Vile 'Intervention' pulls a fast one
Increasingly, reality TV shows are wearing saintly robes. While they put damaged lives on display to attract our pitying eyes, they also pretend to repair those lives -- with a new home, or a new face, or a contract to be pop culture's newest singer, model, or actress.
A&E's ''Intervention" is the latest faux reality philanthropy, and it ranks as one of the rankest. On the surface, it's a benevolent effort to reveal the power and beauty of interventions, which find loved ones confronting an addict about his problem and instantly removing him to rehab. But underneath the charitable veneer, the show, which premieres tomorrow, is about watching broken addicts destroy themselves. It makes prime-time sport of vulnerable, desperate people and their spiral to the bottom.
In the premiere, we meet two drug addicts, a cocaine freak named Tommy who has snorted away his fortune and Alyson the former White House intern, whose many habits includes crack, heroin, pot, and morphine. And next week we meet Vanessa the shopaholic-agoraphobic actress and Gabe the gambler, who's $200,000-plus in debt.
Naturally, we spend the better part of each hour watching these tormented souls act out. The show is almost fetishistic in its attention to the details of their habits. Alyson cleans her dope in her bedroom in her parents' home, fires up her bong, steals painkillers from her dying father, and scores and smokes crack with a friend. Gabe haunts Las Vegas casinos by night, piling up new loans after he's already caused his parents to sell their home to keep him out of jail. Vanessa, a series regular on ''ER" in the mid-1990s, giddily blows her money on clothes she doesn't need, then isolates in her apartment, where her obsessive-compulsive disorder causes her to check and count endlessly.
Finally, out of obligation, ''Intervention" introduces the professional intervention expert in the final minutes, businesslike exorcists fixed on driving out the evil spirits and accompanying the addict into rehab. Thanks to heavy editing, the confrontation sequences hurriedly build to their desired result, and the success of the intervention is mentioned in the final credits. Less dramatic and photogenic than the horrors of addiction, the healing process is chipped down to nothing.
''Intervention" is also an exercise in fraud, as it fools its addicts into participating. Unaware of the intervention theme, they've signed releases to be filmed for a show about addiction (an already questionable signature, since these shaky people aren't exactly of sound mind). Under false pretenses, they've been encouraged to expose their darkest behaviors to the cameras. Alyson lies on her bed sobbing miserably, then nods out blissfully after getting high. Tommy, who recently lost his home to drug debts, shows us the roof where he sleeps and the hotel where he scarfs free breakfast. Once considered a genius, Gabe now bickers endlessly with his mother about money and physically threatens her when she refuses to help him. The addicts are not aware they're about to have a very extreme makeover forced upon them.
Suddenly, in a bait-and-switch that seems like a media ambush, the addicts are confronted in an intervention, faced not only by friends and family but by the A&E cameras. In what could be the most decisive moment of their lives, they've been completely fooled. This isn't the light-hearted pranking of ''Punk'd"; this is toying around with fragile people and their futures. Even if they later approve their participation in ''Intervention," the process of deception that preceded the final permission is repellent. No amount of inspirational reality TV can justify that kind of trick.
