I always want to see realistic depictions of addiction in movies and on television, but when it gets too real, I begin to get squeamish. That’s been happening all year on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, where cast member Kim Richards has been battling a well-publicized struggle with addiction. What’s unsettling about Kim Richards is not her consumption of alcohol—we rarely even see her imbibe, let alone take any of the drugs she’s been accused of abusing—but rather observe how utterly wasted she appears to be after years of bad behavior. Her ruddy skin looks beaten by sun and career alcoholism, her blond hair in a brassy tangle or tied up in an untended ponytail; her demeanor is wearied and scattered, as though words don’t come as easily to her as they once did. Her family and the other cast-mates treat her with a wary mixture of pity and frustration, save the unexpected voice of reason, Brandi Glanville, who is far too lovably louche to be bothered with preserving the open secret of Kim’s addictions. Despite the show’s claims of putative “reality,” the fact is that were the show not being taped, Kim’s “friends” would surely have abandoned her altogether a long time ago, since Kim appears to be the sort of late-stage alcoholic many of us have seen stumble into AA meetings clutching a tattered court card and rambling incomprehensibly.
Reality television has long been considered the lowest form of entertainment, and there’s no arguing that there’s something distinctly Roman about the thrill of watching people self-destruct on screen. Still shows like Celebrity Rehab and Intervention make the mistake of attempting to impose a redemptive arc onto stories of addiction that frequently have negative outcomes, fatal outcomes, outcomes that are anything but inspirational. Thus, the best depictions of addiction on reality TV don’t tend to be the ones that were narrativized to be about addiction, but the ones that come at the subject indirectly, unintentionally, or even unwillingly. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills has long seemed resistant to delving into the subject of Kim’s addiction with the enthusiasm that a show about addiction would, which has made the journey of watching it all the more rewarding. It’s realistic because addictions aren’t edited into neatly digestible hours of arced narrative: they’re messy and sprawling, shrouded in secrecy and subtext, alluded to in coded snippets of loaded dialogue and sloppily disproportionate emotional outbursts—and they aren’t always as clear-cut as “alcoholic” or “not.”
Shows like Celebrity Rehab and Intervention make the mistake of attempting to impose a redemptive arc onto stories of addiction that frequently have negative outcomes, fatal outcomes, outcomes that are anything but inspirational.
Because even if none of the ragtag band of juiced-up, crispy guidos and guidettes on Jersey Shore are actually alcoholics, it would be disingenuous to claim they are anything less than problem drinkers. They black out, not occasionally but constantly, scream and brawl, lose their underwear (if they were wearing any in the first place), and totter through the streets of Seaside Heights in a state of dishabille, the girls in platform sandals that would be perilously high even if they weren’t plastered, the men perpetually shirtless, lacquered with a film of gin-sweat. After particularly unpleasant benders, green-faced and chagrined, they frequently make commitments to teetotalism, which are promptly broken within a night or two.
But it’s hard to fault them for only doing what they’re expected, and even compensated, to do; audiences have come to expect hard partying, and there are never any real consequences for the Jersey Shore cast’s bad behavior. This makes the show a surprisingly accurate representation of a segment of the population for whom the stakes are low, middle-class kids with shitty jobs and shallow relationships who value getting wasted and looking good above all else, a lifestyle of low-rent sybaritic pleasures. (These people are real, I swear—I know some of them.) Can alcoholism exist when there is so little to lose? Or do the lines of where problem drinking ends and alcoholism begins shift in accordance with lifestyle and environment? This is what I wonder while watching Jersey Shore—how low the depths of alcoholic desperation are, when the bad behavior is dressed up as socially acceptable “partying.”
That’s not to say that the problem drinking doesn’t occasionally turn more damaging than broken bottles and ugly crying. Although the cast and producers maintain that the Shore house is a drug-free environment, many viewers swear that they can recognize cast member Ronnie Magro’s “coke face” when he seems, well, suspiciously animated; and cast hanger-on Jonathan “The Unit” Manfare was stopped by security trying to enter the Shore house while under the influence of ketamine. (He maintains that he is now sober.) The editors, too, have gotten smarter in how they compile footage, sometimes sneaking in jabs at the cast that tickle me endlessly. In one memorable sequence from last season, Deena Nicole urinates on the street after leaving a nightclub—par for the course for most of the Shore kids—and wipes herself down with a tissue she is carrying in her handbag. The following morning, she is seen using that same tissue, blithely unaware of its intimate usage the night before. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, but it also proves that you don’t have to hit bottom to be totally fucking humiliated.
