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:
