After Whitney
‘The Houstons’ looks at a family in the spotlight
Lifetime’s reality series “The Houstons: On Our Own" launches Wednesday at 9 p.m., and the family isn’t surprised that the early buzz ranges from expectant to suspicious.
Because the show will follow family members of the late Whitney Houston, whose spirit and legacy will play a central role, skeptics are charging that, to be blunt, the show exploits Whitney’s death.
“Totally unnecessary,” rapper/activist Chuck D tweeted when it was announced.
Whitney’s sister-in-law, manager and close friend Pat Houston, who put the show together, dismisses the exploitation talk.
“It’s not like that at all,” she says, explaining that “On Our Own” is an evolved version of a reality show she developed before Whitney’s sudden death this past February at the age of 48.
“A little over two years ago we shot a pilot called ‘Power Brokehers,’ with the ‘hers’ because it was about successful women and how they balance different parts of their lives,” says Pat.
She was one of the those women, and a number of Houston family members participated. They included Gary Houston, Whitney’s brother and Pat’s husband; Pat’s and Gary’s teenage daughter Rayah; and Whitney’s own teenage daughter, Bobbi Kristina, known as Krissy.
The original concept, says Pat, was a positive show focusing on the ways women and their families work together.
“It was not,” she says, “anything like Bobby Brown’s show.”
“Being Bobby Brown,” which aired in 2005 on Bravo, starred Whitney’s thenhusband and was widely seen as somewhat lowrent. Various Houston family members participated — including Whitney, who often came across as annoyed and wishing she were somewhere else.
Filmed as Whitney’s marriage to Brown was falling apart, “Being Bobby Brown” was canceled after one season when Whitney declined to participate further. The couple divorced in April 2007.
After Whitney’s death, says Pat, “Power Brokehers” morphed into a show about how members of the Houston family, now including Whitney’s mother, Cissy Houston, were handling their own lives and particularly Bobbi Kristina’s.
Krissy became a focal point of concern after Whitney’s death, and the first episode, revolving almost entirely around her, reflects this.
Specifically, 19-year-old Krissy announces she is engaged to Nick Gordon, 23, who has lived for years in the Houston home.
Gordon talks about how his parents kicked him out of his house and Whitney took him in over the objections of some of her own relatives.
It was widely reported that Whitney adopted him, though he says in this show that it never happened.
What did happen, he says, is that he and Krissy became best friends over the years. After Whitney’s death, the show implies, they became even closer.
They look happy. They’re the only ones. To the rest of the family, it’s wrong, and the question is what to do about it.
That thought is temporarily overtaken, however, by an emotional scene in which Pat, Gary, Rayah, Krissy and others, who live around Atlanta, join Cissy in New Jersey to visit Whitney’s grave.
It’s the first time Krissy has done that, and while she gets through it all right, she says she’s not ready to return to the Newark church where her mother’s funeral was held.
As she did during a brief interview with Oprah Winfrey, Bobbi Kristina talks about how hard it has been losing the most important person in her life.
The concern of the adults around her is whether the adjustment is leading her to make bad choices,
including the engagement and what seems in the show to be some mild social drinking.
Some media reports have suggested that her use of recreational substances goes beyond a glass of wine, but those are not addressed here, at least in the first episode.
Pat Houston also cautions against anyone drawing tabloid-style conclusions from scenes in n “On Our Own.”
“We’re seeing a family coming together, supporting each other and loving each other every day,” she says.
As for Krissy in particular, Pat, Gary and Cissy all say they are trying to step up and fill some of the void. Unspoken, but obvious, is the fact that they don’t trust the often-troubled Bobby Brown to be much help.
Brown will not be appearing in “On Our Own.” Own ”
“With Krissy, remember, we started filming this show right after her mother’s passing,” says Pat. “So it’s very difficult for her. To the world, Whitney was a star, but to Krissy she was just Mom.
“And Whitney did her very best to keep it that way.”
Pat declines to say where Krissy is headed — noting, among other things, that at this point it would be a spoiler for the show.
“We want people to tune in every week to see,” she says. “I can tell you that with everything Krissy has gone through, she’s learning and growing. She is very responsible.”
That doesn’t change her situation, however, and Cissy expressed concern this month about what could happen if Bobbi Kristina came into a multimillion-dollar inheritance without some controls.
That sort of drama will presumably weave in and out of “On Our Own,” and Pat acknowledges that in addition to “a lot of love,” the show will illustrate the kind of pressure that lands on a star like Whitney Houston. “People always expected to see the Whitney they saw in ‘The Bodyguard’ or ‘Waiting to Exhale,’ ” says Pat. “But the Whitney we knew was a real person, and I think toward the end she was trying to be able to live a life of her own, outside of that image.”