Giving addicts a jolt of reality

In the 1979 Woody Allen film “Manhattan,” Michael Murphy’s character claims that “gossip is the new pornography.” Now, reality television has taken its place alongside gossip, as broadcast and cable networks scramble for new peepholes.

Based on A&E;’s newest reality program, “Intervention,” the cable channel’s initials could now stand for Annoying & Exploitive. A vile little exercise in debasement, the show details the struggles of addicts followed by the intercession of the title and a postscript showing how the addict fared in rehab.

The producers recruited participants hooked on drugs, alcohol, gambling and shopping (other addictions, we’re told, will follow) based on the premise that they would be featured in a documentary on addiction. The intervention comes as a surprise.

Each episode profiles two addicts, intercutting their respective downward spirals with interviews of family and friends. In the first two episodes, the four people have all tasted success in their lives but lost it all. They haven’t yet reached rock bottom -- that must be saved for the television show!

In the episode airing Sunday we meet Alyson, in her late 20s and addicted to morphine, heroin and crack cocaine, and Tommy, a coke addict in his late 30s.

Growing up in California, Alyson was an excellent student and talented musician. At 19, she earned a White House internship and was asked to return three times -- a rarity, we are told via straight-faced subtitles accompanying a portrait of President Clinton. Alyson won a scholarship to an elite university where her drug use forced her to drop out.

She eventually moved back home with her parents, where we witness her stealing morphine from her dying father, fighting with her mother and sister and pining for her crack-head boyfriend, who is in jail.

Tommy was a vice president of a brokerage firm, earning $128,000 annually, driving a Lexus and living in a million-dollar condo. When he was 37, he tried cocaine. Within two years, he’d spent $200,000 on the white powder, lost his job, car and home and was living on the streets.

Seeing people throw away their lives and tear apart their families is heartbreaking stuff and might even make for compelling drama. The lowest moments of these people’s lives, however, come across in “Intervention” as contrived, the producers bizarrely complicit. When Alyson creeps into her sleeping father’s bedroom to pilfer his painkillers, the cameras are there, strategically placed around the room. Similarly, the cameras follow Tommy into a convenience store, where he pockets a beverage. Both scenes are narrated by the addicts, like misbehaving children, with guilty bravado oblivious to the exploitation taking place.

The show’s second episode focuses on Gabe, a former child prodigy who graduated from college at 14 but nearly 20 years later is a gambler with $200,000 in debts, and Vanessa, an actress who played a nurse on the first three years of “E.R.” but has not worked for two years and spent her previous earnings on shopping sprees.

The hypocrisy of “Intervention” is underlined in a scene in which Gabe confronts his mother because she refuses to pay one of his overdue creditors. He berates her in a parking lot and appears to be on the brink of violence. When Mom gets into her SUV, Gabe shoves her to get at the keys in the ignition, jostling the cameraperson in the passenger seat. Another camera captures this from behind. At what point would the producers have put down the cameras and helped this woman?

The program poses as documentary, fly-on-the-wall filmmaking for the first 45 minutes of each episode, observing its subjects decline at arm’s length -- except when it’s to their advantage to get a better shot. It’s all a ruse, however, leading up to the show’s raison d’etre, the intervention. It’s ironic, then, that the denouements are so anticlimactic.

A veteran interventionist arrives to gather the family and friends to confront their loved one. Letters are read and tears are shed, but at least in the first episode there isn’t much conflict, with Alyson and Tommy both willingly agreeing to jump on a plane immediately and wing off to a faraway rehab facility. If it’s yelling and histrionics you are looking for, you will have to wait until Week 2.

Really, it’s hard not to see this show as a kind of emotional snuff film.

*

‘Intervention’

Where: A&E;

When: 10 p.m. Sunday

Ends: TV-PG L (may be unsuitable for young children with advisory for language)

Jeff Van Vonderen...Interventionist

Candy Finnigan...Interventionist

Alyson...Addict

Tommy...Addict

Created by Sam Mettler.