#episode: britney 2.0

[cryscendo]

This place is enormous!

God, for 1,800 bucks a month, we could get a shoebox in Manhattan or this hangar in Bushwick.

@giftober 2024 | day 21: minimalistic

[angelhummel]

opening the floor for discussion alksfjslk but what do you think is (one of) the most tragically underrated song from the show?? for me i'd say 3 by tina sam and joe bc it slaps beyond belief

[gleesongtournament]

[jauntilyplacedcaps]

[gleek4life]

Boys/Boyfriend

If I was your boyfriend

Sometimes a girl just needs one

Keep you on my arm girl

To love her and to hold

I can be a gentleman

And when a girl is with one

If I was your boyfriend

Then she's in control!

[gleetournaments]

The Ultimate Episode Tournament: Round 1 Match 15

[angelmotifs]

really starting to enjoy glee s4... ok its over for me im in too deep

[historyofglee]

On this day in 2012:

Glee season 4, episode 2 “Britney 2.0” aired.

Written by Brad Falchuk and directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, the episode was originally watched by 7.46m viewers in the United States.

4x02 featured 8 new cover songs- Hold it Against Me, Boys/Boyfriend, Womanizer, 3, Crazy/U Drive Me Crazy, Oops! …I Did it Again, Gimme More, and Everytime.

The episode was the show’s second tribute to Britney Spears.

[queerstuffonscreen]

Glee (2009-2015) [I]

Episode length: 40-58 min.

Country: USA

Genre: Music, Comedy, Drama

Language: English

In this musical comedy, optimistic high school teacher Will Schuester tries to refuel his own passion while reinventing the high school's glee club and challenging a group of outcasts to realize their star potential as they strive to outshine their singing competition while navigating the cruel halls of McKinley High.

Season 1

Episode 1: Pilot

Episode 2: Showmance

Episode 3: Acafellas

Episode 4: Preggers

Episode 5: The Rhodes Not Taken

Episode 6: Vitamin D

Episode 7: Throwdown

Episode 8: Mash-Up

Episode 9: Wheels

Episode 10: Ballad

Episode 11: Hairography

Episode 12: Mattress

Episode 13: Sectionals

Episode 14: Hell-O

Episode 15: The Power of Madonna

Episode 16: Home

Episode 17: Bad Reputation

Episode 18: Laryngitis

Episode 19: Dream On

Episode 20: Theatricality

Episode 21: Funk

Episode 22: Journey to Regionals

Season 2

Episode 1: Audition

Episode 2: Britney/Brittany

Episode 3: Grilled Cheesus

Episode 4: Duets

Episode 5: The Rocky Horror Glee Show

Episode 6: Never Been Kissed

Episode 7: The Substitute

Episode 8: Furt

Episode 9: Special Education

Episode 10: A Very Glee Christmas

Episode 11: The Sue Sylvester Shuffle

Episode 12: Silly Love Songs

Episode 13: Comeback

Episode 14: Blame It on the Alcohol

Episode 15: Sexy

Episode 16: Original Song

Episode 17: A Night of Neglect

Episode 18: Born This Way

Episode 19: Rumours

Episode 20: Prom Queen

Episode 21: Funeral

Episode 22: New York

Season 3

Episode 1: The Purple Piano Project

Episode 2: I Am Unicorn

Episode 3: Asian F

Episode 4: Pot o' Gold

Episode 5: The First Time

Episode 6: Mash Off

Episode 7: I Kissed a Girl

Episode 8: Hold On to Sixteen

Episode 9: Extraordinary Merry Christmas

Episode 10: Yes/No

Episode 11: Michael

Episode 12: The Spanish Teacher

Episode 13: Heart

Episode 14: On My Way

Episode 15: Big Brother

Episode 16: Saturday Night Glee-ver

Episode 17: Dance with Somebody

Episode 18: Choke

Episode 19: Prom-asaurus

Episode 20: Props

Episode 21: Nationals

Episode 22: Goodbye

Season 4

Episode 1: The New Rachel

Episode 2: Britney 2.0

Episode 3: Makeover

Episode 4: The Break Up

Episode 5: The Role You Were Born to Play

Episode 6: Glease

Episode 7: Dynamic Duets

Episode 8: Thanksgiving

Episode 9: Swan Song

Episode 10: Glee, Actually

Episode 11: Sadie Hawkins

Episode 12: Naked

Episode 13: Diva

Episode 14: I Do

Episode 15: Girls (and Boys) On Film

Episode 16: Feud

Episode 17: Guilty Pleasures

Episode 18: Shooting Star

Episode 19: Sweet Dreams

Episode 20: Lights Out

Episode 21: Wonder-ful

Episode 22: All or Nothing

Watch on Disney+

See Glee post II season 5-6

[cryscendo]

kurt hummel in every performance

4x02 - Britney 2.0

Everytime - Marley Rose

[angelhummel]

WAIT WHAT @ THAT PREVIOUS CONFESSION. I haven’t watched S4 in a while. DID SHAY MITCHELL REALLY MAKE A CAMEO? DID I MISS SOMETHING?

when i say brief i mean brief lmao she was there for one second in womanizer. on the stairs beside the courtyard

shay, this is your best shot

[gleesongtournament]

[jauntilyplacedcaps]

[gleepolls]

Glee Episode Bracket

[tuiyla]

Sometimes I wonder if the actors knew how offensive some of the stuff they said/did on the show was. I mean I know it was their characters but still.

There was a lot of biphobia from Kurt, Blaine, Santana and even Brittany. There was the line Blaine said in the script read in 5x20 where he said "I'm gay and you're mostly lesbian" to Brittany!!!

Also the Britney 2.0 episode was super offensive and basically just spent 40 minutes mocking someone's mental health which is a huge problem and something a lot of people struggle with.

I know it's not the actors decision but do you think they knew how offensive some of this stuff was.

Also the whole IKAG episode was pretty bad and when Brittany and Sam got together and she said something about "lesbian bloggers" I have to see that as a dig about the Brittana fans!

I know that Naya, Heather and Darren were straight so it may just be that they are uneducated on these things.

I appreciate things like Kevin talking about the Lights Out mess in the Q&A episode of the podcast, but it’s ultimately not the cast’s responsibility. Am I curious what they thought of certain things, sure. Am I desperate for someone to cover IKAG with a critical eye, very. But I think fans already put way too much on actors and expect them to represent characters and their stories way beyond the constraints of the media itself, and that doesn’t feel fair. I’m general on the side of protecting actors’ privacy and right to do their job and not owe anyone anything more.

With things like Britney 2.0 especially I feel like we shouldn’t expect anything from the actors. Sure I like it when they’re self-aware and Jenna and Kevin are at times critical of the show in their podcast (old and new) but this is a typical example of, like, what are we expecting of them? It has been a decade now but particularly when the show was on, I’m sure it would have felt like biting the feeding hand to call out the biphobia or something. If I were an actor on a major network show and given Problematic material I wouldn’t be happy about it but man, it’s my job to say it. And we’ve heard how volatile things sometimes were on the set despite the general alleged good working relationship. I don’t blame people for not wanting to risk RM’s wrath with a public condemning.

I don’t know if they even stopped to consider this kind of stuff. With something like Artie’s offensive lines, Kevin clearly has. And again I’d kill to know how everyone truly felt about IKAG. I don’t know, maybe they knew. I’m sure there were certain things on Glee that raised eyebrows even then. Kevin, Jenna and Harry talk a lot about things not aging well in the Throwdown episode of the Showmance pod. But again, at the time no one was gonna risk a job. I don’t think anything was that egregious on Glee, it’s more like things adding up. But I mean for sure things like mocking Britney Spears and the consistent biphobia were cringe at best and cruel at worst. So no one get me wrong, the biphobia and the SA stuff and all these poorly handled, poorly framed things were bad, it just wasn’t SO bad that it would absolutely warrant an actor having to apologize for it.

Going back to actors’ privacy and all, I don’t like to a) assume their identities and b) make assumptions based on those assumptions. It especially feels strange to say they might have been uneducated just because they wouldn’t have those first-hand experiences e.g. with queer issues. A leap too big for me. And this is a can of worms of its own, but I think we shouldn’t assume with Naya in particular - in terms of identity, that is. There was that View interview that some take as her confirming she was bi; me, I don’t know and I don’t think we need to know. We never will know. Was Naya Rivera straight, was she queer? I say let the dead rest. Either way she was clearly a fierce ally who fought for that lesbian storyline to exist in the first place so whether she personally considered e.g. the biphobic things they had her say messed up or not, that’s really not for me to know or judge. I don’t really feel comfortable shifting that responsibility onto actors, which I understand is not what you’re doing but it’s dancing too close to that edge for me. Even if Darren, Naya and Heather were all Super Woke™ even back then it’s not like they could have done much to fight the biphobic lines. Actors have some say in these discussions, sure, but no one wants to push their luck.

