Yet again, it looks like society wants a piece of Britney Spears. Ahead of a September 29 hearing to determine the fate of Spears’s 13-year conservatorship, Netflix and Hulu have released dueling Spears docs.
FX and Hulu’s Controlling Britney Spears debuted on Friday, September 24, and serves as the second part to the Emmy-nominated documentary Framing Britney Spears, picking up where the last one left off and taking us headfirst into the world of Britney’s conservatorship under her father, Jamie Spears. Netflix’s Britney vs Spears, directed by Erin Lee Carr, hit the streaming platform on Tuesday, September 28, and had the unenviable task of tackling similar ground to the Hulu documentary.
The situation is weirdly reminiscent of early 2019, when Netflix’s documentary about the doomed social experiment Fyre Festival, Fyre, was scooped by Hulu’s Fyre Fraud, premiering days earlier and containing an interview with the lead scammer of the enterprise, Billy McFarland. Although Hulu once again beat Netflix to the punch, V.F.’s Laura Bradley ultimately decided that the Netflix documentary was the one to watch. But in this case, after consuming both documentaries in one fell swoop, the opposite seems to be true.
Both movies claim to provide insight into the truly gobsmacking conditions of Britney’s conservatorship, which stripped her of essentially all agency and control of her own life. “Some people have called conservatorship tantamount to a civil death,” says conservatorship attorney and talking head Tony Chicotel in Britney vs Spears. In both cases, we watch on—most often in horror—as Britney experiences this civil death time and time again.
While Britney vs Spears attempts to zoom in on Britney’s repeated struggle to get out of the bounds of her conservatorship, Controlling Britney Spears, a documentary by The New York Times, decides to focus more on the external forces that surrounded Britney Spears while she was trapped within said conservatorship. On one side, there are figures like Britney’s former personal assistant and Framing Britney Spears’s breakout talking head, Felicia Culotta; and Tish Yates, head of Britney’s wardrobe. On the other, there’s Britney’s business manager Robin Greenhill—whose position is vague at best, though she seems to be calling the shots behind the scenes with Jamie—and Britney’s head of security, Edan Yemini. Somewhere in the gray area is Alex Vlasov, who worked for Yemini under Britney’s security team, BlackBox, for nine years but has since come forward to allege things of Yemini, BlackBox, and, most notably, Jamie Spears.
Through their eyes and others, we get glimpses of Britney and try to piece together as much as we can about her life and times under the conservatorship. Their stories are heartbreaking, of course—Yates recalls a day where she had to buy Sketchers for Britney because her conservatorship forbid her from spending her roughly $58 million fortune, while Culotta describes being gaslit by Jamie into believing that Britney no longer wanted to see her—but hearing them isn’t the same as hearing directly from Britney Spears herself.
