There is something both thrilling and reassuring in following the story of a star who rises, falls, and then rises anew. It’s a narrative template recognizable to even the most casual viewer of documentary shows such as VH1’s “Behind the Music” or the E! network’s “True Hollywood Story.” Just last week, both Taylor Swift and Jessica Simpson—Swift in her new feature-length documentary, “Miss Americana,” and Simpson in her new memoir, “Open Book”—revealed their struggles with, and triumphs over, personal demons: an eating disorder in the case of the former, an addiction to alcohol and pills in the case of the latter. (In the movie, Swift confesses that when she was starving herself, she thought it was normal “to feel like I was going to pass out at the end of a show, or in the middle of it.” Simpson writes, “I was killing myself with all the drinking and pills.”) As viewers and readers and listeners, we voraciously consume these stories, pleased to realize that stars, too, can suffer, despite, or sometimes even because of, the very fact of their celebrity, and thus to learn how universal some difficulties are.
One celebrity who has experienced both a rapid rise to stratospheric fame and the pitfalls that this type of trajectory often entails is Justin Bieber. The native of small-town Canada became an international pop superstar not long after he was discovered on YouTube, in 2008, by the talent manager Scooter Braun, when the singer was just a young teen with a fluffy cap of shiny hair and a high, clear voice. As he has matured in years, Bieber has behaved badly, in the manner of a spoiled teen, and has also tangled with the law; more recently, there have been rumors of drug use and struggles with depression. Bieber confirmed these rumors last year in an Instagram post, in which he also alluded to the fact that he has had a fraught attitude toward the women in his life. (On Sunday, in an interview with NPR, one of his ex-girlfriends, the singer Selena Gomez, alleged that he had emotionally abused her during their off-and-on relationship. Bieber did not respond to NPR’s request for comment.)
In 2017, Bieber cancelled the final fourteen dates of a sixteen-month world tour in support of his fourth album, “Purpose,” marking the beginning of a hiatus from album-making and touring, which was also punctuated, to the surprise of fans, by a sudden marriage to the model Hailey Baldwin. When cancelling the tour dates, Bieber’s team cited only “unforeseen circumstances,” an explanation whose nebulousness further added to the public’s general confusion. Though social media has allowed for more direct access to celebrities in the past decade, a central characteristic of the relationship between so-called civilians and the famous is that the former will never know nearly as much as they would like to about the latter. When we follow the story of a celebrity like Bieber, we non-celebrities engage in a kind of Kremlinology, piecing together the meagre elements available to us: a D.U.I.-arrest record, a handful of confessional Instagram posts, a smattering of acne in paparazzi photos.
The new ten-part YouTube series “Seasons”—which follows Bieber through the second half of 2019, as he records his forthcoming album, “Changes”—at first promises to change that. The first episode begins abruptly with a wildly cheering “Ellen” audience, in November, 2015, responding to Bieber’s announcement that he is about to embark on the “Purpose” tour. Fans’ shrieks then serve as the soundtrack for a whirlwind montage of the ensuing months of the tour: we see Bieber floating in a glass cube over audiences in Seattle, Tel Aviv, Arnhem, Atlanta, Dubai, Helsinki, Houston; Bieber gyrating onstage as a curtain of indoor rain pours down on him and a score of backup dancers; Bieber, back on “Ellen,” promoting the tour midway through its run; Bieber trying to sing over a shrieking concert crowd, and then saying, “When you guys are screaming, it’s hard for me”; Bieber lying on a stage, his sweat-slicked platinum locks pushed back by a white bandanna, his prone body captured on the screens of multiple iPhones held aloft by audience members. Something, it is clear, isn’t right. The series turns to a slew of clips with responses to the tour’s cancellation. “All we know is that he’s ‘going through a lot,’ that’s it,” an air-quoting young woman, apparently a fan, says in a street interview. On a CBS morning show, Gayle King offers, “People think he’s having issues, seems to be falling into another dark place.” Then the screen goes dark and a title card appears: “Two years later.” Now, presumably, we will lay aside our inadequate attempts at deduction; “Seasons” is here to sort things out.
Part of the pleasure and relief of the fallen-and-risen-again celebrity narrative is its legibility. We are told, from the horse’s mouth, that bad has ended, and that good is now transpiring. “Seasons” has all of the trappings of this kind of tell-all. Bieber has starred in two previous documentaries, 2011’s “Never Say Never” and 2013’s “Believe,” both big-ticket, feature-length affairs directed by Jon M. Chu. (“Never Say Never” was, even, a 3-D production.) They recorded in glossy detail two of Bieber’s earlier tours, complete with the type of screaming-fan clips that the opening sequence of “Seasons” dispenses with within its first two minutes. For most of the series (or at least the four advance episodes I was provided with), the footage is, for the most part, self-consciously low-tech, its iPhone-style aesthetic meant to convey a gritty intimacy. The fact that “Seasons” is airing on YouTube, where Bieber began his career, is significant; each episode hovers around an extremely brief ten minutes, seeming to echo the immediacy of the star’s early amateur videos, while simultaneously courting quick-fix, phone-first Gen Z viewers.
In the first episode, we see Bieber taking his wife on a trip back to his home town, visiting the steps on a downtown building where he busked as a child, and the lower-middle-class apartment building where he spent the first ten years of his life. “She makes everything better,” Bieber says of Hailey, and one senses that there is real affection between the two, and that much of Hailey’s life is spent making sure Bieber’s is stable. “I’m here to cheer him on and support him,” Hailey, who is wearing a gold nameplate necklace that reads “Wifey,” says in a talking-head interview. The couple, who are usually dressed in oversized, matching Drew House sweatshirts (Bieber’s own clothing brand), seem to almost always be together. “I sleep great now that Justin is married and that she’s around,” Allison Kaye, the president of Scooter Braun’s company, says. At one point, Hailey says seriously, “He came out on the other side of some really dark times,” and suggests that this is why “he has a story to tell.”
But what are these dark times? What is this story? It isn’t exactly clear. For most of the first four episodes of “Seasons,” we see Bieber recording songs for “Changes”—which, as he revealed on Tuesday, from his usual place on Ellen’s couch, will drop on Valentine’s Day. The would-be hits are revealed in snippets in these studio scenes, as if to whet the public’s appetite. Anyone who has followed Bieber’s career from its start knows that he is a phenomenal natural talent, and the most joyful moments of the docuseries are the ones that show him in the studio, practicing his craft. But it also seems as if these moments are hard-won, and under threat of a dark cloud—Drugs? Depression? Illness? Tabloid or fan attention?—that might engulf them.
For celebrities, there is a constant trade-off between privacy and an audience’s attention, adoration, and purchasing power. “Seasons” is meant to promote Bieber’s new album, so there is pressure on the series to offer answers to viewers’ lingering questions about the singer, and that pressure is felt: one senses that a concerted attempt has been made to give these answers as perfunctorily as possible. Earlier in January, on his Instagram account, Bieber shared that he has been diagnosed with Lyme disease and also with chronic mono, explaining that this, and not drugs, has caused him to look unwell. In his post, Bieber promised, “These things will be explained further in a docu series I’m putting on YouTube shortly.. you can learn all that I’ve been battling and OVERCOMING!!” This revelation has not yet been addressed in the episodes that I’ve watched, and, to judge from the tone of the series so far, I have doubts about how much further the explanations will go. In the end, “Seasons” feels like, more than anything, a proof of life of an exceedingly fragile individual. Bieber’s constant nearness to some sort of collapse remains a kind of ghostly spectre in the series, glanced at but never named, and addressed only to be wished away.
