Before James Corden, Craig Ferguson hosted the Late Late Show on CBS. Back in 2007, he did a monologue one evening where he vowed to not talk about Britney Spears' issues because the issues were so serious that people like Anna Nicole Smith had DIED from similar issues. The irony in this particular monologue is that both Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears are the subjects of investigative reports that came out on Friday. 20/20 looked into the life and death of Anna Nicole Smith as her surviving daughter, who was a baby when Anna Nicole Smith died, learns more about her mother from her father, Larry Birkhead.
Britney Spears is the subject of a New York Times documentary called "Framing Britney Spears." It debuted on Hulu on Friday. The documentary looks into Britney Spears rise as a pop princess and goes into the media frenzy that her life turned into. She happened to be really famous just as tabloids were in decline and there was a renaissance of gossip at our fingertips on the internet. Pictures and video of famous celebrities were hot commodoties and the photographers and videographers were paid huge sums of money for good pictures. Celebrities were hunted. Britney Spears suffering from post partum depression coupled with the intense media scrutiny led her to become the most hunted. She couldn't do anything out of the public eye. Eventually her life became so unmanageable, she was put under a conservatorship run by her father where she was not allowed to make major life decisions without his consent. 13 years later, she is still under that conservatorship.