Surviving R. Kelly, which aired in its entirety from Thursday to Saturday on Lifetime, is a genre piece. Not science fiction or fantasy—it is difficult not to believe every painful word of this miniseries—but a uniquely televisual genre: the unscripted exposé. The story of R. Kelly and his alleged victims has been given the Lifetime treatment: shaky stock footage, melodramatic audio accompaniment, that suspense-heightening gimmick that transforms a provocative image into a haunting negative. Heavy-handed incidental music burbles and buzzes over every wrenching interview of dream hamptons docuseries, through the words of each self-possessed alleged survivor of abuse and exploitation.
The musical and visual devices of reality television exist to massage the viewers sympathies. A brassy “tension cue” can introduce conflict; wood blocks imply comedy; strings introduce warmth and romance. The Bachelorette composer Brad Segal told Slate in 2014, “Thats the fun thing—[the music] can tell the viewer what to feel as they watch.” Thats whats happening in Surviving R. Kelly: the music—and the interstitial footage—are handing a version of the story to the viewer that codes Kelly as the bogeyman, and the women who once loved him as his prey. Then again, that may be all the viewer really needs to know; for many involved in this docuseries, who have battled for years to be fully heard, that may be all they want the viewer to know.
But the mounting allegations against R. Kelly—which trace all the way back to 2000, when journalist Jim DeRogatis first wrote about the three-time Grammy winner in the Chicago Sun-Times—are more than a monster-in-the-dark story. The R&B star is accused of targeting underage teenage girls and pressuring them into sexual relationships, in complex logistical arrangements that usually involve enforced alienation from family, friends, and even from each other. DeRogatis termed the arrangement a “cult” in a piece for BuzzFeed News, due to the stringent control Kelly allegedly enforced on his sexual partners. The accusers who have spoken out about their time with Kelly, which ranges from women picked up in their teens to Kellys former wife, frame their experiences with him as coercive, degrading, and abusive.
Taken as a whole, the series describes an epic filled with characters who have confusing, conflicting motivations. Theres Kelly himself, the traumatized musical genius, who continues to deny the allegations against him, but cant seem to stop confessing in his work; in July, he released a 19-minute song called “I Admit,” which scoffs at the term “pedophile,” but acknowledges that he has had relationships with “young ladies.” Theres the now-deceased star Aaliyah, who married Kelly in a quickly annulled ceremony when she was just 15—who released “Age Aint Nothing but a Number” under his aegis. Theres his ex-wife Andrea Kelly, who had three children with the star, and enjoyed some privileges as his wife while being trapped in an allegedly abusive relationship. Theres Jerhonda Pace, who came to the singers trial for child pornography in 2007, as a 15-year-old staunch fan who believed in his innocence. Kelly singled her out, as he walked to and from court and invited her to come to his home; shortly thereafter, she, too, said that she fell victim to Kellys effective mixture of charm and punishment.
Theres the silence from Kellys former collaborators in the music industry, even still; only John Legend, Chance the Rapper and Charlamagne tha God represent the music industry in the Lifetime docuseries. Collaborators Jay-Z and Lady Gaga reportedly declined hamptons asks to participate. Theres the embarrassed recollections of Kellys former employees, who were part of a fleet of handlers allegedly charged with enacting Kellys wishes for the women in his thrall. Theres the accusations themselves, detailing countless encounters of alleged sexual depravity against often-underage, mostly terrorized women. Theres the blurry outline of one unnamed woman—the one in the infamous sex tape leaked to DeRogatis that showed Kelly urinating on her when she was allegedly 14. She does not appear in the documentary, and her absence looms unnervingly large, like a ragged hole torn out of the narratives fabric. According to the docuseries, this woman is still loyal to Kelly. She and her immediate family have denied there was any wrongdoing between herself and the singer.
The Lifetime treatment is not the right genre for this story, with its catastrophic destruction and sprawling cast. The sound cues of unscripted television, with their irresolute, seedy flourishes, should have no place here, against this scale of human frailty and psychological devastation. Surviving R. Kelly is telling a complex story, but its tabloid sheen obscures its own profundity—and that salacious skin never lets up, through all six hours of the series. Horrifying as their content is, episodes even tend to repeat themselves, based on the assumption that the viewer cant be bothered to pay more careful attention to whats happening on-screen.
Then again, after decades of inaction, perhaps the only rational assumption is that the viewer truly cant be bothered. Kelly released “I Believe I Can Fly” in 1996—the same year that accuser Tiffany Hawkins brought a lawsuit against him. (Kelly and Hawkins settled out of court.) He released “Ignition (Remix)” in October 2002, a handful of months after he was indicted for child pornography—and in the midst of several allegations of sexual misconduct and the release of the urination tape. Kelly released Trapped in the Closet—an outrageous, comic effort to re-cast his behavior as goofily funny—in 2005, while delaying his child-pornography trial. (He was eventually acquitted.) Lifetime itself released a controversial portrayal of Aaliyahs relationship with Kelly in the biopic Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B just a few years ago, in 2014, depicting their coupling as consensual and even romantic. And while #MeToo and #TimesUp have upended the careers of many alleged serial abusers, Kelly has so far staved off real consequences; even the harrowing details of DeRogatiss 2017 story didnt upend his life the way that exposés about Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer did theirs. (Both Lauer and Rose have denied accusations of sexual misconduct, but lost their jobs as network TV anchors anyway.) Perhaps Surviving R. Kelly is wearing this uncomfortable skin, because this is the only skin available to it.
With that in mind, Surviving R. Kelly is a start. It will take more than interviews and stock footage to uncover how easy it is to write off the pain of young black women, or how complex and minute the mechanisms of the cycle of abuse can be. It will require much more understanding of our own feeble vocabulary of desire and consent before we can sift through tales of illicit seduction and sexual humiliation without positioning them, in turn, as titillations.
Hampton and the participants here—and even Lifetime itself—have done what they can. As the series goes on, it offers up more nuanced terrain, letting interviewees try to explain why a niece or daughter or friend keeps going back to Kelly—or why, so many years ago, they did so themselves. Bit by bit, the stories of the participants become spellbinding, as each word adds to a vivid portrait. In a way, it is a symphony; each voice is an instrument.
Get Vanity Fairs HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Full ScreenPhotos:Golden Globes 2019: All the Red Carpet LooksSonia SaraiyaSonia Saraiya is Vanity Fair's television critic. Previously she was at Variety, Salon, and The A.V. Club. She lives in New York.
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