Addiction as captured on reality TV, at least in shows like The Real Housewives and Jersey Shore, is captured with documentarian grit, then sanded down to a high-gloss finish with slick editing, mood-setting music, and flashy titles to make the final product more palatable while scripted programming on television tends to be either glossy or gritty but not both.
In the glossy category, primetime soaps both new and old integrate alcoholism into the narrative so readily it’s begun to feel threadbare or tired. On Desperate Housewives, Bree van de Kamp, played by the ever-frozen Marcia Cross, is a suburban control freak bound by a rigid sense of propriety that exists only in her mind; her spiral into alcoholism several seasons ago was predictable, at least insofar as it stood to reason that a lonely perfectionist with a broken family would turn to midday wine benders. After several years of sobriety—including time spent in a fictional AA that was handled with refreshing sincerity—Bree just relapsed, after the stress of her complicity in a murder cover-up reached an emotional breaking point. Simultaneously, one of the desperate husbands, Carlos Solis (a terrifically exasperated Ricardo Chavira), also involved in the manslaughter case, has taken to the bottle. Several embarrassing episodes cause his wife, Gabrielle (Eva Longoria, too beautiful to ever have to actually emote), to insist that Carlos go to treatment.
I don’t know why these kids, uniformly likable, would put up with a guy who’s this much of a drunk, and an asshole, and I suspect the show doesn’t know either.
The intended symmetry of the two alcoholic trajectories is handled adequately—one character’s alcoholism rears its head for the first time, while another’s returns after a lengthy period of abstinence—but the implied causality is dangerous. Look! The show seems to be saying. They’re so stressed out that they’ve become alcoholics! Alcoholics don’t become alcoholics because they accidentally killed someone and are being forced to cover it up; alcoholics become alcoholics because they can’t stop drinking. A far more interesting, and authentic, creative choice for Bree would have been an unexpected, out-of-left-field relapse, not a return to the bottle after a period of trying stress. Even if situationally specific duress can sometimes exacerbate problem drinking or trigger a relapse, alcoholism doesn’t need a reason to emerge or return: It just is.
Revenge knows this, and thus gave the hunky male lead, Daniel Grayson (Joshua Bowman, chisel-faced and vacant-eyed) a history of hard partying. Though the show is set in the tony beach community of the Hamptons among the wealthy and indolent, the easy causation of the rich kid-turned-drunk is, pleasingly, foregone. Daniel’s work ethic is fine and there’s never a sense that he drank because he was overindulged or privileged; he just partied way too hard and it got him in trouble. More wonderful still is his mother Victoria (the eminently watchable Madeleine Stowe), who uses Daniel’s past missteps as a way to control and manipulate her son; and as her efforts mount, so his exasperation grows, mother and son caught in an all-too-familiar dance of Al-Anon-ready codependence.
This is an experience that is familiar to many alcoholics but would be utterly foreign to others, and it’s a delight to see it captured so vividly. Likewise, on Private Practice last season, the embattled alcoholic neurosurgeon Amelia Shepherd (Caterina Scorsone, totally believable) is at a wedding when she requests ginger ale from the bar; instead, she is served champagne, which triggers a relapse. It’s a heartbreaking, and frustrating, sequence, but one that’s borne from a very real anxiety. Show creator Shonda Rhimes has a bad habit of stuffing her shows (Grey’s Anatomy, among others) with so many soapy storylines that they become overstuffed and histrionic, suffocating under the weight of their dramatic intent, but this remains a good problem to have. Amelia’s spectacular descent into chaos (operating on patients under the influence! Stealing OxyContin!) utilizes every conceivable dramatic disaster an alcoholic doctor could create, and it would be enough to fill a show of its own; the idea that it would all fall upon the same poor doc strains believability.
Weirdly, it’s more realistic anxieties that are the major currency on Nikita, the CW’s ill-fated La Femme Nikita reboot starring an overly dour Maggie Q as the titular assassin-turned-heroine hell bent on taking down a shadowy governmental organization responsible for a laundry list of international conspiracies. The show is exhausting enough on its own, but it becomes doubly trying whenever Owen (an ingratiating Devon Sawa) appears, due largely in part to his effectively twitchy performance. A fellow government assassin gone rogue, Owen is addicted to a mysterious cocktail of pills called The Regimen, amphetamines and performance-enhancing steroids to give him almost supernatural strength, endurance, and mental acuity. What perturbs me about this is how credible it is to imagine that the government is feeding its best and brightest such a regimen. It’s almost enough to make a guy want to enlist.
