Wendy Williams has been MIA on her own show through the entirety of the 2021-2022 TV season, and more recently we learned she won’t be back on her namesake series at all. In fact, Sherri Shepherd will take over the slot as the next TV season hits the schedule. For now, The Wendy Williams Show has expanded with a few more guest stints, but when is the series actually ending so the transition can happen?
This week, the show revealed that both Sherri Shepherd and Michael Rapaport have been signed on to work Wendy Williams’ show during the month of April. Both have served as guest hosts in the past, though it will be late in the month before these new stints begin. The Wendy Williams Show has a spring hiatus planned, following which Shepherd will host April 19-25. Rapaport’s stint will come at the end of the month.
All of this is good and well, but it also begs the question: When will The Wendy Williams Show be ending? For that, we need to do a little 2022 TV schedule sleuthing or maybe even look back at last year. In fact, Williams was still on board the series last summer, taping her final Season 12 episode during July of 2021.
One thing we do know for certain is that Sherri, which is what Shepherd has called the new show, is expected to hit the schedule in September of 2022. This is per a report at TMZ, but it would gel with the typical fall starts in primetime and daytime on the fall TV schedule. So sometime between now and then, the lights will dim, the curtain will close and the rotating guest hosts announcements will slow, to make room for some spring cleaning and the start of something brand new.
Since Sherri will include staff currently working on The Wendy Williams Show, including David Perler, the showrunner for 12 of 13 seasons on the original show, it only makes sense that one series will transition into the other. A release from Debmar Mercury indicates the show will continue to sport Wendy’s name for the “remainder of this season” though gives no clear date at this point. A separate report at The Hill mentions the original series running until “this fall,” though given a lot of shows hiatus in late summer, that’s where I’d be putting my money on the last episode of The Wendy Williams Show airing, at least if I were a betting woman.
Wendy Williams had been open in the past about suffering from Graves Disease and had separately taken breaks on her series previously before the events during Season 13. She also previously had mentioned a battle with Covid-19 and lived in a sober house for a while, among other health issues. She’s been dealing with personal life troubles as well, as issues coming to light in recent weeks have included back-and-forth with her bank, as well as Williams accusing an ex-representative of misusing her credit card.
For her part though, Sherri Shepherd has only had nice things to say about Wendy Williams and her show, though Shepherd's noted they aren't "friends." The producers of the series have also wished Wendy “a speedy and full recovery.”
