Brittany Luce

The movie reasserts Jackson's artistic dominance and reconnects him with his Black familial roots, keeping the memory of his youthfulness preserved in nostalgic amber.

To this day, the miniseries remains a cultural touchstone, frequently memed in reference, up there with other 90s biopics documenting Black music royalty like What's Love Got to Do With It, also starring Angela Bassett, and the Temptations miniseries.

But then, there's a man in the mirror.

No, not the song on Jackson's blockbuster album Bad.

This.

And no one, no one ever dies.

Man in the Mirror, the Michael Jackson story.

This is a campy, made-for-TV movie from 2004 that's a far, far cry from the Jacksons in American Dream on nearly every conceivable level.

Instead of wholesome, sugar-coated nostalgia, it's this bleary-eyed fever dream.

Man in the Mirror features some brief, lo-fi flashbacks to Jackson's lonely childhood—

But it's mostly focused on the singer's spiral after the highs of Thriller.

The cosmetic surgeries, the brief marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, viewed by many observers as a sham.

The disastrous Martin Bashir interview where he gushed about sharing a bed with a teenage boy.

It's all recreated here.

The movie concludes just before his criminal trial for child molestation in 2005.

which began a few months after the movie originally aired.

Now, crucially, this is an unauthorized biopic.

The creators did not acquire the music rights to Jackson's catalog.

So instead, we get some schlocky, generic music that sounds like it might be lifted from one of those CD compilation commercials from the 90s.

That song plays during a montage where Michael and Lisa Marie are early into their courtship, and they frolic outside on the grounds of Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbara County, California.