Everybody Hurts: Addiction, Drama, and the Family in the Reality Television ShowIntervention

Abstract

This article employs the literature on reality television as well as empirical studies on addiction to analyze Intervention's narrative. We look at the narrative structure of the Intervention's first six seasons (2005-2009), its repeated emphases on the causes of addiction, and the show's purported success rate. Highlighting disturbing discrepancies between the show's representations and assertions versus empirical research, Intervention's notions of what constitutes effective remedies are those treatments generally available only to the financially affluent, and the program's depictions of addiction and intervention practices reinforce a popular culture, rather than a science-based understanding, of the family and of addiction itself.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.