Britney Spears and the trauma of being young, female and famous in the ’90s

It’s become pretty trendy, re-litigating the headline controversies of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Netflix’s “The Crown” recently revisited the royal English intrigue of Prince Charles and Princess Diana; ESPN’s “The Last Dance”told the behind-the-scenes story of the other most famous dynasty of the time, the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls. Slate’s “Slow Burn” podcast has re-examined the Bill Clinton impeachment trial and the feud between Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G.; the popular history-retold podcast “You’re Wrong About” has lately covered the O.J. Simpson trial, the D.C. sniper attacks and the Y2K panic.

And why not? It’s clear there’s an appetite among the key 18-to-34 demographic to re-examine as adults what they remember absorbing in fragments during childhood.

“Framing Britney Spears,” the sixth installment of FX and Hulu’s “The New York Times Presents” series of stand-alone documentaries, premieres Feb. 5 and aims to untangle for the casual pop-culture consumer the convoluted legal battles facing pop star Britney Spears. To the extent possible, director Samantha Stark reports out how Spears, seemingly capable and thus an unlikely candidate for a conservatorship, wound up under the long-term supervision of her father, Jamie Spears.

The documentary only gets as close to Spears as any other reporting project in the past decade - which is to say, not very close. The list of people who are revealed to have declined to speak to the Times includes both of Spears’s parents, her sister and brother, her ex-husband Kevin Federline and a former adviser. Then, an epilogue reveals that it’s unclear whether Spears herself received the requests for her participation.

Consequently, much of what’s in it has been known to devoted fans and interested followers for a long time: The conservatorship has historically given Spears’s father significant control over her daily life and her money, seems suspect to many outsiders, and has only recently been updated by a judge to put a bank in charge of Spears’s finances rather than her dad. He retains authority over much of her day-to-day life.

But the strength of “Framing Britney Spears”isn’t in its new revelations; it’s in its thoughtful hindsight, which positions it squarely within that “1990s, re-evaluated” genre. The documentary wisely revisits Spears’s breakneck-speed ascent beginning in 1998, quietly making the case that fame in that era - particularly for young women - was traumatizing, and that the booming tabloid industry of the time played a role in Spears’s current predicament that shouldn’t be overlooked.

As Times critic-at-large Wesley Morris points out in the episode, Spears rose to fame during the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, when young women’s sexual desires were being discussed in public at once frankly, pruriently and scornfully. As a result, little daylight existed between fame as a young, attractive woman with any hint of a sex life and what we now know as public shaming. The press - both the tabloids and more credible, high-profile outlets - hounded women like Spears for disturbingly intimate details of their lives, then belittled and even villainized them for those very details.

To illustrate just how little of Spears’s private life remained private, Stark includes footage from the early 2000s of Spears being asked, before a room full of reporters, whether she’s a virgin; she confirms in a soft voice that she’s waiting until marriage. Moments later, a voice-over plays of Justin Timberlake, Spears’s ex-boyfriend, telling a radio host he slept with Spears. A Details cover depicting Timberlake and congratulating him for “getting into Britney’s pants” appears on-screen.

Even acclaimed TV journalists subject her to denigrating lines of questioning about her personal life. In an interview clip, ABC’s Diane Sawyer quotes the first lady of Maryland as saying she wishes she could “shoot Britney Spears” for being a poor role model. When Spears responds in horror, Sawyer seems to defend the statement: “Because of the example for kids, and how hard it is to be a parent.”