My new favorite ritual on Sunday nights is to pour a stiff drink, open a fresh pack of cigarettes, and watch Intervention on A&E.
The show features two addicts per episode: they're into painkillers, crack, compulsive shopping, whatever. A crew follows them both around for a while, filming their colossally bad decisions (oh, like you never spent $20,000 on meth?). Finally the addicts get tricked into entering a room where all their friends and family are gathered to try to stuff them onto a plane and off to rehab.
The great part about the show is the way they match the addicts up. Usually one of them is fairly sympathetic, just a decent person who screwed up until things got way out of hand; it could happen to anyone. By the end you sincerely hope they get some help.
The other addict, on the other hand, is always some totally whiny shitbag, and it seems like their only salvation would be to have their people push them off a cliff into a pit of starving wolverines.
Unfortunately, this will never happen, so I'll probably get bored with the show pretty quickly. For now, though, I get to indulge in two of my favorite activities: drinking and hypocritically passing judgment on others.
