New York Times Presents and FX on Hulu take on the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime Show with ‘Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson’

Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson, the next film from the award-winning series The New York Times Presents, will premiere Friday, November 19 at 10 p.m. ET simultaneously on FX and Hulu.

In 2004, a culture war exploded when the Super Bowl halftime show audience saw Justin Timberlake expose Janet Jackson’s breast for 9/16ths of a second. A national furor ensued and her career was never the same while Timberlake’s stardom only grew. The New York Times examines the racial and cultural currents that collided on the Super Bowl stage, and explores how the incident impacted one of the most successful pop musicians in history. 

Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson follows on the success of The New York Times Presents’ Controlling Britney Spears, the explosive follow-up documentary to Framing Britney Spears that catalyzed international attention on the singer’s conservatorship battle. Framing Britney Spears received Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Picture Editing for a Nonfiction Program, as well as the TCA Award for Outstanding Achievement in News and Information. The New York Times Presents also won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding News/Information (Series or Special) for The Killing of Breonna Taylor.

The film features rare footage and interviews with several people who were at the controls that night in Houston — including N.F.L. and MTV executives — to reconstruct an incident that shook the country and explain how it shaped culture in the decades to follow. With new reporting by The Times, as well as insights from music industry insiders, cultural critics and members of the Jackson family, the film illuminates the extraordinary fallout, and CBS executive Les Moonves’s role in it.  

Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson is directed by Jodi Gomes (One Child Left Behind: The APS Teaching Scandal; The Jacksons: A Family Dynasty) who also serves as a Producer.