Intervention

So, I found this show on A&E called "Intervention". I was hooked immediately. The one I saw profiled 2 people. One, an actress from the first 3 seasons of ER (she was a nurse and if you saw ER you'd remember her) had killer bad OCD and a severe shopping addiction. The other was this insane crazy guy who had a gambling addiction that had cost his family over $500k and put them into debt. He was totally insane. Both of their stories were great to watch. Anyway, the premise is that they are told they are being filmed for a documentary on addiction while they are actually being filmed for back story for the interventions that come at the end of the show. Next week they have this girl who is into cutting herself.

Anyway, I have a couple of complaints, one is general and applies to most tv production lately and the other is mostly me being a baby and wanting more than I should expect. First is something that I've just started noticing a lot that wasn't happening before and that's tv shows thinking I'm a stupid fucking attentionless moron.

Yes, I know that tv has to cater to the average American and that the average American is a stupid fucking attentionless moron but still, it has totally gotten worse. Can I tell you what I'm talking about? Lately television shows have been showing me the same thing twice in the same program. Do you know what I'm talking about? Like, you see something and then after the commercial, there it is again, the minute and a half I just saw before the commercial. Sometimes it's not as blatant and they try to sneak in a synopsis a little later on in the program of the beginning stuff. Like duh! I've been watching! No need to remind me about anything...And I've seen this in a number of shows this season. Off the top of my head: Smallville, The Surreal Life, and this one...

So in this show, at about the 30 minute mark, they felt it appropriate to show me the same text on the screen with the same messages that they used in the first half.. Stuff like “Joe has wasted $500,000 of his parents money”. Uh, yea, I know that.. you told me 10 minutes ago.. Like what the hell?

The second thing I didn't like was that it didn't end right. Mostly this was about the gambler deal. The intervention happened, he went to rehab and then the text explained that the he checked out 3 weeks later against his doctors wishes. Nothing else.. it's like you build up to this climax of him finally going to rehab, the intervention was the last ditch effort by the family to save their sanity and money and presto, it ends with him quitting rehab a failure.. what happened next? Did the family disown him? Why tell me this story? I want to know that he's better or that he's back at home mooching off his enabling parents. Let me see failure or success, don't leave off the ending. Duh! Maybe I'm a baby.. who knows.