

On Saturday, Lifetime aired Whitney Houston & Bobbi Kristina: Didn’t We Almost Have It All, a documentary teeming with talking heads from the inner circle of Houston and her daughter, including relatives, godchildren, Whitney Houston: Can I Be Me? co-director Rudi Dolezal, and singers Cherrelle and Pebbles. Didn’t We was clearly not authorized by Houston’s estate (executor Pat Houston wasn’t so much as mentioned and could only be seen fleetingly in footage), but it didn’t contain much of the luridness typical in unauthorized media of this nature. It was chatty and gossipy but without earth-shattering revelations or truly scandalizing material—mostly it served to merely shade in a Russian nesting doll-style design of related tragedies so immense it’s still hard to wrap one’s head around them, years later.
Maybe the biggest news to come from the doc was the claim that Houston had saved her daughter from drowning in a bathtub the same weekend that Houston herself would be found facedown and dead in a hotel bathtub. “If my godmother had not walked in that bathroom the very second that she did, Krissi would have died,” said Brandi Boyd, Houston’s goddaughter.
What I found most illuminating were comments from the sister of Houston’s ex-husband Bobby Brown. Tina Brown was Houston’s drug buddy and she recounted how, in the aftermath of Houston’s disastrous 2002 interview with Diane Sawyer, they laughed about her “Crack is wack” comment and considered getting it printed on merchandise.