Michael Jackson Video Archives Volume XXI

Description

1. ABC Network TV 20/20 News Special “Living With Michael Jackson” Thursday 02/06/2003: In-depth Interview and a never before look at MJ as never seen before. In an unprecedented gesture of candidness — or was it desperation? — Jackson opens the proverbial kimono to Brit journalist Martin Bashir, who spent eight months trailing Jackson from his home in Neverland to Las Vegas to the singer’s famously ill-fated trip to Berlin. And the result is we wish he’d kept it shut.

All the more reason, many might think, to tune in tonight. Some 15 million Brits watched the documentary when it aired in the United Kingdom on Monday. ABC, not one to underestimate the American public’s fascination with celebrity weirdness, reportedly paid somewhere between $4 million and $5 million for the rights to air it stateside. If it was weirdness they wanted, we’d say the suits at ABC got their money’s worth.  2 hours

Perhaps most poignant is the scene where Michael sits with Bashir in his movie screening room, watching old television of himself performing “I Want You Back” with the Jackson 5. The camera jumps from the young Michael — cute, brown, innocent — to the middle-aged Michael — ravaged, white and clinging to the illusion of innocence, and that moment says more than nearly two hours of shock TV that comprises “Living With Michael Jackson.”