Browning Around: On "Being Bobby Brown"
Bravo
Various Times

Bobby Brown has had a rough ten years, and now he wants America to forget all about it.

The 1990s started out well enough for Brown. He was riding high on a string of hit songs and solo success. He even found love, marrying chanteuse Whitney Houston in 1992. Then the good times took a turn for the worst. Brown's scrapes with the law and substance abuse problems began to outshine his talent.

Brown's Bravo reality show, "Being Bobby Brown," begins as Brown is being released from jail and is starting to forge a path back to superstardom. The audience isn't told what his sentence was for, and Brown doesn't care to elaborate. And while Brown occasionally pokes fun at his history (in one episode assuming a handcuffed position to evoke recognition from a stranger), the show presents Brown as a man with an important musical, not criminal, past.

In it's desperate attempt to reintroduce Bobby Brown as a music star in his own right — and not as a music-related novelty — the show also tries to gloss over the stardom of his talented wife. While introducing his wife to the TV audience, Brown comments on her beauty, not her talent. But the truth is, Brown has withered in the shadown of Houston's talent for over a decade, and this obvious attempt to diminishing the scope of her achievment just comes off as selfish and petty. And the pettiness of the ommission sets the tone for the show.

Brown goes on to elaborate his self-centeredness by making it very clear, again and again, that he wears the pants in the family. At one point, an autograph hungry fan addresses Houston as "Ms. Houston"; Brown cuts him off and corrects him by curtly saying, "Mrs. Brown." (Given this outburst, one can't help but wonder if Brown would prefer all Houston's albums to be reissued with her married name printed on them.) The fan corrects himself, and looking directly at Brown, repeats, "Mrs. Brown."

However, as hard as Brown tries to steal the spotlight, Houston casts a shadow over him. Whenever she's onscreen, Brown becomes second fiddle. And when she's not, the channel begs to be changed.

But it's not that Brown isn't interesting, and it's not even that he comes off as an asshole (which he does). It's that his unique brand of self-conscious inadequacy is painful to observe and impossible to enjoy.

Brown struggles to cover up his feelings of inadequacy with blatant machismo and an unhealthy overdose of ego. When he introduces his children, LaPrincia, Bobby Jr., and Bobbi Kristina, he introduces Bobby Jr. as his "pride and joy," the vehicle through which his name will live on forever. This is a common sentiment regarding sons and surnames; however, Brown goes on to say that he named his daughter Bobbi after himself as well. (Mrs. Brown, if you're nasty?)

Brown's conversational skills, like his social skills, also need some work. While he's watching Houston get her hair done, Brown's hand makes its way into his shirt. He manually stimulates his nipple and wonders aloud why he does such things — leaving a horrified audience to wonder why he's doing such things in front of a camera crew.

A bit later in the show, as Houston is getting her hair done, Brown recounts the story of how he recently assisted her in a bowel movement. He wiggles his fingers gleefully as Houston announces, "That's love! That's love!"

That may be love, but it's not good TV.

Bravo President Lauren Zalaznick told CNN that "Bravo is really committed to providing programming that goes very deeply into the internal worlds of creative people." If going very deeply into the creative Bobby Brown's world means one must endure stories about him helping his wife defecate, Bravo should put the kibosh on their style of reality television ASAP. (If discussing nipple tweaking and colon-finger interaction is the material that made it to the show, I shudder to think what was cut.)

The title, a reference to Being John Malkovich, a movie in which "normal" people enter the mind of John Malkovich, is a strange choice for this program: does anybody really want to be Bobby Brown? They won't after watching this show. Unlike "The Osbornes," which managed to indulge our desire to witness the dysfunctionality of fame while still wooing us with Ozzy and his family's unique charm, "Being Bobby Brown" is painful and coarse. It shows us a spoiled, driven, petty man with no depth, no heart, and no meaning in his life, beyond his misguided struggle to be more famous than his wife.

Of course, if that's what they want us to understand about the "deep interal world" of Bobby Brown, than the show is a success. However, if it's meant to give Brown the chance to make a musical comeback (or even if the aim is to make good TV — not that it ever is these days), then ths show is a significant, stirring failure.

But for Brown, it seems, that kind of failure (in front of a few million people), is merely par for the course.

— Tamara Watkins (tamara dot watkins at gmail dot com)