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Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields Season 1 Episodes
Season 1 Episode Guide
2 Episodes 2023 - 2023
Episode 1
Part One
Mon, Apr 3, 2023
Brooke's early life up until her early twenties is presented. Her somewhat controversial fame is as a sexualized child, most notably in Pretty Baby (1978) at age eleven. While she did act in other movies, she became renowned for these sexualized portrayals in subsequent projects, such as The Blue Lagoon (1980), Endless Love (1981), and a series of print and television commercials for Calvin Klein jeans. While these projects were directed primarily by older white men, Brooke's overall career was directed by her divorced mother, Teri, who always saw the beauty in her daughter and wanted to present it to the world. Despite Brooke's actual chaste personal life in part a result of she, in her youthful naïveté, disassociating herself from her public image, what happened to her could not be but affected by the public perception of her as this sexualized being. It was also affected by Teri's alcoholism, and Brooke being the household breadwinner, those two items in combination leading to Brooke seeing herself often as Teri's caregiver. Brooke attending Princeton would change her life in many of those people she would meet ignoring her in not wanting her fame affecting their interactions with her, and in being out of Teri's control for the first time in her life providing her with an opportunity to find her own voice.
Episode 2
Part Two
Mon, Apr 3, 2023
Following her graduation from Princeton, Brooke had to redefine herself in having been out of the public eye for several years with no clear path forward, the major difference pre- and post- college being now that she was an adult, and thus no longer the proverbial "Lolita" figure, but an adult with a unique background of being in the public eye yet largely having been sheltered. In combination with the media focusing on one minute aspect of her first book, namely being a virgin at age twenty, and the book not being what she wanted but that of the publisher, she would have to deal again with people seeing her in a certain light, and how she would deal with her own sexuality. While not her first love or sexual experience, her first marriage to tennis star Andre Agassi would be like moving from one controlling figure in her mother to another, while still trying to maintain that caregiver role for Teri. She also had to define, in still wanting to have an acting career, what that was going to be in arguably not having been respected as an actress as a child and thus what the public would accept her as portraying in this new phase. She talks about her second marriage, to comedy writer Chris Henchy, its grounding influence in her life, and becoming a somewhat reluctant spokesperson for something important to her personally in having gone through it but the not often talked about issue of postpartum depression.
