As Britney Spears releases her supposed comeback album Circus today, I'm reminded of another Britney circus: Her short-lived 2005 reality show with her infamous then-husband, Britney & Kevin: Chaotic.
Even by reality-television standards, Chaotic was real barrel-bottom-scraping material. It pretty much consisted of cobbled-together amateur webcam footage (much of it shot in ghoulish green nightvision) of the Spederlines gazing as their pierced navels with their suspiciously bloodshot eyes, slurrily yammering about deep stuff like love and the meaning of life, y'all, in between their cow-like chewing-gum chomps.
It was probably not what broadcasting pioneer Edgar R. Murrow had in mind when he envisioned what the television medium might be like in the new millennium...
and probably not what (the successful, schoolgirl-skirted, pre-K-Fed) Britney envisioned her career would one day be reduced to.
Of course, we all know how chaotic Britney's life really became after her divorce from her co-star...in fact, we can only imagine how scandalous a season 2 of Chaotic would have been, if UPN execs hadn't wised up and cut the series short after just five episodes. Now the show's craptastic camcorder footage almost serves as gritty documentation of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
And viewing it in that context, I actually find it more fascinating than I did before. 
I certainly find it more informative than Britney's whitewashed For The Record documentary that ran on MTV last weekend. That program wasn't reality TV at all.
And now, with that setup, enjoy this flashback rehash of some of Chaotic's most chaotic, most circus-like moments here: