If you were old enough to listen to pop music on the radio in the early 2000’s, you knew this: Britney Spears was a radio queen. Her hits like “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” “Oops!… I Did It Again,” and “Toxic” could have seemed like they were being played on an endless loop. The young star’s music charted constantly and rarely wavered; since then, though she’s made more music since, Spears’s earlier stuff has made her a classic in the music industry and earned her awards and acclaim for her work.
Now, there will be a full TV movie to commemorate that. A biopic chronicling the life, music, and achievements of Britney Spears is currently in the works at Lifetime, Variety reports. The special will be called, at least, so far, a simple Beyonce-album-esque name–Britney–and it will run for a total of two hours, give or take, given that it is still in the development stage.
Britney will follow a more youthful incarnation of the pop legend as she begins to climb into success and fame. As a refresher, Spears broke into the music world with her first album …Baby One More Time, all-the-while performing in malls around America with two back-up dancers and opening for then-extremely-popular N’SYNC. From there, Spears bloomed into an international pop star, accumulating number-one hits, Grammys, and a paparazzi-frenzied social life. Her relationships with men always seemed to rocket to the stratosphere and then, inevitably, crash back to Earth up in flames. Her three famous boyfriends and husbands were Justin Timberlake, whom she met initially as they were both in the cast of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse revival in the ’90s, Jason Alexander, and Kevin Federline, whom she had son Sean with.
Britney, of course, will cover all the turmoil and how public her strife had been, including the times parenting activists flayed Spears for having Sean sit in her lap while driving to when she shaved her head. However, the show is also to try and replicate what the world did not see of Spears behind the scenes in all of her complexities–her stint with Kabbalah, the stresses of fame dragging her down briefly, motherhood in private, and so on.
There has already been a casting for Spears as well, as the actual pop star won’t be making an appearance in the TV movie as she would in a movie documentary. Natasha Bassett, the Australian actress who recently made it big in the Coen Brothers movie Hail! Caesar, is officially set to take on the role of Spears.
Executive producers for the special include Joan Harrison, Jonathon Koch, and Steve Michaels, while the script will be crafted by Anne-Marie Hess. Britney will air on Lifetime sometime in 2017.
There will be more from Spears, however, before that. Her next album, Glory, will drop this Friday.