In 2021, Wendy Williams left The Wendy Williams Show due to health issues. Guest hosts stood in during her absence, one of them being Sherri Shepherd. Now, The Wendy Williams Show has been canceled, its last episode airing June 17. And Shepherd will take over the show’s previous time slot with her new talk show, Sherri. When Shepherd originally filled in for Williams, she was set to host for only a few days. Ahead of the Sherri premiere in September, the show’s bosses behind the decisions are explaining why they chose Shepherd as Williams’ successor.

Executives at Debmar-Mercury, The Wendy Williams Show‘s production company, said Shepherd was one of the most popular guest hosts by far, according to show ratings. The syndicated TV programming group previously tried to set up a show with Shepherd that never panned out, so her success as Williams’ temporary understudy made her the clear successor.

“She blew us away,” Debmar-Mercury’s executive VP programming Alexandra Jewett told The Hollywood Reporter. “We’re always looking to see who’s out there and what they can bring to the table, and it was apparent from day one that Sherri had something special.”

When executives new Williams needed a replacement, the former View co-host quickly became a short-list candidate for the full-time gig. Debmar-Mercury co-president Ira Bernstein said they saw Shepherd as the perfect person to lead a talk show about celebrity news and gossip without a political angle.

“We had the time period and we had the format, so the question became: Who’s the person who can best do it in his or her own style?” Bernstein said. “And we thought that Sherri did such a great job doing [the Wendy format] that, with tweaking, we’re going to make it the Sherri Shepherd show, but at 30,000 feet, in the marketplace, it’s going to fill that niche about gossip and entertainment and celebrities and what’s going on in the world without being political at all.”

Their ultimate goal was to make a new show similar enough to Wendy Williams that those loyal viewers would keep watching. Bernstein’s fellow co-president, Mort Marcus, said shows with Leah Remini and Michael Rapaport hosting were pitched, and while the ideas were “so good,” they wanted Shepherd.

“To try to get the audience that was watching [The Wendy Williams Show] to keep watching, we thought it should be Sherri,” Marcus said. “It was just clear she was much more of a fit for what The Wendy Williams Show was, and you could see that in the ratings when she was on.”

“Sherri’s fun and she’s positive, and she’s got the gravitas to carry her own show,” he added.

While most of Sherri‘s crew hail from The Wendy Williams Show, it won’t be a copy of the original. Shepherd’s program will attempt to maintain a friendly atmosphere over an at times shady one, as Williams’ show was known to be. But Williams’ shady humor was part of what made her so popular in the first place. Still, the execs are confident in Shepherd’s ability to bring in new viewers while retaining old ones.

“We’d do research on Wendy over the years and [audience members] would say, ‘I can’t believe she’s so mean to people. I watch her every day and she’s so mean.’ And it was like, OK, wait, wait, wait, what was the second line? I watch her every day, so clearly there was something there, but Sherri doesn’t have that edge,” Bernstein said. “In many ways, she’s just like the audience in the sense that she’s a single mom whose kid is her priority one, two and three, and she also happens to be a really talented comedian who’s hosting a talk show and she’s great at it.”

Show bosses also made the decision to remove Wendy content from YouTube and social media.

“Because we waited as long as we possibly could to decide about Wendy and, by then, we had no choice but to cancel The Wendy Williams Show and launch a new show,” Marcus said. “And look, there’s no guarantee of success, but we saw enough of Sherri to think, ‘Wow, she can actually do this,’ and so we’re excited to try.”

Sherri, September 2022, Check Your Local Listings