It seems likely, at this point, that Britney Spears may never escape her status as a pop culture battleground. Spears’ fame is so massive, and the circumstances surrounding her life—from the rampant sexualization of her early career, to the regular infusions of reality show energy, to the bizarre conservatorship she’s lived under for more than a decade—are so strange, that she’s probably doomed to exist forever less as a person whose life we discuss, and more a symbol through which the world is widely interpreted. The latest variant of that ongoing argument has, somewhat ironically, become the rising number of documentaries examining how we, as a society, have treated Spears herself, a movement led by FX and Hulu’s Framing Britney Spears, and which is now set to add BBC Select’s The Battle For Britney: Fans, Cash, And A Conservatorship to its ranks.
Directed by Mobeen Azhar, the documentary will focus on the conservatorship proper, the legal arrangement that grants vast degrees of control over Spears’ life to outside parties—most notably her father, Jamie Spears. Interviews for the doc include Spears’ makeup artist and former choreographer, blogger Perez Hilton, and Catherine Falk, whose legal battles over her father Peter Falk’s own conservatorship led to “Peter Falk’s Law” being passed in New York a few years back.
BBC Select, by the way, is the latest streaming service to fight for your time and attention (via Britney Spears content); rather than be a standalone, though, it’s available through either Amazon Prime or Apple TV. The Battle For Britney will stream on the service on May 11.