Review: ‘Framing Britney Spears’ a Reductive Vision of Complicated Lives

See if you can spot the fallacy: Britney Spears received a lot of attention from the press. Britney Spears went crazy. Hence the first occurrence caused the second.

As a former member of the celebrity-industrial complex, I can reveal: It isn’t actually that hard to be a celebrity. They control their coverage far more than you’d think. (Angelina Jolie, for instance, adjusts hers as though finessing a volume knob.) I was the music editor at People magazine for some of the peak years of Spears’s career (when she happily sat for interviews to be our cover girl), and I can tell you this too: The picture presented by Framing Britney Spears, a new New York Times/Hulu documentary, is guilty of exaggeration, oversimplification, and (most of all) indulging in a heroes-and-villains vision of complicated, messy lives. In other words: There’s a lot of tabloid in this Times production.

About the Author

Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

See if you can spot the fallacy: Britney Spears received a lot of attention from the press. Britney Spears went crazy. Hence the first occurrence caused the second.

As a former member of the celebrity-industrial complex, I can reveal: It isn’t actually that hard to be a celebrity. They control their coverage far more than you’d think. (Angelina Jolie, for instance, adjusts hers as though finessing a volume knob.) I was the music editor at People magazine for some of the peak years of Spears’s career (when she happily sat for interviews to be our cover girl), and I can tell you this too: The picture presented by Framing Britney Spears, a new New York Times/Hulu documentary, is guilty of exaggeration, oversimplification, and (most of all) indulging in a heroes-and-villains vision of complicated, messy lives. In other words: There’s a lot of tabloid in this Times production.