Dark Roots: The Unauthorized Anna Nicole

Hard as it is to fathom, walking tabloid Anna Nicole Smith endured an unorthodox upbringing. To learn more, Dark Roots travels back to her humble beginnings in Mexia, Texas, where the family she grew up with—her aunt played mommy, while her cousins played sisters—tells it like it was. Along the way, mysteries are solved: The painkillers resulted from her enormous breast implants (she had two inserted into each breast); the marriage to old-ass oil tycoon J. Howard Marshal was born of a chance strip club encounter (she was performing, he was in a wheelchair); and the lesbian leanings began when she started making out with girls (and she realized she liked it). Meanwhile, country music interludes, with lyrics like “A new career/She now pursued/By posing naked/In the nude,” lead us from one relative’s bizarre anecdote to the next. We even get courtroom footage of Anna Nicole losing it on the stand amid settlement proceedings with her son-in-law (who is twice her age). And, of course, there are plenty of nude pictures of Anna when she was still hot—hey, it ain’t called Showtime for nothing! Until the teary-eyed reunion between Anna Nicole and her cousin Shelly—originally thwarted by an Anna Nicole Show producer…until he could get their cameras on it—sapped the finish, we were actually enjoying ourselves. Then we realized how truly sad all of this was and switched to smiling on the inside.