Britney Spears’ 2001 ballad “I’m not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” opens with a verse that includes “But now I know that life doesn’t always go my way.” Sadly, that seems to be an understatement and foreshadowing what was to come for her.
Many fans see Britney Spears now like the singer in that song, a woman who hasn’t been able to fully grow up, a woman who sings, “There is no need to protect me. It’s time that I learn to face up to this on my own.”
The question is can she handle the world all on her own?
In Framing Britney Spears, part of the New York Times presents investigative series, Times journalists investigate not just the mechanisms behind which Britney rose to power, but the reasons why she fell from grace–and potentially has continued to struggle in a type of purgatory between being independent and being totally controlled.
At the heart of this, is the question: What is the “Free Britney” movement and is it needed? Is Spears being helped or hurt by not having total freedom of her own self, her career, and her fortune?
The best part of the documentary is it serves as a primer for those who have little or no understanding of Spears, her complicated story, or the conservatorship she’s caught in.
Yet with precious little total air time to explore the biggest mystery of all–whether the conservatorship is working or harming her– way too much of the program is given to Spears’ background. There’s probably a good reason for that: it’s the easiest to research and find sources to discuss.
We see Britney’s hometown, her first manager, and a representative from the studio that signed her as 15-year-old. We hear from an early talent agent who represented her. One fact that everyone seems to agree with: she was a small-town girl who truly enjoyed performing. Spears was happy, genuinely nice, and took control of her career without letting fame get to her.
Until it did.
When Spears was signed at 15, her mother hired Felicia Culotta to be her traveling assistant, a personal manager of sorts. Culotta–even in 2021–clearly cares about Spears and is the voice of compassion in the documentary.
Like a parent who has watched a child grow up and leave home, we see Culotta flipping through photos of Spears through the years and reminiscing, growing emotional as she discusses all the adventures they had together and how Britney rose to every expectation set for her.
Culotta may beam about Britney, but she has very few positive things to say about Britney’s dad, Jamie.
And she’s not alone.
Kim Kaiman, Senior Director of Marketing at Jive Records, discusses how almost all of her interactions with the Spears family involved talking to Britney’s mother, Lynne. Kaiman notes even after signing Spears to a contract, the only thing Jamie ever said to her was that he hoped Britney would make enough money to buy him a boat.
Directed by Samantha Stark and written by New York Times’ Senior Story Editor Liz Day, the most interesting and thoroughly reported aspect of this documentary has nothing to do (directly) with the conservatorship and more about the moments before it began: the double-standard of how the media treated pop celebrities based on gender and the terrible and dark places they went to afterwards.
If Culotta was the voice of compassion, the strongest source of insight in the documentary is Wesley Morris, a New York Times entertainment critic.
Morris notes after Spears broke up with Justin Timberlake “she was the school slut and he was the quarterback.” Timberlake not only played the victim but drove the narrative that something must be wrong with Britney.
“He weaponizes the video from one of his singles to criminalize their relationship,” Morris says.
Misogyny in the music business shouldn’t be surprising–but the documentary effectively shows it in other aspects of society: from late night talk show hosts to questions on Family Feud to news anchors who pre-judged Spears and asked questions they wouldn’t ask men.
“It was a revenge. Pure male revenge fantasy. Misogyny. There’s a whole infrastructure to support it” Morris says.
Yet like most moments in the documentary, right as it gets momentum this angle also falls away. We have a segment on her past, a segment on her being victimized by the press, and then a segment on her future. For a documentary attempting to connect the dots between the three time periods, it fails.
Part of the issue here is the timeline format of the documentary. Although it is set up chronologically, there seems to be little method to the madness of what is included. It briefly focuses on some tours (but not others) and leaves significant gaps in the years that led to Britney being placed in the conservatorship and immediately afterward.
One source speculates that Britney’s mental issues came from postpartum depression, but it’s never followed up on. You begin to wonder if like Michael Jackson anyone was medicating Britney. But that question is never asked. The words drug, alcohol, and medication are literally never mentioned once after her entry into the conservatorship.
Instead, we are simply left with “the media” was brutal to Spears after she divorced ex-husband Kevin Federline and that caused her to snap. We’re shown how a relationship with the tabloid media impacted Spears — sometimes it was mutually beneficial (she relied on the tabloids early in her career to help promote her stardom), but as photos of Britney began to sell for up to $1 million, things quickly changed. Spears was never able to shake off a ruthless press as she cycled into depression.
