The New York Times Presents: Framing Britney is currently taking the internet by storm and causing many to reconsider their view of troubled pop star Britney Spears, but South Parkalready offered an empathetic take on the media’s mistreatment of the pop princess back in 2008. A dozen years ago, South Park turned its satirical aim toward Britney Spears, whose personal life was in free fall at the time the animated sitcoms season 12 episode “Britney’s New Look” aired.
Twelve years later, the documentary The New York Times Presents: Framing Britney has offered an in-depth look at the pop icon’s controversial conservatorship. Framing Britney’s moving portrayal of a woman consistently wronged by the media and cruelly vilified by the public is currently causing many journalists, fans, and even media outlets to reflect on their own coverage of the troubled singer’s very public 2007 breakdown.
While notable comedian and American Horror Story guest star Billy Eichner took to Twitter to tell his followers they are as much to blame for the media’s mistreatment of Britney as the outlets who exploited her mental illness, few commentators noted one prominent pair of American TV satirists offered a more sympathetic look at her circumstances at the time. While many shows such as Family Guy were complicit in mocking and minimizing the singer’s struggles, Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s often controversial South Park took a surprisingly delicate approach and aimed its ire at the right target, mocking the media as amoral vultures while portraying Britney as a victim of their relentless haranguing.
“Britney’s New Look” is a dark South Park outing from 2008 and sees the media at large portrayed as uncaring paparazzi who treat Britney’s gruesome attempted suicide as a fashion choice. Even after the star shoots herself, the media continue to harass her in a story whose bleak, blackly comic ending – wherein Britney is finally driven to killing herself by the paparazzi – is lifted from The Rite of Spring. By the episode’s conclusion Britney has met an early death and the South Park boys haven’t been able to stop the cycle of abuse the media puts celebrities through, as it’s revealed she was targeted as part of an eons-old cult ritual.
It’s a dark spin on The Haunting Of Hill House author Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” that forced viewers to confront how complicit they’ve been in Spears’ cultural mistreatment, a surprisingly prescient theme for an episode that aired over a decade before the viral documentary gained plaudits for doing the same. Notably, this episode didn’t receive rave reviews at the time of release, with many outlets calling it a middle-of-the-road miss for the satirical series. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the outlets that dismissed South Park’s take on Britney Spears’ treatment by the media also ran gossip columns that discussed the singer’s breakdown in lurid detail at the time, and many of the same outlets are currently praising Framing Britney for interrogating how brutally exploited the singer has been.
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