“It’s more than just a job, it’s an adventure,” Wendy Williams said about her soon-to-be-national talk show.
She isn’t kidding. Daytime television is about to get a lot more interesting as “The Wendy Williams Show” hits airwaves through national syndication.
Williams is probably best known for her gossip-driven, no-holds-barred radio show, which is carried by various urban radio stations throughout the country, or her VH1 reality-show specials like “Wendy Williams is on Fire” and “The Wendy Williams Experience.”
Williams said that all of her radio and TV experiences have helped to prepare her for the gargantuan jump to daytime TV.
“All that stuff has prepped me for my show,” she said. “The very important ingredient and the biggest difference between doing radio and TV are the cameras and getting used to being on TV and not letting a glimpse of yourself take you out of your game. You get very distracted.”
Even with her extensive background, it’s going to take a lot of moxie to stake a claim in a field where the likes of Oprah, Ellen, Tyra and Jerry dominate. But Williams said her established fan base and broad appeal should give her an edge.
“I am a black woman who happens to be from New Jersey, but I’ve always had a pretty general group of friends even prior to getting into radio,” she said. “It was no surprise to me that my radio audience evolved into a general market in spite of being on a radio station where every other song is hip-hop. I have a wonderfully mixed audience.”
Williams also has a secret weapon in the form of Rob Dauber, her show’s Emmy Award-winning and openly gay executive producer. He has seen some of the most powerful women in daytime talk in action, having worked on talk shows for Martha Stewart, Rosie O’Donnell and, most recently, Oprah herself.
So what would make a producer leave the employ of a billionaire for a relative newcomer to the field?
As it turns out, Dauber was homesick.
“I had just come back to New York from Chicago, where I was doing a project from Oprah Winfrey, who I adored,” Dauber explained. “New York is my home. I’ve lived here since 1992. My life and my friends are here. I’m a single gay guy and you create a family for yourself with your friends. My life was here. I can back to New York and I was contemplating what I was going to do. I got the call from my agent that Wendy wanted me to meet with her. I knew of her from her radio show and her books and I was always intrigued by her. The minute I met her, I instantly fell in love with her. I knew that this was the right place for me. We had the right sensibility to go together.”
Dauber added that Williams has the same winning spark as many of today’s daytime superstars have.
“I loved Oprah, the same way that I love working with Rosie and Martha. I know from working with the three of them that Wendy has it,” he said. “I related to her because she was real. She’s not afraid to say that things in her life aren’t perfect and that most people are not perfect but we should all be tolerant of one another. She doesn’t always have the popular point of view. She’s not afraid to tell someone ‘Break up with your boyfriend. You’re wasting your time.’ I like that. I didn’t think twice about it. I knew it was the right place for me to be.”
For Williams, the feeling is mutual.
“Oh my God, he’s fabulous,” she said. “First of all, the supreme confidence of going to the office and seeing the plethora of daytime Emmys, that would be number one. Plus he’s worked with all my favorite girls. I love Rosie. Oprah is one of the foremothers of this entire thing. She ranks right up there with Merv Griffin and Phil Donahue. Rob really holds things together.”
Part of holding the show together was proving to the networks that it would catch on, which is why “The Wendy Williams Show” tested the waters last summer with a six-week run in just a few markets such as New York, Detroit, Dallas and Los Angeles.
Dauber said the gambit worked well.
“This economic environment is tough for everybody and it’s tough for TV as well,” he said. “These syndicated shows, they cost a lot of money to produce and most of these shows fail. The company that is producing the show is a smaller company that likes to break the mold of how things are done. They realized, instead of just doing a pilot and selling the show, let’s do a test ad, put it on for six weeks to prove to everybody how well it’s going to work. We all had high hopes for it and we felt that it was going to work. But the test cost far less to produce, and it allowed us to show stations that it was going to work.”
Dauber added that viewers got a taste of what makes Williams unique compared to other daytime talk-show personalities.
“We are the only talk show hosted by a woman who, in her 6-inch-high heels and blond wig, is probably as tall as a basketball player,” he said. “From a visual standpoint, that’s what’s going to make us stand out. She’s the first one to say, ‘When people are turning their dial and they come across me, they’re going to say: What is that mess?’ Because she refers to herself as a ‘big ol’ mess,’ I think that people can relate to that. Because she says that, people are going to want to watch to see what she is going to say every day and who she is talking to. She is a really strong woman who has juggled a career, family and major challenges in her life. But she still is so inquisitive about celebrities. She appears to be bigger than life when at the same time she really is just like the viewers.”
Dauber said Williams’ boisterous charm and gift for dishing it up with celebrities appeal to gay audiences.
“We’re a variety show in the vein of Rosie or Ellen. Every show is different but there’s a format,” he said. “She starts every day with hot topics, mostly about celebrities. The gay community, we love our hot topics. She’s not afraid to talk about it. We have good dish at the top of the show. Wendy does great celebrity interviews. The celebrities have a great time. They all really dress up because Wendy dresses up very much on the show. It’s a little bit of fabulous going on, so the gay community is going to like that. We do some fashion segments, a little bit of cooking and beauty segments. Then we do ‘Ask Wendy,’ where people have a chance to ask her for relationship advice. She’s the first one to say, ‘I am not a therapist. I am just a woman with a lot of life experience, a very big mouth and a microphone.’”
Williams’ brand of brash bravado may be exciting to the viewers, but it could also cost her some high-profile interviews. She has been known to have some famously heated and headline-grabbing moments on-air and behind the scenes with celebrities like Whitney Houston and P. Diddy on her radio show.
Dauber said episodes like that were few and far between, and that Williams’ TV show is going for a different vibe than her radio show.
“I think she gets a bum rap for a few interviews over the course of a 22-year career,” he said. “For the most part, her show is funny. There have always been a handful of celebrity interviews that have been in-your-face. On the TV show, we don’t go for that. She wants people to come and have a good time. She’ll find the interesting things that they’ll want to talk about. She’s still going to do an interesting Wendy interview, but she’s not going to ask people things they don’t want to talk about.”
Williams said she isn’t worried about her reputation preceding her and that, on her TV show, she wants her celebrity guests to come across as best they can.
“I’ve always said that great guests and the people that I want are people that tell great stories and give great answers, not just verbally but animated,” she said. “TV is a visual medium. I love interesting people to look at and speak to. That doesn’t necessarily mean somebody A-list. Kathy Griffin calls herself the D-list, although clearly she’s not. I adore Kathy Griffin, and she is a much better TV guest than she is a radio guest because she gives you the hands and the big eyes. She’s very animated. I also would love to have Soulja Boy on the show. He’s the hottest thing in rap right now. He’s a really smart young man. His entire business is based on him. The kid is rich. I would like to see him perform and sit on the couch.”
And, at the end of the day, she wants both the audience and the guests to think of her program as a feel-good show.
“Any time is the right time to feel good,” she said. “It just so happens my national launch is happening at a tumultuous time in the country. It’s a down time for America right now. My show is free and I’m not attempting to split the atom or cure the common cold. I’m purely there for one hour, five days a week, to make you smile and laugh.”
“The Wendy Williams Show” begins national syndication on July 13. For more information, visit www.wendyshow.com.
Larry Nicholscan be reached at [email protected].