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Yep, Britney, we can handle the truth

Sex! More sex! Spears' 'Chaotic' doesn't reveal much

At the very least, the debut episode of “Britney and Kevin: Chaotic” helps explain why Her Spearsness got with child not long after she and Kevin Federline began their days of wedded bliss.

“God, our sex is so good, yes it is,” she tells the camera not long after first meeting (and quickly bedding) her man.  Moments later she brags to her long-suffering assistant Felicia, “I’ve had sex three times today.”

What to do on a dreary day in London, where this first episode unfolds? “Let’s just ---- all day,” she suggests to Kev, who doesn’t exactly reject that suggestion.

If Britney was getting play half as often as she mentions it on her new UPN home-video clip show, it’s a miracle she had enough energy to make it to Wembley Stadium for her concert.

Frankly, we shouldn’t be so naïve as to think an image-obsessed entertainer like Britney would surrender up a legitimately unvarnished peek at her life.

She makes the requisite goofy faces and coolly self-deprecating (but never close to embarrassing) humor. Beyond the endless nookie talk, she allows herself to appear doing some things -- like smoking a cigarette –- she once reportedly fought like a cranky tiger to keep out of the public eye. 

But she’s not about to let anyone rub through even the top layer of her sheen.  When Felicia responds to Britney’s endless smack-talking with a slight dig, Spears’ voice instantly shifts; she sounds like a lady of the manor scolding an errant maid.

And after Britney manages to humiliate her entire retinue by demanding they reveal their favorite sexual position, she snappily ducks that very question when the camera is finally turned on her: “No, I’m not going to answer that.”

By comparison, Paris Hilton is the very model of transparency.

Bitter Britney?Spears spends much of the rest of her time in a clunky bit of foreshadowing, querying everyone in her immediate vicinity about commitment.

She rather improbably bemoans how lonely and bitter she is. She wants us to believe she was wasting away in Britain, awaiting her one true love. (Brad Pitt, she tells us.)

And then — you know what’s coming — there’s … this guy. It was a Monday night at Joseph’s Café in Hollywood. They met. They danced. She can’t get him out of her head. Cue the chorus.

So of course she does what any responsible young woman would do: Drags him to London to follow her around on tour.

Should we be surprised that the love-and-marriage questions (all recorded on video, of course) start soon after he arrives? Given the Fedster’s track record with ex-girlfriends, should we be shocked when he replies, “Love is a commitment. I don’t believe in marriage”? Thanks for clearing that one up, Kev.

Britney’s not done yet, though. What’s his take on love vs. sex?  “It makes it good when you have feelings for somebody. It’s not just sex, or I mean it’s … it gets deeper than that.”

Her tender reply: “Cool!”

Harlequin novel fodder, indeed.

Perhaps the best subplot in this whole endeavor, which makes “Survivor” look like cinema verité, comes when her security man, Mo, offers a clear-eyed take on our man Federline: “There was nothing I liked about Kevin the first day I met him.”  Curious to see how that resolves, no?

'Can you handle my truth?'Presumably, we’re meant to believe Britney is letting us through her door, even if the savvy Spears-lover knows by now that she wouldn’t eat a Twizzler without considering how it could impact her image. So when she sees a handful of paparazzi standing below her plush hotel suite, she quickly shifts into Defiant Britney.

“People can take everything away from you but they can never take away my truth,” she rants. “But the question is: Can you handle it? Can you handle my truth? I don’t know.”

If this hastily jammed-together excuse for a May sweeps entry even began to approach the truth, it might be more, um, dangerous. But there’s precious little chance of that.  Madonna, in whose image-perfect steps Britney treads, offered up way more reality in her 1991 documentary “Truth or Dare.” To anyone who believes Britney is Madonna Lite, you’ve got more evidence right here.

The closest we get to an unvarnished moment in this first episode comes as Britney and Kevin discuss Eminem. Britney first talks scrap about Mr. Mathers, then offers an unexpected dollop of praise: “Hey, whatever gets you in the game, right, and gets you out there, it’s cool. It’s controversy. That’s what they all want. It’s how good you can play the game.”

Seeing as we’re wasting hours of prime-time TV to watching this jumbled heap of Britneyisms, it’s fair to say she’s playing the game pretty darn well.