Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Carters: Hurts to Love You’ on Paramount+, A Two-Part Doc About The Scars And Tragedies In Nick And Aaron Carter’s Family

In The Carters: Hurts to Love You, a two-part documentary that streams on Paramount+, director Soleil Moon Frye explores a family’s dysfunction through the perspective of Angel Carter Conrad, twin sister of singer Aaron Carter, who died in 2022 at age 34. After Nick Carter found fame with Backstreet Boys, Aaron followed his big brother into pop success. But with Aaron’s drug-related death, and the passing of Leslie Carter in 2012 and Bobbie Jean Carter in 2024, Angel’s contention in Hurts to Love You is that the Carter family’s history of untreated mental illness, the siblings’ upbringing in a home racked by alcohol abuse – and her parents’ meddling in all of the money Nick and Aaron were making – contributed to these tragedies. “As the family was becoming famous, and money started coming into play, behind the scenes it was chaos.”

THE CARTERS – HURTS TO LOVE YOU: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: As “Backstreet’s back alright!” echoes like an audio logo from another age, Angel Carter Conrad describes how she was only four years old when Nick became a star. All she ever knew was her oldest brother being so famous, Times Square was shut down for a Backstreet appearance on MTV’s Total Request Live. 

The Gist: “Aaron loved doing it,” Angel tells director Soleil Moon Frye in The Carters: Hurts to Love You. When they were growing up in Florida, her twin brother was always the charmer, while she was always the observer. Like Nick, he was born to be a star. “But how do you tell a child that it’s OK to work like an adult? To not have your childhood, and to have that taken away from you?” 

In 1992, after their parents, Bob and Jane Carter, pushed Nick to audition for a singing group advertised in the local Tampa paper – a boy band that became Backstreet, the global phenomenon – it was natural that Aaron would emulate the big brother he idolized. At just 10 years old, Angel says, Aaron was already performing and touring the country, with Bob and Jane as his managers. Hurts also interviews Lori Knight, Aaron’s former tour manager, who describes a relentless professional schedule that left no time for him to develop just as a kid. But it wasn’t just being removed from school by third grade, or the constant pressures of living in the public eye. Angel says Bob and Jane controlling and eventually stealing the money Aaron was earning was a byproduct of how they had raised their children. “Money became the driving force,” and replaced them being present in the lives of their five children simply as parents.

Bob Carter died from a heart attack in 2017. But according to a Hurts to Love You disclaimer, Jane Carter did not respond to the filmmakers’ request for comment. And Angel’s descriptions of the family’s dysfunction continue. She describes a 2004 fight between her parents, again over money, after they’d separated – “I felt like they pushed Aaron too hard,” says Ginger Carter, Angel’s stepmom – and that her parents’ alcohol abuse and generational issues with mental illness went unaddressed, even as these behaviors surfaced in the lives of the children they were increasingly either pulling away from or pitting against each other. The Carters: Hurts to Love You sets up Part 2 with a meeting between Nick and Angel, filmed on Frye’s phone, where the Backstreet Boy and reality show star describes how his thirty years in show business were defined by the experiences of the Carter kids’ childhood. “You don’t know who to turn to, who to trust.”  

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? In the 2024 docuseries Fallen Idols: Nick and Aaron Carter, former pop singer Melissa Schuman goes on the record with allegations of sexual assault against Nick, and Aaron’s public meltdowns and controversies, as well as some of the same disturbing stories from Hurts to Love You about the Carter siblings’ childhood, are discussed. The influence of Lou Pearlman over the Carter family also surfaces in Hurts, and for a primer on the disgraced boy band impresario, now dead, check out Dirty Pop, where a weird AI version of Pearlman speaks alongside interviews with (the real) former members of NSYNC. And while not explicitly about boy bands, Moon Frye’s 2021 documentary Kid 90 does cover some similar ground when it comes to the stresses placed upon people who encounter fame at a young age.

Our Take: The first part of The Carters: Hurts to Love You offers a lot of setup for the downfall and death of Aaron Carter, to be discussed further in the documentary’s second half. But that doesn’t mean Angel Carter Conrad’s recollections of her childhood with her siblings aren’t terribly sad. The doc draws a bold line from the early behavior of Bob and Jane Carter – they were each raised in dysfunctional homes; she knew he was a womanizer when they met; they both drank heavily – to their life in Florida with the five Carter kids. When money from Nick and Aaron’s burgeoning stardom began to roll in, Angel says, it created new opportunities for Bob and Jane, but exacerbated the same old problems. It’s right around when she mentions her parents spending all the cash Aaron earned before he turned 18, and disparaging comments about them from a former tour manager, that you begin to wonder where the parents’ voices are in all of this. 

That’s when the disclaimers take over, just like they did with the story Fallen Idols tells. Hurts to Love You is powerful on a one-to-one level, as Angel processes her feelings of neglect, of being ignored by her parents while they rode the financial wave of her brothers’ careers. But it doesn’t push her to elaborate when she mentions how she was nearly sexually assaulted by men employed by her parents. And it doesn’t address at all the allegations made against Nick Carter in Fallen Idols. Part 2 of Hurts will feature more of Angel’s conversations with Nick, and how the facts of their early life together affected them and their late brother. But on the whole, Hurts to Love You leaves us wondering what’s left after all of the sadness it describes.

Sex and Skin: Nick Carter appears in both parts of Hurts to Love You, through conversations with his sister Angel about their childhood and their late brother Aaron. But Hurts never once mentions the numerous sexual assault allegations against Carter, or their related legal proceedings.   

Parting Shot: There are tears as Nick, with Angel, says he feels like no one understands how much he hurts inside. And in scenes from Part 2 of The Carters: Hurts to Love You, “Things started to spiral for Aaron…”  

Sleeper Star: Get used to seeing over and over again the same handful of home video clips of Bob and Jane Carter and their kids when they were little. So many naked babies frolicking, and oversized white Guess T’s tucked into Silver Tab jeans.    

Most Pilot-y Line: “There is a genetic component to mental health,” Angel Carter Conrad says in Hurts to Love You, “and in my family, mental health disorders run very deep.” 

Our Call: Stream It, but if you’re interested in this story and the scope of its tragedies, maybe include The Carters: Hurts to Love You in a viewing block with Fallen Idols: Nick and Aaaron Carter.  

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. 

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