The Cruel Reality TV Exploitation of Whitney Houston

The Cruel Reality TV Exploitation of Whitney Houston

In the new Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance with Somebody, Houston’s mother has her daughter escorted out of her home by the police (in front of her baby daughter, Bobbi Kristina) after she found Houston in a drug-induced state following her father’s death. Next we see Houston peacefully recovering at a rehab center and later a recreation of her emotional comeback on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2009. The film cuts most of the 2000s from Houston’s history, including her starring role in the disturbing reality series from 2005 to be Bobby Brown.

The eleven-episode saga followed Brown, Houston, their daughter Bobbi Kristina, their half-siblings La’Princia and Bobby Jr., Brown’s brother Tommy, and his father Herbert. But the married couple were the star attraction of a show that chronicled Houston’s temper, Bobby’s audacity and the general feeling that the couple — Houston in particular — weren’t doing well. “Behind the scenes, Houston had been using again,” reported Vanity Fair.

However, the show was met with derision and disdain rather than concern and apprehension. An early hit for Bravo, now famous for its Real Housewives franchise, Being Bobby Brown was reportedly the network’s highest-rated show at the time. Its callousness is what makes I Wanna Dance with Somebody feel necessary — it’s a loving embrace from Houston after years of media exploitation, fueled by condescension and sensationalism.

The series allowed its producers and its titular star to capitalize on Houston’s hardship and the dysfunction of her marriage. Ahead of the show’s premiere, Brown admitted it was all for his image. “I try to prove every day that I’m more good than bad,” he told the New York Times.

In doing so, he thought the world would see just how challenging Houston could be. “Bob’s big deal was that everyone blamed him for her downfall, but by the time he met her, she was already on drugs,” Karrine Steffans told Vanity Fair.

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Steffans is an author and former music video model who was Brown’s lover in the 2000s during his marriage to Whitney. “He was always very angry about that. He told me, ‘What everyone saw wasn’t the real Whitney.’ He always said her private persona — which you saw on Being Bobby Brown — was who she really was.” But instead of elevating Brown, the show demeaned them both. “Not only does it show that Brown is even more vulgar than the tabloids suggest, but it manages to rob Houston of every last ounce of dignity,” wrote a critic in .

One of the show’s executive producers, Tracey Baker-Simmons, claimed she wanted to tell the story of Brown and Houston beyond the headlines. “Aside from all the negative blurb, we wanted to know what else these people have,” she said.

Brown allowed 24-hour access to himself and his family, but the result fed rather than challenged the prevailing narrative. Marc Hoeferlin, editor of the documentary Whitney: Can I Be Me, which used outtakes from Being Bobby Brown, suggested it didn’t have to be that way. “This show itself feels like a show’s train wreck,” he told Jezebel. “It wasn’t shot that way. It was shot really well and from observation, and I don’t know if that was the intent to do that kind of reality TV thing.”

For Bravo, however, the humiliating, bordering on humiliation, of the once-revered stars seemed to be the whole point. Lauren Zalaznick, Bravo’s president at the time, reportedly gave the green light to the series in 15 minutes. “It was very clear to me that this was something right for Bravo,” she said. “It’s very tactile. You feel something when you watch this show.” Zalaznick has made it his mission to empower Middlebrow television, claiming that the “channel has truly become the fullest expression of high-low culture.” She described a show like Top Chef as up-and-coming, while Real Housewives — which features rich women bickering and betraying each other — could be viewed by viewers with a sense of moral superiority. Being Bobby Brown also easily fit into that box.

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In 2009, Houston told Oprah that she agreed to be on the show to appease Brown’s jealousy of her power and profile and to censure the world’s contempt for her marriage. So she downplayed her success and upplayed her marriage.

“I was trying to make a statement like, ‘You guys aren’t going to win,'” Houston said. “‘You won’t do that. We have married. we were in love We were crazy about each other. We wanted to have a family. I won’t let you do this to us. It’s just not me.’” However, she admitted that the fight was futile: “It kind of got pretty messy and got lost up there. And then we started doing other things that went into marriage that you just can’t come straight out when you have a lot of external things going on.

Seven years after “Being Bobby Brown” aired, Brown admitted watching the show revealed how drugs had affected them as a couple. “We could see that our drug use had affected our relationship, the love we felt for each other,” he said.

Rather than showcasing Houston’s behavior and addiction issues, I Wanna Dance with Somebody locates her drug use in her pain. We first see her smoking a bong with her brothers to escape a vicious argument between their parents. We later see her get out paraphernalia after flying to her husband’s home, only to find he’s not there – and presumably with another woman. In this way, the film’s portrayal of Houston is gentle – she can still be bold or tough, but the film captures her with empathy and tenderness.

Some critics of the film slammed Houston’s drug abuse as too valuable. “I feel this need to respect history, but at the end of the day [the biopic] felt a bit like overcorrection to me…so it just didn’t go into it really deeply,” NPR’s Aisha Harris said. The media’s lax treatment of Houston, embodied by Being Bobby Brown, is precisely why this was not the case.

The Cruel Reality TV Exploitation of Whitney Houston

Whitney Houston and her husband Bobby Brown attend the VH1 Divas Duets post concert party May 22, 2003 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

The show only lasted one season. Houston refused to show up in a second, so it wasn’t picked up again, although Brown reportedly hoped it would. A year after the show ended, Houston served Brown with divorce papers. The 2004 shooting period became a turning point. During the taping of Being Bobby Brown, Brown was jailed for about a month after multiple parole violations stemming from a 1996 DUI charge. One of the violations was allegedly punching Houston in the face so hard that her cheek was bruised and her inner lip was cut.

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While Brown was behind bars, his sister Tina lived with Houston while she was in the grip of her drug use and sold scary stories about her addiction to the National Enquirer, which they published in March 2006 (along with the photo Pusha T and Kanye West eventually – and insensitively – used as album art for Daytona 2018). By 2007, Houston’s divorce from Brown was final.

In recent years, Brown has expressed regret for the show — specifically for dragging his daughter Bobbi Kristina, who died in 2015 in circumstances similar to her mother’s, into it. Reflecting on Houston’s infamous interview with Diane Sawyer, in which she declared, “Crack is whack,” he also admitted, “There was no reason for that [Houston] to be on TV at that time.”