“Thank you for accepting us in the spirit in which this show has been done since we first started.”įrom the jump, The Wendy Williams Show felt special. “I didn’t even think we were going to make it past our six-week sneak peek,” Williams told audiences in what would be her final sign-off last July. A Black woman spearheading a solo talk show with nothing more than a penchant for gossip and a built-in audience from a long-running radio show: It was never guaranteed that Wendy Williams ’particular brand would translate to the treacherous landscape of daytime television, where more traditionally "obvious" hosts, like Katie Couric, Anderson Cooper, and Meredith Viera all failed. There are very few people who can hold up an hour-long daytime show on the premise of just being themselves, and Wendy Williams was one of the first of her kind. The Wendy show was a cosmic flash, a risky concept that could’ve completely bombed and been a forgotten blip in talk-show history. “From her days on the radio to ruling daytime talk for thirteen seasons, Wendy earned her title as the queen of all media.” “There is nobody like Wendy Williams,” Shepherd said. It was a move that upset fans, who were even more dismayed when it was officially announced this week that Wendy would air its last show today.Īt the top of its final episode, Shepherd thanked the crew, guest hosts, viewers, and Wendy herself. In February, it was announced that Sherri Shepherd, a frequent guest host in the months prior, would become a successor to Wendy with her own show, Sherri, debuting later this year for the 2022-2023 season. A breakthrough case of COVID-19 and complications with her Graves Disease delayed the show’s thirteenth season weeks beyond its projected start date last fall, causing Williams to take time away from the show to focus on her health.
The last eight months of Wendy shows saw a slew of guest hosts filling in for the legendary talk show maven. “The limp wrist feels like a throwback in some ways I remember it felt like a ubiquitous homophobic mocking gesture from my time as a closeted kid in the late 90s and early 00s,” said Philip Ellis, a journalist who wrote a piece for GQ magazine in 2019 about gay men adopting the word “faggot” as a term of pride.Įllis pointed out that the LGBTQ community has for several years used images of limp wrists as memes.After 14 years, 2797 “How You Doin’s,” and innumerable memes and memories, The Wendy Williams Show has officially closed its sliding stage doors, marking the end of an era for a talk show that defined the word “iconic” before it became an overused pop culture descriptor for everything under the sun.
Most recently, this has involved many people choosing to identify as “queer” or using that word as a shorthand to describe the broader community - although some still find this offensive.
The LGBTQ community has a long history of reclaiming things that were once used as derogatory slurs against them. (According to a 2012 Slate piece, limp wrists have been deemed “unmanly” since ancient Rome). The 18-year-old said he thought the action would be instantly “relatable” to others in the LGBTQ community, even though he also recognized it had offensive roots. BuzzFeed News can’t 100% confirm if Hallows came up with the limp wrist meme, but he was the earliest we could find and recalled devising it as something different from what he had seen trending. By this time, “Kiss Me More” had been a viral hit on TikTok for months, but that point of the song was mainly used for clips featuring sudden transitions.