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Britney Spears megafan Chris Crocker gets an HBO deal

Remember the "Leave Britney Alone" guy from YouTube? His documentary on Internet fame is headed to cable.

 

Fruzsina Eördögh

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Posted on Jan 26, 2012   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 10:15 pm CDT

Chris Crocker, the YouTuber best known for his teary-eyed defense of troubled singer Britney Spears, made a splash at the Sundance film festival this week with his documentary Me @ at the Zoo.

HBO was so impressed that they picked up his documentary and will air it this summer, making Crocker the latest YouTuber to make the leap to cable.

Me @ the Zoo is a documentary about Crocker and the cult-like effect YouTube celebrities have on their fans.

The title of Crocker’s doc is an allusion to the title of the first video ever uploaded to YouTube: “Me at the zoo,” by YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim.

The zoo Crocker finds himself in, however, is the zoo that is YouTube today.

The Salt Lake City Tribune called Crocker’s Me @ the Zoo “a grating examination of Crocker’s Internet life as well as the cultural impact of Internet celebrity” and gave it two stars.  

Critic Daniel Fienberg was a little more generous, giving the doc a B-. He waxed philosophical with references to Socrates, and declared that introspection was “so pre-2005.”

Despite being picked up by HBO, Crocker told Queerty in a video interview he doesn’t think his YouTube persona “will ever be mainstream,” because he is a “little too controversial.”

Crocker briefly pursued, then abandoned, a career in gay porn.

One career goal he still hasn’t achieved: actually meeting Britney Spears. A Spears rep told Crocker his video was “lewd and disrespectful,” he told Queerty in a video interview:

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*First Published: Jan 26, 2012, 2:42 pm CST