BOBBY MINISERIES,
Brown vilifies Whitney in new miniseries
Bobby Brown struggled with drugs and drink, but his greatest addiction was Whitney Houston. That's the only conclusion you can draw from the two-night, fourhour miniseries “The Bobby Brown Story,” about the Boston R&B superstar (Tuesday and Wednesday at 9 p.m. on BET) that portrays Whitney as a tempest of talent and tantrums who titillates and torments Bobby for years.
With Bobby as a coexecutive producer, the film doubles as image rehab, though viewers may be surprised by how much Whitney is vilified. It's not that she's thrown under the bus. It's as if she's tossed off a chasm, the ground filled in and salted.
The low point in their relationship might be when he suffers a stroke in their mansion and she takes her drugs, gives him a kick and leaves the help to deal with him.
Woody McClain stars as Bobby, returning to the role he played in the well-received “The New Edition Story” last year. That miniseries covered bits of this story, but this is a deeper dive into Bobby's life, particularly his solo career efforts. It's not a sequel — a side-quel? We need a new word for these franchise efforts.
The film harkens back to Brown's youth in the Orchard Park Projects in Roxbury, where the violence he witnesses scars him and leads him to the excesses that threaten to ruin his life.
As a rising solo artist, he has a flair for getting audiences on their feet and women out of their clothes. He crosses paths with Whitney (Gabrielle Dennis, “Marvel's Luke Cage,” “Rosewood”) at the 1989 Soul Train Awards. She loses to Anita Baker, but wins Bobby's attention.
He sees what no one else does: She's no princess.
On their wedding day, he discovers she uses cocaine, and the miniseries implies she led Brown right into hard drugs and years of partying. Brown's cheating and his multiple children by multiple women are acknowledged here, and the miniseries alleges Whitney wasn't faithful either and leaves no doubt as to Bobby's opinion of her best galpal Robyn Crawford (Yvonne Senat Jones), whose glares probably could turn lesser men to salt.
There are some terrific re-creations of his greatest hits that will get you off the couch and probably drive you to Spotify and iTunes. Such celebrities as Kevin Costner, Janet Jackson, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds and even Heather Locklear are re-created with varying success.
Neither Dennis nor McClain especially look like their actual inspirations, but that's not as important as their ability to channel the outlandish behavior. The miniseries faithfully re-creates some scenes from Bobby's ill-fated 2005 reality series “Being Bobby Brown,” which turned out to be the last straw for Whitney.
That second night covers a lot of loss: the end of their marriage and the deaths of his beloved parents, Whitney and their daughter Bobbi Kristina (played as a young woman by Donshea Hopkins, “Power”). The latter two perished three years apart in bizarrely similar circumstances, drowning in