Most networks have experimented with addiction television – a heartbreaking Movie of the Week, some righteous anti-drug crusade, any news of Lindsay Lohan – but in recent years a handful of channels, all cable, have become seriously hooked. It started with A&E’s “Intervention,” now in its ninth season, which showed people feeding their addictions to drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, shopping, video games and plastic surgery before being ambushed by a tear-filled intervention of family and friends. A couple years later, VH1 launched “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew,” followed by “Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew,” followed by “Celebrity Rehab Presents Sober House.” Recently TLC, a Discovery channel, introduced “Addicted,” another intervention-type show.
These became gateway shows to further obsessive/compulsive television. Last fall A&E gave us “Hoarders,” a grim look at compulsive collectors who have literally made a mess of their lives, homes, porches and backyards, and in March TLC followed suit with “Hoarding: Buried Alive.” Oprah plans to premiere “Inside Rehab,” a series dedicated to compulsive eating disorders, next year on OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, and as I write this, Animal Planet, another Discovery channel, has just launched “Confessions: Animal Hoarding,” “from the producers of the hit series ‘Intervention.’” What’s next, a whole network devoted to these cravings – OCD TV?
GETTING SUCKED IN
At first I couldn’t stand watching these shows – they seemed so creepy and choreographed and maudlin. But then Steven Adler, former drummer for Guns N’ Roses and alumnus of “Celebrity Rehab 2,” shows up for the first day of the first season of “Sober House” so wasted they have to use subtitles to clarify his slurring. They find needles and heroin in his luggage. Jennifer, the halfway house manager, wants to throw him out, Dr. Drew (Dr. Drew Pinsky, board-certified physician and self-certified “addictionologist”) wants to give him another chance, and Episode 1 ends with Steven spending the night with Will, the house security guy. The point is: I can’t wait to see what happens in Episode 2. (Steven is allowed to return, smokes heroin in the bathroom, Jennifer calls the cops, and in Episode 3 the police arrive and haul Steven off.)
As repulsive as these episodes might be, they sucked me in, made me squirm on the edge of my couch. But do they do any good? Do they help the addicts? While many TV therapists refer their addicts to Alcoholics Anonymous or other 12-step programs, their own methods often seem to clash with 12-step practices – particularly the anonymous part.
On one episode of “Addicted,” Amanda, a longtime alcoholic and junkie, is left alone in the home of her parents who, after padlocking their booze in a refrigerator, go on vacation. Hmm…that was a good idea. We see Amanda drunk and bragging on the phone. “I broke into my parents’ fridge. There’s nobody here!” Hello! Who’s holding the friggin’ camera? The camera records Amanda unscrewing the hinges of the refrigerator door and dragging out a giant bottle of vodka. The camera zooms in on the bottle to the ominous thud of a bass drum.
On “Celebrity Rehab” the camera often intrudes on the rehab process, particularly the intimate one-on-one interviews Dr. Drew conducts with each addict at the start. The celebs tend to hold back. Mackenzie Phillips at first refuses to discuss a trauma (about the incestuous relationship she had with her papa, John Phillips), then writes some of it down on paper to avoid the camera, then asks for the camera crew to leave: “Can I just tell you something while they go away for a second?” But it’s amazing what the celebs do say on camera, and here the camera alters things in another, stranger way. Perhaps for legal reasons, “Celebrity Rehab” bleeps out personal references to parents. So you have Lisa D’Amato, who got drunk on “America’s Next Top Model,” telling Dr. Drew, “My bleep was very well aware of her boyfriend sexually molesting my sister and I, and she just let it go on.” Who knew Mama was a four-letter word?
THE DRAMA OF IT ALL
What really bothers me about the camera is it adds to the drama. Part of getting sober, in AA and I assume elsewhere, involves cutting back on the drama, on the emotional binges of rage, grandiosity and self-pity. But these addiction shows thrive on it – the camera, the confrontations, the music. And the editing.
Amanda’s parents arrive home after their vacation and discover their daughter has broken into the refrigerator and has been drinking and partying. Well, duh! Close-up of grief-stricken Mom saying, “I need somebody to tell me what to do.” Cut to beautiful blonde-haired woman in SUV. She is Kristina Wandzilak, family interventionist on all the “Addicted” episodes, and she’s driving to Amanda’s intervention. (Kristina uses a no-surprise model of intervention – Amanda agreed to the intervention even before her parents went on vacation. Whereas “Intervention” goes for the traditional ambush model – addicts volunteer to be in a “documentary” about addiction, binge themselves silly, then one day walk into a room filled with parents, siblings and friends waiting to tell them how they really feel.)
