Take Two Tabloids and Call Me in the Morning

Trust Me, I'm an Addictionologist

A Media Shmedia column

by Scott Patrick Wagner

Paddy Chayefsky wrote Network in 1976. In that brilliant, alleged satire, programming became overrun with real lives being presented and manipulated for ratings. It all seemed so cautionary, so overstated, so highly unlikely. Welcome to 2008.

Though reality television has been testing its boundary issues for some time, it appears to have taken the writers' strike — and the subsequent sinkhole where scripted programs used to be — to give reality producers the license to trample any remaining ethical vestiges.

The culprit in reality television is not necessarily in the portrayal of real lives in edited-for-television terms. That, for better or worse, is the given. The insidious added element is the Tabloid Factor (or TF, if you will). The TF is nothing new to TV, but it has largely been relegated to the news/infotainment sub-genre. To make a distinction between this branch of reality and the one that includes people living in a house (with or without Brigitte Nielsen) may seem moot, but it really isn't. We accept that The Insider and all its salacious brethren are TF by definition, just as we accept that professional wrestling doesn't hurt and Ann Coulter is an evil robot. The problem arises when TF backwashes in one of two directions.

When an ostensibly real news program gets all TF, it is reassuring to know that it still becomes an issue. Though it is a stretch to call Fox News "real," it does feign a standard that one of its anchorweasels sunk below last week. A bottom-feeder named John Gibson decided to comment on the sad and untimely death of Heath Ledger with mockery and derision. The airing of clips from Brokeback Mountain (Gibson, for example, took "I wish I knew how to quit you" and responded with "He found out how to quit you") reveals a level of homophobia in addition to outright callousness. This poor excuse for a mouth-breather has subsequently offered an apology for his remarks — after huge outrage from his peers. Self-monitoring checks and balances don't seem to be in place at the other end of the reality TV spectrum, however, where the TF factor is ratcheting upward.

Submitted for your perusal is a new show on VH1, the cable network that gives you Best Week Ever with one hand (providing a sharp jab at reality TV's foibles) and Danny Bonaduce's televised meltdown with the other. This second hand has dug a little deeper into the nether regions to produce Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. The title alone makes me want to exhume the body of Paddy Chayefsky to see if it's twitching. Feeling like the stunned-yet-complicit tag-along at an Amy Winehouse concert, I couldn't take my eyes off this thing. Dr. Drew Pinsky is the vaguely Anderson Cooperish former cohost of a sex-talk show on MTV. Identifying himself as a "board-certified Addictionoligist," Dr. Drew draws us into the detox and rehab process, because (as he puts it) "it's time people understand the real nature of this problem." Apparently people won't understand if presented with everyday drug addicts, so the cast of characters all come from the Business of Show, including a porn actress named Mary, a Baldwin brother named Daniel, a lady wrestler named Chyna, an American Idol semi-finalist named something, and Brigitte Nielsen. Also stumbling among them is Jeff Conaway, of Taxi and Grease fame, who is so torturously strung-out and suffering as to add an air of gravitas to these proceedings (if, in fact, such were possible).

I can't honestly tell you if this show will really steer anyone away from drugs (or rehab, for that matter). But the TF level is off the charts. As is the case with another newcomer, this one on network TV (the big sister, in fact, of the cable network that brings you slimegopher John Gibson). Fox has premiered The Moment of Truth, whose dangling carrot is a half-million dollars for the truthful response to 21 questions. I have to admit a certain fascination in watching contestants give polygraph-verified answers to questions like, "Have you ever checked out another man's equipment in the showers?" to the former pro-football player, and "Have you ever had erotic fantasies during Mass?" to the lifelong Catholic. But when the questions turn to "Does your wife have any reason to distrust you?" with the contestant's wife sitting right there, it is clear that the ultimate agenda of this program is to foment tragedy.

Even if the Gibsonian (John Gibson is my new disparaging adjective) Producers Guild finally make good with the Writers Guild, I don't know if a transfusion of scripted programs will interrupt the momentum of sludge that seems to be in progress. I guess it all depends on what we choose to turn away from, regardless of its smarmy allure.