“Where Is Wendy Williams?” is a heartbreaking docu-series

It’s usually a delicious proposition: raw, unfettered access to a celebrity in the midst of a personal and professional metamorphosis.

That’s how the controversial new Lifetime docu-series “Where is Wendy Williams?” began, say producers. Cameras started rolling in August 2022 amidst a cluster of scary medical diagnoses, troubling behavior (falsely claiming she had married a cop, collapsing on live TV), a stint in a sober house and the canceling of her successful titular talk after 13 years.

But instead of feeling privy to a journey of redemption and self discovery, the viewer quickly realizes they’ve wandered into a house of horrors — past the caution tape to the point of no return.

This series is invasive. It’s uncomfortable. It’s inhumane.

Within the first few minutes of the four-part show, it’s evident that something beyond Tito’s vodka — which she proclaims her love in a scene — is destroying her brain, her soul and her ever loosening grasp of reality.

While there are rare lucid moments, Williams often seems almost feral. Her mood swings are as unreliable as her memory.

In one scene she visits her hometown of Asbury Park, NJ, and points out her childhood street, only to be told by a stranger that it’s on an entirely different road. In another, a confused Williams yells at her driver and now former publicist to buy vape pens. When they arrive at her usual smoke shop, a disoriented Williams throws a tantrum, prompting producers to — finally — call “cut” for the day.

Days before the series premiered, dueling bombshell headlines dropped.

Williams’ family told People that the former talk-show host — who was placed under a financial guardianship in May 2022 after her bank, Wells Fargo, claimed she was “incapacitated” — is in a care facility and they can only speak to her when she calls them.

Then her unnamed “care team” issued a statement revealing Williams had been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia and frontotemporal dementia. Together, the two disorders, from which actor Bruce Willis also suffers, affect language, communication skills, behavior and cognitive function.

Now, it seems, the producers of Williams’ series are doing damage control and claiming they were unaware of her deteriorating mental state while filming.

“Of course, if we had known that Wendy had dementia going into it, no one would’ve rolled a camera,” Mark Ford told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview, calling into question his own sanity — or, at the very least, humanity?

If not someone with cognitive issues, who did producers think they were filming? An alcoholic in the throes of a dangerous addiction?

Hardly the makings of a triumphant showbiz comeback.

Ford even admitted to THR he suspected something was off.

“Did it surprise us? I don’t think it surprised us,” he said. “Of course, we’re not medical professionals. But anyone watching the film can see that there are signs that were there and then progressed rapidly.”

But, even during filming, Williams’ son, Kevin Hunter Jr., now 23, said on camera he knew she was suffering cognitive decline.

“[Doctors] basically said that because she was drinking so much, it was starting to affect her headspace and her brain. So, I think they said it was alcohol-induced dementia,” Kevin says in the film.

Williams’ story is an American tragedy: a collision of money, addiction, health woes and the price of fame.

It’s also a story that should have been kept off camera.

The series presents a family fighting for access to their beloved mom, sister and aunt amidst a guardianship shrouded in mystery.

However, it does little to unravel the complicated personal and legal tangles surrounding the loudmouth Jersey girl. Williams burst onto the scene as a shock jock in the early ’90s and later emerged as a daytime TV queen.

Her no-nonsense, often unvarnished — and, yes, sometimes downright cruel — commentary about celebrities gained her legions of fans repeating her catchphrase, “How you doin?” And hey, she always got real about herself: her past cocaine addiction, her multiple miscarriages. But there’s no way Wendy wanted people to see her like this.

Members of her family and close friends reveal in “Where Is Wendy Williams?” that she’s long been coming apart at the seams — picked apart by booze, her (now ex) husband fathering a child with another woman while they were still together, and the 2020 death of her beloved mother.

Williams, meanwhile, often reminds the viewer of her unquenchable thirst for fame, a desire that started as a precocious 6-year-old. She only wants to return to television. She wants to be seen. To be adored.

The camera seemed to tap into that primal part of her brain.

“And by the way, Wendy loved it when the cameras came to the door, it gave her a reason to get up in the morning. I think you see that,” said Ford.

Unlike the Britney Spears conservatorship, where the singer’s father was in control for a while, this case is more muddled and secretive. Her family seems confused by the arrangement, as do the producers.

“The guardian won’t speak to us. And so we’re constantly just trying to push forward and get the information as filmmakers. Like, what is actually going on here,” said Ford.

The viewer is left only with more questions than answers.

Lifetime’s parent company was sued by Williams’ guardian to block the network from airing it, but it was dismissed by a judge citing the First Amendment.

Ford said they had no way to get it to Williams to see the final product.

“We simply have had no way to get it to her to see it. No way to screen it with her, because she’s locked down in a facility and we haven’t been able to speak to her since we wrapped filming.”

But was she ever competent to give consent in the first place?