In 2006, Britney Spears had reached her professional and personal nadir, brought down in part by incessant tabloid coverage of her tumultuous personal life. Attempting to regain control of the narrative, she booked a primetime interview with then-Today show co-host Matt Lauer .

Its deeply unsettling to stumble upon archival footage of Lauer, or Charlie Rose, or Mark Halperin, or any of the other prominent men in media who were ousted after being accused of or admitting to sexual misconduct amid the Me Too movement. Its even more unsettling when its footage of them covering a story involving sexism, misogyny or abuses of power. Once you see it, you cant unsee it. And these clips are everywhere because of how ubiquitous and influential these men were.

Framing Britney Spears , a new documentary from The New York Times, FX and Hulu that premiered Friday, is about Spears gradual loss of control over her narrative. Since 2008, the pop icons life decisions and finances have been under a conservatorship mostly controlled by her father , Jamie Spears. Over the years, Free Britney advocates have called for ending the conservatorship and allowing the singer to regain control over decisions about her own life. The documentary explains the conservatorship but then shifts its focus backward, tracing how Spears got to this point and in the process, how sexism and misogyny figured heavily in the media coverage of her. It strings together a trove of archival footage about Spears in the 1990s and 2000s, including that jaw-dropping interview with Lauer. Framing the documentary this way astutely illustrates how we havent properly reckoned with the extent to which misogynistic men have controlled media narratives and the ways their influence has permeated our culture.