Wendy Williams Was AWOL For The Final Episode Of Her Long-Running Morning Show

Since October of last year, the show at The Wendy Williams Show has gone on without its namesake star. The erratic, complicated, occasionally straight-up bizarre host has been absent since catching COVID-19. Since then health problems and other personal issues have kept her off-air, replaced by a string of guest hosts, including Sherri Shepherd, Michael Rapaport, Bill Bellamy, Leah Remini, and more. But when the show ended, it continued to do so without Williams herself.

Back in February, the company behind the show, which began in mid-July of 2008, decided that they were ending the show. It wasn’t a total cancellation. Instead, some of the same staff, including the showrunner and executive producer, would transition into a similar-but-different show hosted by Shepherd, to be called simply Sherri.

It was Shepherd who lorded over the final episode of The Wendy Williams Show, which made up for the absence of the show’s star by loading up on tributes and montages. The show even ended with one of Williams’ signature lines — “How you doin’?” — but recited by Shepherd and crew. Also present was the show’s very first guest: Vanessa Williams, who had this to say about the star:

She was real. She is real — she’s still with us — and she’s resilient. She’s a fighter and she’s real, she was down to earth, she said it like it was. She kept it 100 but she did it with fun. And she was articulate and funny and has all these weird ‘Wendyisms’ that we would grow to love and know. I’m really gonna miss the show and miss her presence. You know she’s unique.

Shepherd herself weighed in on the MIA star, saying, “there is nobody like Wendy Williams,” and claiming she “changed daytime talk with her unique take, her one-of-a-kind celebrity interviews, the signature ‘Ask Wendy’ segments and of course, y’all, her famous ‘How you doin’?”

Still, surely we’ll be seeing Williams again. After all, who else can get into fights with both Howard Stern and Aunt Viv from Fresh Prince?

(Via Deadline)