While our proprietary, patent-pending VirtuaPhil™ technology allowed you to experience what a showdown between the KingWorld tough-love swami and a Britney Spears well-past the verge of a nervous breakdown might have looked like, the actual footage from their historic meeting will never air. (Save, perhaps, for repeated 4 a.m. screenings on a rickety Super-8 projector in the doctor's home library, popping cashews into his mouth as he obsessively relives every moment of the intervention that got away.) Now the Spears family, whose only means of dealing with a situation involves relaying their problems to the nearest national media outlet, is on the attack, with frayed matriarch Lynne Spears and fecund tween daughter Jamie Lynn having dispatched a representative to The Today Show to insist they had never authorized a Britney-themed Dr. Phil episode.

The representative further castigates the celebrity therapist for having made "inappropriate" public statements regarding Britney's mental state. A betrayal of trust does appear to have occurred here, as of the approximately 16,000 licensed mental health professionals currently working in California, the one the Spears family painstakingly selected to help a relative deeply in need, with nothing to gain from going public with this access save for perhaps a massive ratings boost on his nationally syndicated show, marks a clear breach of TV-therapist / bottomed-out-pop-star-patient confidentiality.