5 WTF moments from ‘The Bobby Brown Story’
Writer Dustin Seibert says these five WTF moments from The Bobby Brown Story prove that it was every bit as entertaining, if not more so, than The New Edition Story. Agree?
For a network that has endured so many peaks and valleys, BET seems to have found a gold mine in music biopics overseen by the artists themselves. The New Edition Story surprised all of us by being good (for a made-for-TV movie). It put up great numbers and served as Black Twitter fodder for two days straight in 2017. Doubling down with a film based on the most interesting member of New Edition seemed like a no-brainer.
The Bobby Brown Story was every bit as entertaining, if not more so, than its predecessor. But, as we conjecture about what in the story was dead-accurate and what was embellished, it’s important to remember that Bobby Brown himself oversaw this two-part film, just as New Edition oversaw their own biopic.
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Everyone born in the mid-1980s and earlier knows that Brown was mercurial at best and a g—damn nut job at his worst. We also know that he likes to avoid certain topics, as he did in the 2018 documentary Whitney (which is excellent and worth watching with good speakers). There were plenty of WTF moments over the two-night series, and I think most of them are explicitly a result of Brown being at the helm.
Here are just a few:
1. Janet and Bobby
It would appear that many of us 80s babies who grew up on the music of Janet Jackson and Bobby Brown had zero idea about the brief romantic relationship between the two before this week, even though it was explored in Brown’s 2017 autobiography Every Little Step: My Story. Essentially, Brown was Jackson’s side-n—a, fulfilling side n—a needs behind closed doors as she kept him from tainting the (chuckle) good Jackson name with his bad boy antics. What we didn’t see: a scene in which Brown kicks Janet out of their hotel room naked, which was snatched out of the final cut of the film for what’s likely a number of good reasons.
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2. Age was handled…interestingly
Woody McClain, who also depicted Brown in 2017’s The New Edition Story, is a handsome 29-year-old dude. I’m not sure if it was a budget issue or just the real Brown exercising creative license, but I would’ve loved to see McClain look a bit older as the 30-plus-year-spanning story progressed – especially because he’s portraying someone who abused alcohol and hard drugs. That the real-life Brown often looked like 40 miles of bad road at any point past the mid-1990s is no secret, but all we got in the film is his post-stroke “Bobby Brown Jaw” (which seemed to disappear at times) and a modest prosthetic pouch that I didn’t notice until the scene in which he finds out Whitney Houston died. Perris Drew, who portrayed Brown’s oldest son Landon at age 22, is slightly more than three years younger than McClain in real life; I couldn’t tell who was older when they were on screen together.
3. The entire beginning sequence of part 2
The second night kicked off with Brown succumbing to his vices, which included pulling a gun on Houston after hallucinating that she’s trying to kill him and winding up in front of a countryside home staring down the barrel of a white dude’s shotgun. (Dude exercised more restraint than I might’ve considering Brown never dropped his own gun, but I digress.) Brown then suffers the stroke that almost killed him and apparently set him on the path of sobriety. If I were still 10 years old, those sequences alone would’ve had all the effectiveness of the “Just Say No” campaign had in keeping my ass away from drugs.
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4. Evil Whitney
Definitely the most suspect part of the whole series – and that which singularly indicates that Brown oversaw this – Houston (Gabrielle Dennis) is portrayed as a coked-out shrew completely lacking in empathy and singlehandedly responsible for the corruption of Brown and the eventual downfall of their daughter Bobbi Kristina. Even if Houston’s portrayal is accurate, I’ll bet every dime I have that Brown played a much bigger victim role in the biopic than was true to life. Hell, just watch the videos in the recent pair of Whitney Houston documentaries – Brown was nobody’s choir boy. I’m sure Cissy Houston turned white with anger while watching BET this week.
5. Having to watch Raina St. Patrick die again
As soon as I saw Donshea Hopkins portraying Bobbi Kristina, I thought, “perfect casting choice!” But then, that feeling of dread quickly crept in my chest at the knowledge that I’d have to endure the second death of a Hopkins character on screen in as many years. Look, I’m still recovering from the bastards who run Power deciding to kill off Raina (spoiler alert, but c’mon son) – my heart has not yet gone on. I’d worry about Hopkins getting caught in a rut of dead characters as a 16-year-old actress, but Michael B. Jordan died a lot early in his career, and look at him now.
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Dustin J. Seibert is a native Detroiter living in Chicago. Miraculously, people have paid him to be aggressively light-skinned via a computer keyboard for nearly two decades. He loves his own mama slightly more than he loves music and exercises every day only so his French fry intake doesn’t catch up to him. Find him at his own site, wafflecolored.com.
