Brittany Luce

But it eventually became part of my initiation into the world of MJ obsession.

My parents had a VHS tape recording, and it was constantly rerun on VH1 and BET.

It was basically the first way I absorbed his life story and understood who he might be outside of the songs and the music videos.

For my parents' generation, this movie was nostalgia.

For someone my age or younger, it was an education of sorts.

That movie, all four or five hours of it is like,

part of the informal civil rights, Black history education that you get growing up.

Like, you don't sit there and watch all five hours of it in school.

This is Corey Antonio Rose, a producer on NPR's It's Been a Minute.

He's also more than a decade my junior, firmly Gen Z. But his experience with MJ as it relates to the miniseries wasn't all that different from mine.

like right in between Roots and the Malcolm X movie.

He came into my life as like a cultural figure that is like what MLK did for civil rights is what Michael Jackson did for music.

A biopic's existence implies that the subject is worthy of legend status.

A well-made biopic, like An American Dream, is especially powerful because it carries out a seductive, mythological silhouette through the sheer power of movie magic.

Now, the miniseries is based on Katherine Jackson's memoir, My Family, and a couple things are worth noting here.

For one, the program premiered in 92, right before the first public allegations of child sex abuse were made against Michael.

by Evan Chandler, whose son was an alleged victim.

And conveniently, the series concludes its story right around the release of Thriller, just as Michael's solo career explodes, and just before the weirdness begins to kick in.

So there's a way to read An American Dream as the savvy counterpoint to his increasingly bizarre public image at the time.

though this may or may not be intentional.