TV REVIEW : Maria Shriver Hosts ‘Fatal Addictions’ Special

When does an activity become an addiction . . . a habit become an obsession . . . a news program become annoying?

Find out tonight on the “Maria Shriver Show,” otherwise billed as “Fatal Addictions,” an NBC news special at 10 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39.

Do we need another program about our bad habits? Yes. The lives lost and the monetary cost of addictions are astronomical. We need to know as much as possible about a problem that affects us all, directly or indirectly.

Do we need this particular program? Not all of it.

Anchor Maria Shriver hosts the show. She wrote it. She interviews people--including Betty Ford, ex-pro quarterback Art Schlichter, Margaux Hemingway and former Dodger pitcher Steve Howe--who are or have been addicted to drugs, alcohol, sex, food, shopping or gambling. She goes to treatment centers. She asks questions such as, “Was alcohol destroying your life, your marriage, your family?”

She bludgeons viewer sensitivity with constant, pedantic narrative.

Self-parody threatens in titillating glamour shots of colorful pills, men and women in sexually suggestive poses, roulette wheels and liquor gurgling wetly into glasses. Variously, this demonstrates the media’s role in encouraging addictive behavior or impresses us with the drama of what we’re seeing.

Reality is further distanced with the use of clips from made-for-TV movies about bulemia, Betty Ford and Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Shriver touches on, but doesn’t pursue, the “booming business of addiction,” a $3-billion health care industry. The cost is shocking. One clinic profiled charges $28,000 for a 49-day stay.

She concludes that it is the insurance companies that are footing the bills. Robert Du Pont, a psychiatrist and co-founder of the National Institute on Drugs, reminds her that it is the policy-holders and the taxpayers who actually bear the financial burden.

What does engage thought and emotion comes during those segments that allow the addicts and their families do the talking, without prompting.

A wife and two daughters confront an alcoholic man with their grief and anger. Children in a treatment center say they feel “mad, sad and lonely” when their parents drink.

When truth, not hype, is offered, no editorializing is needed to make clear the toll taken, the years lost in lives such as these.