If you’re a Belieber, you probably already know that Justin Bieber is working though some family stuff at the moment.

If you aren’t all caught up, and for whatever reason, you want to be, you’ll get the opportunity to find out all about Bieber’s life in his new YouTube documentary-series, Justin Bieber: Seasons. 

The first episode went live on Monday, and the reviews are already rolling in.

NOW reckons watching it is akin to “flipping through an Us Weekly photo spread of celebrities walking out of Starbucks”.

BuzzFeed says that the doccie “doesn’t have much to say”, and the Guardian describes it as “nothing but boredom and snogging”.

The documentary is 10 episodes long. Each episode lasts for roughly 10 minutes. If the first four episodes are any indication, they won’t exactly be highlight-heavy. In fact, a good editor could probably take the best bits of the whole series and fit it into a Snapchat post. Which might not have been what YouTube was expecting, given that this 100-minute collection of meandering home videos reportedly cost over $20m to acquire.

The point of the series is to introduce a new, more mature Bieber to the world.

He’s covered in tattoos. He’s got married. He’s capable of some reflection. His upcoming album is a deep meditation on everything he has learned about the world after being buffeted through several unimaginable highs and lows. It’s a spiritual koan on the purpose of existence as we know it, as evidenced by the album’s first single Yummy, which goes: “Yeah, you got that yummy yum/ That yummy yum/That yummy yummy”.

Deep. Tell us more:

In one scene, he plays the drums. In another, he phonetically sings a song syllable by syllable in a language he doesn’t understand. In another, one of his producers glumly recalls the time Bieber summoned him to the studio with 20 minute’s notice midway through a family barbecue. And, for an entire episode, he sucks face with his wife.

If that sounds like a good way to spend 10 minutes, you can watch the first episode here:

There are three more available on YouTube Premium, but we’re good.

Let’s recap what we just saw. Ellen is there, he’s going on tour and it’s going to be a big tour, he cancelled the tour halfway through, and everyone was very concerned.

Then Bieber introduces himself like nobody knows who he is. After that, he talks in a car about making a documentary in the documentary. It’s all very meta. Hailey is there and “she makes everything better” (except this documentary, which is testing the limitations of my attention span).

The two of them take the cameras along to look at some steps, and he sits on said steps to remember that time he played the guitar on them.

He plays the guitar on steps quite often, most recently while he was courting Hailey.

There’s a bunch of stuff after that about how hard his childhood was.

I clocked out at around that point. That’s three minutes of my life that I’ll never get back.

Stick around for the entire series and you might find out more about his recent Lyme disease diagnosis, and the Hillsong faith that’s supposedly going to lead to an affair-proof marriage.

Or, you could do literally anything else – your call.

[source:guardian&now]