The melodramatic editing continues throughout Amanda’s intervention. Close-up of Amanda sobbing. “I don’t know what’s happened to my life.” Another angle, close-up of Kristina gazing at Amanda with her pale blue eyes. “Addiction happened,” she purrs sweetly. Musical sting.
You think that’s sappy? Earlier this year, in the eighth season of “Intervention,” Rocky Lockridge, former boxing champion turned homeless crack addict, gets viciously and tearfully berated by one of his sons, who finishes with (soft piano chords), “I’m here because I know, somewhere, deep down in my heart, I still love you.” Rocky responds with a long, agonizing wail so bizarre it becomes a hit Internet video, “Best Cry Ever,” with six million views and dozens of variations on YouTube. Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee925OTFBCA – believe me, it’s well worth the time you spent on this article. I particularly liked the auto-tune mix.
BAIT & SWITCH
But even more troubling, when you look at the credits for these shows, most of them include a “casting producer” of some sort. These addicts are cast…many are stoned but few are chosen. And on Dr. Drew’s series, they’re even paid. I mean, doesn’t that taint the therapy? “My whole thing is bait and switch,” Dr. Drew told Chris Norris in The New York Times. “Whatever motivates them to come in, that’s fine. Then we can get them involved with the process.” Maybe so, but how does money and celebrity exposure affect their motivation to stay clean?
Over the seasons Dr. Drew, like the Burt Reynolds character in “Boogie Nights,” has put together a kind of family of regulars from his shows, including Steven Adler, American Idol singer Nikki McKibbin, porn star Mary Carey, lead singer Seth “Shifty” Binzer of Crazy Town, Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss and police brutality celebrity Rodney King. If any of them relapses, they can always be recast for another season or spin-off, and most of them have been. But if they stay clean and sober, well, they're out of a gig.
Like most treatment programs, including AA, addiction series have a mixed record of success. Some addicts make it, some relapse, some relapse on the show. (My favorite synopsis line, from “Sober House 1”: “Seth becomes increasingly disturbed when David calls him a ‘has been,’ causing him to relapse.”)
After “Celebrity Rehab 1,” Mary Carey returned to porn and made an x-rated parody film called “Celebrity Pornhab with Dr. Screw,” where she gets it on with a Dr. Drew look-alike. Dr. Drew later twittered that her mockery “makes me very sad.” And during the sixth season of “Intervention,” the show’s top interventionist, Jeff VanVonderen, himself relapsed and started drinking again. He actually announced his slip on camera, during an “Intervention” special in front of a live audience, and said he was taking a leave of absence. He’s now back on the series and seems to be doing fine.
BREAKING THE DENIAL
So despite all the gimmicks and hyperbole, these addiction series harbor a good and serious purpose, and I think they may be helpful in a couple of ways. For recovering addicts watching at home, the shows can sure “keep it green” – particularly the hoarding shows where the addicts’ “wreckage of the past” literally covers their floors and walls and imprisons them in their homes. It’s hard to forget the desperate look on a hoarder’s face when a “certified professional organizer” removes the first piece of trash. And why would a hoarder, so ashamed of her compulsion that she hasn’t allowed any friends or family to visit in years, suddenly let a camera and crew into her home? It can only be she’s ready to give up, to hit bottom, which is the most important moment in recovery.
And that gave me hope. These shows could help us all, I thought, as I watched the first episode of “Confessions: Animal Hoarding.” Bonnie, 63, lives with eight dogs and some cats, which may not seem so bad except she refuses to let the dogs outside, so her carpet is covered with feces and the place reeks with urine. But Bonnie has other problems – she’s obese, suffers from diabetes and asthma, and has to sleep with an oxygen mask at night. And then, in the second act, you learn this isn’t Bonnie’s home at all. She’s living with her 85-year-old mom; and Bonnie’s two 40-something sons, Donny and David, live in the basement. Donny recently moved in after they foreclosed on his house. The family seems intelligent, good-natured and dressed okay, but they’re all living with a house full of feces and urine, and you realize there’s a lot more going on here than animal hoarding. There’s something seriously wrong inside and outside this home. I mean, Animal Control could come in and rescue the animals. But who would rescue the humans?
There is a demographic of denial, and maybe we’re all part of it. You don’t see these people in the New York Times, or on CNN, Fox News or PBS. But you see them in busses across the land, at county fairs and in handicapped parking at the Walmart. And now you can see them on addiction TV, and that’s a good thing. It could help us with our denial. It could mean that like the addicts on Reality Television, all the rest of us in Reality America – the whole morbidly fat, dysfunctional, self-centered and self-destructive country – are finally hitting bottom.
Has Dr. Drew considered running for office?
David Felton is a journalist and television comedy writer living in Manhattan. He has written for Rolling Stone, MTV and the AA Grapevine.