Heather in particular has said some things in the past, iirc during season 4′s run especially that pissed people off but even still I don’t think being a little tone deaf or not living up to fan entitlement should warrant that much criticism. For other things too, I think she gets too much shit because people expect her to be this Representative when she’s just a person. They’re all just people. They’re actors and they get paid to say the words as they’re written. There’s some creative freedom with that but it’s up to the director/producer’s discretion. So again, maybe they were aware of how messed up the more iffy things were, maybe not. My bottom line on questions like these is that it’s not our business and not their responsibility.

[arisingonmorningsinnocent]

"[Britney] Spears’s Instagram has always been a place where fans go for clues about how she’s actually doing. Between viral Facebook-core image macros about positivity and self-love and cute photos of flowers or the phases of the moon, Spears dances, twirls, and shows off her bikinis and bralettes in dizzily edited videos and heavily filtered photos taken at unusual angles. Hers is the opposite of a typical celebrity social-media account: It’s chaotic in a fun way and in a way that can arouse concern, all of which is deeply confusing for fans who are used to seeing their starlets post careful, publicist-approved content. Over the course of the conservatorship, Free Britney activists developed detailed theories about messages Spears was sending via her Instagram posts.

[...]

Since this past December, Spears has only rarely left her Instagram comments open. She turned them off after posting a series of nude photos and pictures of herself in her great-great-grandmother’s veil; on one post, a top comment was a theory that Spears was being locked in her house and that all of her videos were being secretly recorded from behind a mirror. Even fellow celebrities had theories — after Spears posted a photo of her sister, Jamie Lynn, former Bachelorette star Kaitlyn Bristowe wrote, “Ok well now we know who’s running her account. Cough Jamie cough.” On December 21, when actress Alyssa Milano tweeted, “Someone please go check on Britney Spears,” Spears reposted the plea on her Instagram Stories and wrote, “It saddens me to see things about me from people who don’t know me!!!” A month later, after briefly deleting her Instagram, she explained on Twitter that she’d shut down her account “because there were too many people saying I looked like an idiot dancing and that I looked crazy. Honestly, I was doing my best, but it disturbed me to see people freely talk about it on TV … yep, it hurt my feelings.”

[...]

Lipscomb and others say that most of the inconsistencies Free Britney 2.0 points to can be explained by other means; he suspects much of the fan theorizing comes from the public’s ignorance of the peculiarities of L.A. celebrity culture — there was a rumor, for instance, that Spears was being sex-trafficked because she would only dine in hotels; Lipscomb notes that hotels are often the most discreet places for celebrities to eat because many have private entrances. Other theories, he says, reveal ignorance of Spears the person. “I’ve talked to so many people who’ve worked with Britney and I’ve talked to people who’ve dated her,” he says. “People question, ‘Why doesn’t she have her hair done?’ I knew her hairstylist — she hates having her hair done. They’re still analyzing every movement and trying to zoom in to see if that’s a bruise on her ankle. It’s just like, ‘Oh my God, you guys, at some point you do have to get a life.’”

The original Free Britney movement may have been proved right, but it has always attracted extremist thinkers. Even QAnon believers used Spears’s case to exploit their own aims, seeing a beautiful woman controlled and abused by “Hollywood elites” as evidence that she is a victim of a larger cabal of Satanic cultists. Jasmin Vargas, a Free Britney supporter since 2016, has written about how conspiracy theories derailed the movement, which was largely made up of fans trying to do the work of journalists — a necessary tactic when journalists wouldn’t take them seriously, she writes. But that still didn’t make them journalists.

Vargas cites a 2019 episode of Britney’s Gram — the podcast run by Tess Barker and Barbara Gray that was crucial to eventually revealing the truth of the conservatorship — that discusses one of Spears’s Instagram captions, in which she celebrated losing five pounds. “If you know Britney at all, if you’re a fan even casually, you’d know that she would never write that,” Tess says. “No. Never,” Babs responds. They later backtracked their comments when Spears continued to discuss her weight in future posts. Perhaps Spears would talk about her weight now? The fandom’s fixation on knowing the “real” Britney is rooted in an idea of who she used to be, and to accept who she is now would mean giving that up.

“Her whole career, there was an image of her that was created, and if she didn’t comply with it, there were consequences,” says Miller. “Now that she’s finally allowed to have control over how she’s portrayed, that makes people uncomfortable. And that’s good. It should be a little uncomfortable, because what happened is not right.”

--"Where Is Britney Spears?"