So I’m surfing through the channels the other day and I see that “Behind the Music” is on VH1. I wait for the satellite to download the program info and it finally pops up: Britney Spears.
Have they finally run out of real stories? IIRC “Behind the Music” usually centers on a band that had fame & fortune and then lost it all because of death & drugs & self-destruction and then (maybe) makes a comeback.
What is madame Spears now, 21 years old? What story can there possibly be to tell? I thought all these teenage pop divas were covered in the “Driven” series.
Every artist who’s achieved any kind of success has a story to tell. Britney’s no different. Besides, it’s a refreshing change to not see massive human trainwrecks associated with musicians’ careers.
And really, how many bands have had fame and fortune and lost it all and come back AND haven’t already been featured on the show? Perhaps Behind the Music is getting short on musicians to profile.
They could also be trying to appeal to a younger audience. Who else would care that she has a new album coming out this month?
When BTM started it focused more on over-the-hill bands that have had the kind of ups and downs.
Then they got bigger names who had been around for a while but not faded as badly or broken up for good.
About the time it hit cultural overload, they had switched mostly to big names who maybe had a scandal in their past or a long history in the business. I noticed that the career “comeback” to give the story its happy ending was usually their upcoming album or a massive greatest hits package with the standard two or three new songs.
Since Britney Spears has an album coming out and music sales are still flat I guess they figured she needs all the help she can get. She’ll probably tell us about the “hardships” of being a struggling child singer who just wanted to be a star, her taste of fame followed by the painful sadness of finding out the New Mickey Mouse Club was being cancelled, her success with her first album and scorn about her sexy jailbait image, criticism of her musical talent, the “vicious jokes and tabloid rumors” about whether she had implants, how “she rose above the critics by poking fun of herself on SNL” and relying on the love and support of her family and fans, the soulmate that Justin Timberlake turned out not to be, her “wild” stage when she was “out of control”: dating Fred Durst, smoking(!!!), and trying to maintain the lie that she was still a virgin for the sake of her young impressionable fans. And make sure to tell how the stronger, more mature, “and wisened by her youthful mistakes” Britney brushed herself off and “rose from the ashes” with whatever the new album is called.
It’ll be a bigger puff piece than a Pat O’Brien Access Hollwood interview. Plus she’ll probably act more in it than she apparently did her movie.
I agree, but the BTM format is more appropriate to the “trainwrecks”. But I admit that I have not been a regular watcher of late (if ever). They have the “Driven” series which seems to me more appropriate for a young superstar who is still at the top of her game.
I guess they’ll do another one in 20 years after her soft-core porn career ends in a tragic overdose
But inside dirt and human trainwrecks are the core of the BTM formula. The episodes without tend not to be as interesting. The Bad Company episode where the worst thing they mentioned was the death of Free guitarist (and former bandmate of Paul Rodgers and Simon Kirke) Paul Kosoff, even though he died after the band had really dissolved and Kirke and Rodgers had moved on.
Look at the fueding in the Styx episode over the control and direction of the band. Not to mention, the admission of buying airplay on radio by giving cocaine to DJs (“penguins” as they called them, since they’d follow you anywhere when you showed them some “snow”).
OTOH, the Cat Stevens episode was interesting and one of the best because of the direction his life took with his conversion to Islam, and turning his back on the life that had brought him the very things so many want. Not the typical episode.
