'Intervention' an addiction in itself
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Christina, center, is confronted in A&E's "Intervention."
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Christina is a 21-year-old Riverside, Calif., woman living with her mother and taking constant hits off a crystal meth pipe whenever she isn't gobbling as many as 50 prescription pain pills a day. Voices in her head taunt her, as do the absent wails of a baby son who now lives, by court order, with his father.
While high, Christina stares in a mirror and imagines that bugs are crawling out of the sores on her face and arms. She screams at her mother from morning to night and sometimes physically attacks her until her older brother comes over to the house and wrestles her to the floor or an ambulance comes to escort her to an observation ward.
In other words, warm wishes for a Happy New Year from the people at A&E's still absorbingly terrific and raw "Intervention," which returns tonight. Nothing has changed since the Emmy-winning show began in 2005. "Intervention" remains determined to bring the horrors of drug and alcohol addiction into plain light, through one hard-to-watch episode after another.
As reality programming goes, "Intervention" remains admirably free of the genre's plot-advancing gimmicks, save one: Once they are confronted by their families and friends -- the intervention of the title, facilitated by one of the show's trained counselors -- the addicts are offered three-month stays at some of the country's best rehab centers. Such treatments can easily run to six-figure tabs, which means that appearing on "Intervention" is the one stroke of good luck that most of its subjects have ever encountered. "Will you accept the gift being offered you today?" their family members beg in tearfully composed letters read aloud. Some still do refuse the help or accept it only to suffer relapse in due time. The show's epilogues are often iffy at best, in the grand tradition of living one day at a time.
When: 10 tonight on A&E
I remain hopelessly addicted to "Intervention," which is surprising, given how the stories all tend to run the same course. Years have passed, and yet some of "Intervention's" addicts still remain fresh in my memory, as if I met them personally.
There are so many kinds of reality TV vying to suck what's left of our brains from our skulls. On one end of the spectrum waits the greasy array of celebrity-centered melodrama. In the middle are a whole lot of people who've commodified their fringy occupations and lifestyles (wild boar hunters, extreme couponers, polygamists, tattoodlers) into passable television.
First Published January 2, 2012 12:00 am