Shameless, the Showtime series based on a British show of the same title about a large family of neglected kids in working-class urban Chicago, features a scabrous, selfish William H. Macy in the part of Frank Gallagher, the family’s undoting paterfamilias. Frank drinks away the rent, the grocery budget, and even the money for his son’s field trip; it’s his eldest daughter, Fiona (marvelously inhabited by Emmy Rossum, managing to somehow be drab and luminous at the same time), who takes care of the family with an eye for detail that seems automated after years of fixing everyone’s problems. But there’s a saccharine current of affection that underpins the show, at least insofar as Frank is accepted by his family—his unconscious form is carted home by police at the end of the night, he passes out in gutters and alleyways, and he shows no real consideration for the people who continue to house him and care for him. I don’t know why these kids, uniformly likable, would put up with a guy who’s this much of a drunk, and an asshole, and I suspect the show doesn’t know either.
But it’s the goofy tone, which pokes fun at the Gallagher family’s petty thieving and delinquency and wanton pursuit of easy pleasure, that rings false. Any family with an alcoholic that sick for a father would be so consumed by bitterness and resentment that the living room would be a war zone, not a playing field to bandy about self-consciously clever insults and crass jokes. The moments of tenderness, like when one of Frank’s daughters sneaks downstairs to place a pillow under his head while he is passed out on the floor, lack potency because they’re decontextualized, tonally incongruous.
Maybe the hardest of all to watch, for me, is Breaking Bad, which captures the ugliness of human behavior with a richness and dexterity that’s still going strong after four seasons (by which point most great shows peter out.) Bryan Cranston’s portrayal of chemistry-teacher-turned-meth-cook Walter White remains TV’s most brilliantly drawn antihero, with supporting characters of considerable texture and complexity. His right-hand-man, the perpetually lost Jesse Pinkman, to whom Aaron Paul brings a heart-crushing apathy, is probably the most realistic addict on television, not because of anything he does but because his disaffected nature is so authentic. He goes through intermittent periods of sobriety, intense addiction, and moderate usage, but he never gets invested in anything other than continuing to get high and produce the means (money, drugs) to get him there. At the same time, he’s not a total husk; something warm and human still beats inside him, even if it’s buried under layers of disenchantment and cool unease. Real addiction anesthetizes the addict from the agony of his feelings, which is why it’s so frustrating when filmmakers and producers give fictional addicts volcanic outbursts of emotion that real addicts would be too numb to ever deliver. Breaking Bad makes many mistakes with storytelling and for—it simply isn’t as flawless as critics like to say it is—but characterologically? It’s a masterpiece.
Amy is a searing portrait of how easy it is to succumb to those all-too-real inconsistencies, with her regressive shifts back into bitch mode serving as a cogent reminder of what early sobriety is like.
But the character who has taught me the most about addiction is Laura Dern’s astonishing Amy Jellicoe on the HBO series Enlightened, who experiences a mental breakdown in her corporate life, heads to a luxurious Hawaii treatment center (which treats emotional issues like Amy’s as well as chemical dependence), and then attempts to come home and reintegrate herself into society. What’s so smart about the execution of this storyline is Amy’s struggle to maintain the serenity that she developed in treatment in a world that seems categorically opposed to providing her with any emotional peace. Her relationship with her mother (Laura Dern’s real-life mother, Diane Ladd, understated in her callousness) provokes her; her soulless corporate job is a source of endless woes; a still-messy entanglement with her ex-husband, a self-serving overgrown party animal who probably is an alcoholic and addict (played by Luke Wilson), is a boundless well of frustration. Amy’s transformation from crazed corporate harpy to placid yoga zombie spouting New Age platitudes with grating earnestness, is remarkable because of how quickly she oscillates from one extreme to another; in one moment, she’ll be a marvel of Zen implacability, in another, she’s spewing profanity over the pettiest of stresses.
Treatment has changed Amy, and treatment does have the power to change us; whenever we choose to close the door on a pattern of old behavior, there’s an irretrievability to that specific mode of self-destruction we’re leaving behind. But the wreckage of a torn-down past self still remains, and Amy is a searing portrait of how easy it is to succumb to those all-too-real inconsistencies, with her regressive shifts back into bitch mode serving as a cogent reminder of what early sobriety is like. Amy isn’t an alcoholic—she’s probably just a codependent—but in Amy’s credibly smug transformation into and back out of the enlightened woman she’d like to be, I’m reminded of the reality that change isn’t permanent: It’s a process of recursion, of trial and error, of maddening and impossible reconciliations of authentic and aspirational selves. Enlightenment shows us that recovery is about taking one step forward only to take two steps back, and there’s nothing more squirm-inducingly real than that.
Sam Lansky is an editor at Wetpaint and a regular contributor to The Fix who also wrote about Britney Spears and dating in sobriety, among many other topics. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/samlansky.