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Instead, Ferguson went onstage and - amid the audience’s nervous and sometimes downright inappropriate laughter - he spoke from the heart, announcing, “Tonight, no Britney Spears jokes.” And for the next 12 minutes, he instead shared stories of his own addiction and recovery, while also expressing concern for Spears, who was 25 years old at the time. But Ferguson refused to make her a punchline.

And, as Framing Britney Spears sadly makes clear, the media was especially unempathetic to Spears that weekend. It was an especially cruel media era - TMZ had launched two years prior, and nasty gossip bloggers like Perez Hilton were racking up millions of pageviews reporting on Spears’s doomed Kevin Federline marriage, various supposed fashion/parenting/hygiene fails, and increasingly erratic behavior. Three days earlier, Spears (who that month had entered Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Centre rehab facility in Antigua, only to check herself out after just one day) had made international news by shaving her head at a hair salon in Tarzana, Calif.

19, 2007, the Monday of Presidents’ Day weekend. “I was convinced at the time that I was going to get fired for it,” he confessed in 2019. But there was one time when he decided he didn’t want to cross that line - even if it meant losing his job. During his nine-year run on CBS’s The Late Late Show, Ferguson, like most late-night talk hosts, frequently poked fun at tabloid celebrities during his opening monologues.