall of Fame, Wendy Williams tapped into something else. She refused to play by the taboos that she must talk about just “black” celebrities on her radio show.
Now, in daytime, she exploits her pop culture background to the fullest. She loves reality television, white and black shows. Heather Locklear is a dream guest. She gushed over Simon Cowell being on her couch but dishes on The X-Factor as if she never met him even as she references his appearance on the show. It’s this sort of full disclosure, take-me-or-leave-me approach that distinguishes Wendy from the rest of the pack.
When The Real Housewives of Atlanta’s Cynthia Bailey showed up on Wendy’s couch, she admitted to her audience beforehand that it would be awkward because she had often referred to Bailey as not being too bright. It’s that “realness” that keeps her in high favor with her fervent New York fans especially.
She was unafraid to tell Demi Moore through her popular “Hot Topics” segment that cougar relationships rarely work because younger men have a need to have children and women of their age (Wendy Williams is not coy about being a few years shy of 50) are not really capable of giving them that. She even took Vivica A. Fox to task for saying that she planned to have a child without a surrogate, even breaking it down to her why that was extremely unlikely for women of their age.
She also broke protocol by not speaking highly of her experience on Dancing with the Stars but, still, as bad as her personal experience was, she still talks about the show. “How you doin’” is a catchphrase that rolls off the tongues of guests whether they hail from Texas, Iowa or NYC because Wendy Williams has not adapted to television. Instead, she’s made it because television is slowly adapting to her.
Some experts may credit her tremendous success, recently reflected in the renewal of her talk show to 2014, as the result of a conscious, “anti-Oprah” approach but the truth is Wendy Williams is being consistent with the same behavior that built her iconic radio career; she’s just transferred it to television. So, while others try to fill Oprah’s shoes, Wendy Williams is just comfortable in our own stilettos. There’s nothing anti about it, just all Wendy.