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DETROIT - Offered for your consideration: New York radio shock talker Wendy Williams will spend the next six weeks figuring out if there is a TV audience for an anti-Oprah.
Williams, who turns 44 later this week, tries the daily hour TV talk grind on for size starting this week. It’ll be an unusual on-air tryout on four Fox owned-and-operated stations in New York, Dallas, Detroit and Los Angeles.
But why might she be the anti-Oprah? Case in point:
Williams chats over the phone the other day while driving to work through New York’s infamous white-knuckle traffic. Emerging from the Lincoln Tunnel and stopped at a red light, her car is set upon by one of the city’s infamous squeegee men. They will clean your windshield - dirty or not - for cash while the driver is immobile until the light blessedly turns green.
“Don’t do my windows! ” she blurts when a would-be cleaner interrupts the chat. “I thought New York cleaned this up with Giuliani, but apparently now they’re back. ... Their urine waste is pungent and they’re putting spew on your car.”
Ueeew.
Now St. Oprah might have stopped, sent him off to a spa to spruce up and turned him into one of her makeover show triumphs. And maybe even given him a car of his own.
But not Wendy Williams.
Williams, who holds sway weekday afternoons on New York’s WBLS-FM, has carved out a reputation for being an arbiter of who and what’s hot and not; a feisty battler with coworkers and radio competitors, and an interviewer who’s not afraid to air her own dirty laundry. A past addiction - for her it was cocaine - and domestic and workplace strife involving her husband and manager Kevin Hunter are standard. She regularly gets to areas where softball interviewers seldom tread and is rewarded with listeners who are loyal because they feel listened to.
Williams dabbled in TV before; she had a couple of efforts on VH1. But this six-week test is her shot for the lucrative daytime talk market with backing from Fox - a network that doesn’t blanch when programming gets controversial.
This mid-July trial came out of talks that began last fall with producer Debmar-Mercury, and Fox, Williams said. “I’ve been through the pilot process back in 1993 or ‘94, in and out of hearing pitches,” referring to the usual gestation for daytime talk - producing a few episodes for local programming execs to look over and then make a purchase decision. “This particular way is very, very new. It all starts with having a host you believe in who is going out there to make it happen.”
With the show produced before a New York audience, expect fans who are devotees. “I start with a very, very devoted fan base,” Williams said. “My sidekicks will be my audience; I really want the smartest, freshest audience in all of daytime. My set is fabulous and my theme song by David Vanacore says it all - ‘Say say say it; feel it, feel it, feel it; how you doing? Shout it out.’...We’re embracing the old-school way of doing talk shows where the audience is very much a part of the show.”
On the other side of the screen, Williams said the target viewership is “women aged 25-40, the usual daytime audience ... sassy, smart and also still navigating our way through the world and who are very much that 15-year-old girl. You know, we need each other.
“In terms of color, I’m a black woman, so my natural fan base would be black women. But in actuality, plenty of different people listen to ‘The Wendy Williams Experience.’ Heterosexual men are embarrassed because they feel it’s a gay man’s thing, but that’s not true either, you know? But if you’re interested in me, I’m interested in you. I take everyone.”
What will you see? Three segments look to be regular. First are “Hot topics ... which is what’s going on with Michelle Obama ... or Lindsay Lohan’s mom’s reality show,” she says. “I love pop culture, hot guys, hot women, hot restaurants, great clothing.”
Then there’ll be celebrity interviews with those who can stand some astringent querying.
“This is not the Jay Leno interview,” Williams warned. “I guarantee that Wendy will give a more interesting twist for my audience. That’s my job: to put the remix on what others are doing.”
Sometimes, it’s twist and shout, as in 2003 when she interviewed Whitney Houston about her drug use and tempestuous marriage to Bobby Brown. Houston responded with obscenities and threatened her with “If this were back in the day in Newark, I’d meet you outside, but not now because I’m a lady with class.”
So, how is Williams able to ask someone a deeply personal question?
“I ask because I genuinely want to know. And my intent is once I get the response that I was looking for - or maybe not looking for - then I send the person ... away with a little smile. Understand that I mean no harm. I’m a girl from New Jersey and I don’t feel as though the things I talk about are honestly shocking. I think these are real things that real people want to know and I think the way that society is going, I feel we have the right to know.”
Finally, there is a segment on real-life issues. “I’m not a doctor,” Williams says, “but I’ve got a really loyal core that values my opinion regarding particular things in their lives, whether they are tempted to step out on their 15-year marriage or whether they’re having difficulty with their boss or their boyfriend’s mother.”
But that’s followed up with an admission that she’s working with the same stuff other talkers do.
“It’s a talk show,” she reasoned. “It’s not Oprah, it’s not Rachael Ray. Certainly, there are no new ideas - just remixes on things that many people already do and, of course, a brand new presentation by way of a fresh new host - and that would be me.”
If things go well, she says, the show would launch nationally in 2009. And unlike her battling radio reputation of obliterating and even humiliating her competition, she seems more than willing to swim with the other TV talk fish. “There’s room for all of us,” she says. “I’m not doing it to see who can I eliminate.”
