Justin and Hailey Bieber launched a new show on Facebook yesterday, The Biebers on Watch. Interesting to me that this is happening on FB as opposed to YouTube, where JB got his start and where his most recent docuseries aired to promote his album Changes.
The Biebers are currently in isolation in Canada and the show will document their lives during these last few weeks, with the first episode taking place on the lake at their property, talking to each other on the boat about their breakup a few years ago and how they found their way back to each other. I don’t know that any of this is new, since they’ve discussed this before in previous interviews, like when they covered Vogue together last year.
While the information may not be fresh, though, the visual does feel fresh because it’s not just that the Biebers are on camera, it’s that they’re on camera alone. There’s no film crew or producers around. It’s just JB and Hailey filming themselves, speaking to each other, and yes, they’ve edited the video, but this is about as close to “unproduced” as we’ll get… even though we don’t know how many layers of vetting, if any, this may have had to be cleared through on the management side (Scooter Braun).
Maybe it’s because I’ve now read Jessica Simpson’s Open Book three times but this may be the modern 2020 version of Newlyweds, the way Newlyweds was sold to people initially. We now know, especially after Jessica’s thorough description of how overproduced that show was, that none of that was real. Still, it was Newlyweds that made Jessica Simpson a superstar. As she says in the book, she and Nick Lachey went into that with him the bigger name. This might seem hard to believe now but it’s true – and even if you can’t remember back to a time when Nick mattered more than Jessica, all you have to do is think about why she had to pay him out so much money when they divorced. If she went into that marriage and their show as the heavyweight, there is no f-cking way there wouldn’t have been a legal document to protect her assets and limit his take.
Nick, of course, while more famous than Jessica then, was never at Justin Bieber’s level. But my point re: Newlyweds 2020, aka The Biebers on Watch, isn’t about Justin, it’s about Hailey – and what this show might do for her, if it might do for her what it did for Jessica. And if it pulls her up closer to JB’s level on the fame scale, what that might mean for them as a power couple. The Biebers on Watch is supposed to let us get to know them both a lot better. In this first episode, she articulates how she changed during their separation and what she brought back when they reunited. It almost serves then as a self-profile. How much do we really know about Hailey Bieber, after all? But we’re getting to now, right?
And then there’s the spiritual messaging. Faith, as we know, is a big part of the Biebers’ lives. So it wouldn’t be impossible to think that there might be a faith-based component to this show as they self-counsel and share their relationship with the world. Might the Biebers become Hollywood’s new Ministry Couple?
