In a New Documentary, Janet Jackson Is Hiding in Plain Sight

A four-hour film on Lifetime and A&E touches on the highs and lows of a long career, but doesn’t dig deep into one of pop’s great risk-takers.

Throughout her two-decade-plus heyday, Janet Jackson was an astonishingly modern pop superstar — a risk-taker with a distinctive voice, a vivid sense of self-presentation and an innate understanding of the scale of the labor required to make world-shaking music. She was the embodiment of authority and command, practically unrivaled in her day and studiously copied by later generations.

But throughout “Janet Jackson,” a four-hour documentary that premiered over two nights on Lifetime and A&E, the highs and lows of Jackson’s career are often presented as a kind of collateral asset or damage. Her brothers were famous first; Jackson was the spunky younger sister who came after. When her brother Michael, then the most famous pop star on the planet, faced his first allegations of sexual impropriety, Jackson lost her opportunity for a lucrative sponsorship with Coca-Cola. When a wardrobe malfunction derailed Jackson’s performance at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, it is her career that’s tanked, and not that of her collaborator, the rising star Justin Timberlake.

It’s a curious choice for the first official documentary about one of the most influential musicians of the last few decades. But what makes it even more curious is that Jackson herself is the executive producer (along with her brother, and manager, Randy). It is a bait and switch, using the lure of access and intimacy — cameras followed her for five years, we’re told — as a tool of deflection.