The documentary toys with the theory that Britney agreed to being put in a conservatorship because it may have been part of a deal for her to see her kids. After her multiple hospitalizations, Federline was granted 100% custody of the children. We hear that Jamie Spears believed his daughter’s health and fortune were at risk because of a potentially toxic relationship with Sam Lufti, who at one point was Spears’ manager, which is why the judge granted the request for conservatorship–not just over her as a person, but over her fortune.
But it’s also the conservatorship part that fails the most. It’s supposed to be the focus of the broadcast, but it lacks so many facts the audience needs to help understand this in a truly comprehensive way.
As for documentary sources, it was all over the place. When you think about how much 60 Minutes can pack into a 20 minute segment, you can’t help but feel disappointed with this much longer documentary. Instead of relying on a lawyer who “almost” was hired by Spears before a judge rejected his request, why didn’t they interview a single academic professor or scholar on conservatorships to give their opinion on what has happened the past ten years with this conservatorship dilemma?
They discuss how Britney fans are disappointed by the continual verdicts against her but they never ask if there is a chance the judge is biased? Has it been the same judge all these years? Different ones? And what are her next options to keep challenging this? All of these questions should be asked but aren’t. We aren’t getting a hard-hitting news documentary, but one that spends too much time talking to Spears’ fans, who range from inspired to unsettling. We get speculation (but no proof) from podcast creators that Spears is sending cryptic messages for help in her social media posts. But that too goes unexplored.
You begin to wonder if the Times had a little material that they knew they could get ratings, and then posed questions they had no intention of answering. We see Britney as a victim, which we already realized she was. We see media, pop culture, and men as a problem But we never get into a deep study of Jamie Spears.
Jamie Spears is potentially the villain in this story, at least according to the perception among Britney’s fans who are leading the movement to “free her.” The documentary paints a clear picture that he was barely in Britney’s life at all until the conservatorship.
Strangely, they don’t mention what Jamie has been doing the past decade. Are there accusations he’s just sitting on the riches? Overly spending? Are any of his people “watching” Britney or misleading or misleading her? We just don’t know because the documentary doesn’t even attempt to study that.
The most chilling accusation of all perhaps is the idea that Spears is so entrapped by her father or father’s managers that she no longer has true freedom of speech.
“Anyone who interviewed her in the past five to ten years did so under very careful watch of her handlers,” Joe Coscarelli, a Times music reporter warns.
That type of comment is sure to resonate among the masses who believe Britney is a modern day prisoner. But it leaves objective viewers with a sinking feeling that it’s simply impossible to know for sure.
While the Times interviews fans who argue the movement is about “freeing Britney,” we see that Britney’s own lawyer asked only that her mom be appointed conservator instead of her dad. (And a bank to be appointed conservator of her finances instead of her father). Yet we don’t hear from anyone who says why it would be helpful for Lynne to be there with Britney or what Lynne’s feelings about this issue are.
Even Britney wasn’t arguing to free Britney. Again, there is no explanation or expert commentary as to why she wanted that change.
While a couple of other allusions were used, I can’t help but picture Spears more as the young woman imprisoned in Rumpelstiltskin’s castle. She’s stuck in a tower making money.
We don’t know how “trapped” she currently is and yet she continues to spin gold–the royalty monies that go mostly to her account run by her father.
The issue with Britney is just how much we don’t know about Britney, which is a remarkable comment considering we knew everything about her until 2008.
As a whole, the program suffers from an inability to ask questions – or at least ask the right questions.
And all the media trying to egg on Britney’s supporters to help “free her” seems almost like the rabid media that wanted to “capture” her downfall. That leaves viewers to wonder if this documentary was itself doing more to exploit Britney than to help Britney. The New York Times had a great hook. But sadly, the actual investigative reporting is so slipshod a journalist in college would be asked to re-do their work for lack of information.
So as a documentary, it just doesn’t work. It isn’t good enough. For those who really believe we need to free Britney, this documentary itself remains constrained behind bars. And because it’s a beloved American icon that is still suffering–the biggest tragedy is the documentary fails to push its pedal on the gas to discover anything truly enlightening. Its creators were more interested in showing off their own New York Times writers than people who could have unlocked a few more puzzle pieces about Britney’s situation.
Sadly, and ironically, while it certainly “frames” Britney as even more of a victim than we realized, it shies away from helping to really get to any credible new place with her story. Like Britney, we are stuck in an abyss. And like Britney, we too deserve better.
Framing Britney is airing on FX and Hulu and can be streamed for free on the FX website: https://fxnow.fxnetworks.com/shows/the-new-york-times-presents/episode-guide/season-01/episode-06-framing-britney-spears/vdka22117338
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