The prurient Britney Spears documentary industry is out of control and needs to stop

As a pop star Britney Spears has achieved the impressive feat of notching up a string of hits that sound entirely distinctive from one another. Baby One More Time, I’m a Slave 4 U, Toxic and Oops!… I Did It Again each feels like its own self-contained pop fantasia. The songs never descend into one long congealed, samey muddle, as is often the case with music made by stars at Spears's level.

In that regard, it’s a shame the makers of the ongoing deluge of Britney Spears documentaries haven’t paid closer attention to their subject matter. Instead of standing on their own two feet, these films all run into the other. They recycle the same cast of hangers-on and former associates, the same footage of Spears pursued by paparazzi and the same ominous conspiracy thriller tone. They are a prurient mishmash that all appear to have dropped off a single production line.

Even the names are interchangeable. The latest is Netflix’s Britney vs Spears, which arrives shortly after the new Sky-Hulu doc Controlling Britney Spears – itself a sequel to February’s Framing Britney Spears (and which has delivered the new bombshell claim that her father, Jamie Spears, has been covertly monitoring Britney for years).

There’s also CNN’s Toxic: Britney Spears’s Battle for Freedom and the BBC’s The Battle for Britney: Fans, Cash and a Conservatorship. Has anyone made “Freeing Britney Spears” yet? Or what about Being Britney, Blaming Britney, Buying Britney or Batman v Britney: Dawn of Justice? The possibilities are endless – as are the number of times the same story can be regurgitated.

Britney vs Spears is the heavyweight vinyl boxset of the milieu. It’s full of legalise: documentarian Erin Lee Carr and music journalist Jenny Eliscu seem to have interviewed every single lawyer in Los Angeles. There are also conversations with former boyfriends and confidantes, including paparazzo-turned paramour Adnan Ghalib, Spears’s ex-manager Sam Lutfi and her former assistant Felicia Culotta (don’t worry if you have to pop to the loo when she’s on – she’s also in Controlling Britney Spears).

Eliscu brings a personal testimony too. She befriended Spears after interviewing her for Rolling Stone. And she was drawn into what would later become the “Free Britney” conspiracy. This occurred when associates of the singer asked her to smuggle to Spears legal documents that would allow the singer to appoint a lawyer independent of the conservatorship which has controversially managed Spears’s affairs since 2008. Eliscu cries as she recalls meeting Britney in the toilet of a rooftop pool.

“She looked at me and said, 'Thank you', and I said, 'I’ll see you again',” Eliscu says. “She definitely seemed scared.”

The anecdote is striking: it’s that rare moment in which Britney vs Spears brings us something new. Otherwise, the documentary cycles between the dreary and the overwhelming. The sheer accumulation of detail – emails, leaked files, a hand-written note that Britney asked her friend Andrew Gallery to share with the world – is exhausting.

Yet the conclusion the directors reach could have come from any of the other Spears films: that the conservatorship relationship was weighted against Britney and in favour of her father (who in August announced plans to step down from the role of conservator “when the time is right”).

Jamie is painted as the villain and the lengths to which Britney vs Spears goes to underscore this verge on comical. There are repeated shots of the 69-year-old looking jowly and dishevelled. And whenever he is on screen the musical cues turn menacing – just like Lord of the Rings when the black riders are snooping around the Shire.

Jamie Spears wasn’t interviewed. Nor, it goes without saying, was Britney herself. And if Lee Carr and Eliscu clearly perceive themselves on her side, it’s hard not to see Britney vs Spears as anything other than Netflix cynically joining the stampede to cash in on Spears’s personal woes. First it was Ted Bundy docs, then wacky dating shows. And now it’s Britney Spears conservatorship porn. Whenever a new genre is in vogue you can count on Netflix hitching itself to the bandwagon.

Spears herself has spoken out about the parasitic quality of the Britney documentary gold rush. Just last week she criticised Controlling Britney Spears.

“It’s really crazy guys,” she wrote on Instagram. “I watched a little bit of the last documentary and I hate to inform you but a lot of what you heard is not true”.

She has yet to offer her thoughts on Britney vs Spears. But she would surely agree that, however well-intentioned, these films serve only to bring needless drama to her life and that the feeding frenzy around her needs to stop.