NYT to premiere new Britney Spears doc

by Judy Kurtz - 09/24/21 9:52 AM ET

The New York Times is releasing another documentary on Britney Spears, which, according to sources interviewed for it, will describe the “prison”-like conservatorship that has ruled her life the last 13 years.

“Controlling Britney Spears,” poised to debut Friday at 10 p.m. on FX and streaming on Hulu, will disclose a “portrait of an intense surveillance apparatus that monitored every move” that the “Toxic” singer made.

The project features “exclusive interviews with members of Spears’s inner circle who had intimate knowledge of her life under the conservatorship.”

The film is a follow-up and from the same team behind the New York Times’s February documentary, “Framing Britney Spears,” which drew attention and renewed scrutiny to the legal conservatorship that the 39-year-old performer is under.

Spears’s father, Jamie Spears, has served as her court-appointed conservator since 2008 following her hospitalization for mental health issues.

“It really reminded me of somebody that was in prison,” a person described as a former employee of the security firm hired by Spears’s father for his daughter, told the “Controlling Britney Spears” filmmakers.

“And security was put in a position to be the prison guards essentially.”

Earlier this month, Jamie Spears filed to end the conservatorship by late September, saying in the petition that “recent events related to this conservatorship have called into question whether circumstances have changed to such an extent that grounds for establishment of a conservatorship may no longer exist.”

Britney Spears tore apart the conservatorship in remarks to a judge in June, saying she had been “traumatized” and left in “shock” by it. She accused the conservatorship of preventing her from marrying her boyfriend — who she later became engaged to in an announcement last week — or having a baby by requiring her to have an IUD.

News of the New York Times’s sequel comes just two days after Netflix announced its own documentary focused on the conservatorship premiering Sept. 28, called “Britney vs. Spears.”