How Wendy Williams Became Daytime Talk’s Unlikely Survivor

Wendy Williams is sitting alone onstage, like a doll in an oversize chair. Her spindly heels dangle several inches above the floor as she tells a story about Kim Kardashian and her husband, Kanye West. A few weeks ago, Kardashian’s half-sister got into a Twitter feud with a model named Amber Rose, who once dated West. The rapper tried to intervene. “So now Kanye is all up in grown women’s business,” Williams tells her 50-person live audience, who explode in applause whenever she pauses. “We hate when our men get involved with our girl fights!”

This is what Williams calls Hot Topics, a 21-minute monologue about celebrity gossip that’s delivered without a script and almost no notes. It’s the cold opening to The Wendy Williams Show, her syndicated talk show, which has aired since 2008. Williams’s audience has risen sharply in the past year, and the program attracts 2.4 million daily viewers on average, according to Nielsen. Among women age 25 to 54, the most coveted demographic by daytime advertisers, hers is the only talk show to have achieved year-over-year national growth, and Williams now trades off daily with Ellen DeGeneres as the No. 1 female host. (Dr. Phil beats them both, albeit with a different format.)