By Steve Rhodes
I don’t know which was more depressing, watching the hopelessly far-gone alcoholic on Intervention hiding huge bottles of discount mouth wash all over her house while babbling nonsensically to her poor husband and children, or Chris Matthews actually officially projecting Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee based on all the information available to Hardball despite the fact that a single vote has yet to be cast in a single primary. Earliest Projection Ever.
Not that I don’t have compassion for one of the subjects of my TV viewing last night: The drunk.
Intervention is, in all seriousness, a serious – and almost always heartbreaking – show. I suppose you could call it Reality TV, but in reality it is really a series of mini-documentaries into the lives of the addicted – not just alcoholics, but heroin addicts, pill poppers, shopaholics; whatever addiction you can dream up, though I haven’t seen a sex addict on the show.
The subjects believe just that – that they are participating in a documentary. They don’t know that come the bottom half of the hour an intervention will take place.
I thought I’d seen every episode but I hadn’t seen last night’s repeat, featuring Leslie. A&E’s episode guide describes her this way: “Leslie is a Sunday school teacher, PTA member, soccer mom of three and a raging alcoholic. When she can’t get her hands on vodka or wine, Leslie resorts to economy size bottles of mouthwash. After countless arrests and DUI’s, her husband is hoping to find help for the mother of his children before it’s too late. It’s time for Leslie to choose: her alcohol or her family.”
The show is educational, not exploitive, and would probably be useful as part of those otherwise dopey high school anti-drug programs in a Scared Straight kind of way, because nothing I’ve seen so effectively and economically shows the everyday ravages of addiction among people with otherwise mundane lives – the people living next door, and/or their kids.
The patterns are depressingly familiar: the desperate and transparent strategies for getting money from an enabling parent or spouse, the pain-numbing and escapist drug use that never occurs for an addict in a party setting, but alone or with fellow addicts in a car or hotel room, the shame and embarrassment of family members.
Leslie’s three kids demonstrated in unusual intelligence and ability to articulate their young emotions. I wanted to scream at them: It’s not your fault!
And you couldn’t help but feel for her patient husband struggling to cope with a life and a wife holding him captive.
In almost every case – surprisingly to me – the intervention is successful and the subject accepts treatment. Unsurprisingly, they don’t always stay complete treatment successfully or stay sober afterwards. In Leslie’s case, the courts ordered her to 30-day rehab the day before her intervention, rendering it somewhat moot, although the interventionist said it was important to do it anyway so everyone in the family could have their say.
This can be an emotional show to watch, but I highly recommend it. It just moved to Monday nights.
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Yes, Chris Matthews has already called the Democratic primary. What a blowhard. I watch Hardball frequently, and depending on the guests and the subject matter, it can be useful, but you have to work awfully hard to glean the gold from all the rotten, stinking crappy and degraded political bullshit that this guy spews right out of his ass. He has a gift for glib TV, but that’s no substitute for political insight.
Your political discourse is being moderated – controlled, even – by clowns. A news junkie like me can still find the necessary information, even in the mainstream media. It’s out there, and it’s not a secret, if you can think critically and synthesize what you see and read. And everyone should be a news junkie like me.
But given that most of the citizenry isn’t, these guys do a tremendous disservice to our democracy.
Yesterday, Matthews called the primary for Hillary Clinton, though he did hedge at one point, if I understood properly, and calibrated her “power rating” and odds for the nomination at 71 percent.
What?
This is what they’re filling up airtime with?
Politics can be a fun parlor game, but it’s actually really not a game. Pakistan is boiling over and the war drums are beating for Iran. Oh, and there’s a war in Iraq. As Michael Douglas told the White House press corps in The American President, a lot of people lost their lives today. Let’s not take our eyes off the ball.
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Catch up on the What I Watched Last Night collection. Submissions welcome!
Posted on November 6, 2007