How a cable show navigated the opposing forces of recovery and good TV. From the mouths of producers, interventionists, directors, and a recovered huffer.
A&E's Intervention comes to an end this week after eight years, 13 seasons, 243 interventions, 194 episodes, and an Emmy win for Outstanding Reality Programming. Among the reality TV clutter of Kardashians, pawn stars, and boozy housewives, Intervention distinguished itself from other shows by relying on classic documentary techniques, handheld cameras, and deep dives into the tormented psyches of addicts, enablers, and their often dysfunctional families. It sustained itself without scripted contrivances, but rather with the real-life drama that is prevalent behind the closed doors of so many American families.
The idea for Intervention came about in 2000, when show creator Sam Mettler, who was working as comedy writer, joked about organizing his family to confront his father about the stinky cologne he wore. "Originally, I pitched the show to MTV, and it would be half serious episodes and half light," Mettler recalls. "It could be on any topic — from bad hair to bulimia."
When A&E picked up the show in 2005, Intervention did not stand alone as a program about rehabilitation. But its competitors (like Celebrity Rehab) always capitulated to the salaciousness of the addiction itself. Intervention took itself seriously, and while it complied with the demands of television, it also provided addicts and their families an array of comprehensive resources way beyond the reach of an average user and his family. There is no standard metric for recovery, but if you take into account the revolving door of drug offenders who "graduate" from drug courts, the commonly held view that relapsing is a part of recovery, or anyone who has dealt with the baffling power of addiction in their own life, a recovery rate of 64% for Intervention alumni is impressive any way you cut it. It may sound corny or perhaps it was just the cost of doing business, but the producers invested in their subjects. After extracting from them all the drama possible, addicts were repaid with the highest-quality, cutting-edge care.
In May of this year, A&E canceled the long-running series due to declining ratings. The network's highest-rated show currently is Duck Dynasty.
"The show took intervention mainstream," says Jeff VanVonderen, a former alcoholic and the most recognizable interventionist from the series. "It's now everywhere ... I think it changed the world. If I didn't work on the show, and I still worked in the field I worked in, I would be sad and angry that the show went away, because it mattered; and Duck Dynasty does not matter. The trials and tribulations of hillbilly prima donnas does not matter."
No question, there was a voyeuristic streak to the show — all good television is voyeuristic. The genius of Intervention, however, was letting the camera roll to reveal the elaborate, sometimes byzantine, cover-up networks and mechanisms constructed by addicts and their families. And the audience, knowing the formula, would wait with real anticipation, as one of the hard-nosed interventionists would arrive on the scene, pull whatever there was of the family together and force them to stop enabling the addict.
The most mesmerizing allure of the show was not the depraved behavior of the featured addict — everybody knows to what desperate ends a junkie will go to get a fix — but the skill with which the interventionists would unearth the tangled family relationships. Even if viewers didn't have an addict in their family, the self-deception, denial, and co-dependencies that were so joltingly exhibited every week were often all too familiar.
What follows is what it felt like to be a part of the show that had to negotiate the boundaries of good TV, exploitation, docudrama, and recovery, through the eyes of the show's producers, directors, casting crew, and its most infamous addict.
Candy Finnigan: “Rachel [heroin addict and street kid] is one of the few people from the show I still keep in touch with. She is an incredible artist and I so want for her to be healthy. She has no one. No friends. Living on the street. Her parents despised each other. She relapsed after the show when her boyfriend was murdered in San Francisco while he was seeing another woman.”
In the fall of 2004, Sam Mettler recruited Orange County-based Jeff VanVonderen, an interventionist trained in a confrontational style of rehabilitation, to do an on-camera audition for a new reality show he was pitching to Hollywood production company GRB Entertainment. VanVonderen came to GRB's offices and conducted a fake intervention with members of the production team on camera. After the show was picked up by A&E in 2005, Mettler and producers started looking for VanVonderen's female counterpart to round out the show. A recovering alcoholic from Kansas City named Candy Finnigan was at the top of the list, but producers worried she looked "too old." Finnigan told producers if they wanted to find a thin, young, pretty woman to run interventions, they should "contact the Screen Actor's Guild, not a trained professional" like her. She got the job. Mettler stayed on as field director for the first 100 episodes. Once the production team had, in Mettler's words, "learned enough to train other people in how to perform this delicate surgery," Dan Partland and Jeff Grogan, two documentarians, were brought on during the show's second season to oversee production.
Sam Mettler (series creator, executive producer): I was a comedy writer at MTV working on reality-based TV around 2000, and it wasn't really going anywhere. I originally pitched the show to MTV. At first it was a mix of heavy and light interventions — everything from bulimia to bad hair. It didn't go anywhere — the idea just sat on my desktop for two years. Then I mentioned the show to a lifelong friend, Rob Sharenow, who was working as a producer at A&E, and he said, "Send it to me right away." A&E's original programming was just starting, with shows like Dog the Bounty Hunter and Gene Simmons' Family Jewels. So Rob said, "You have to make this more serious." Within three weeks we were in pre-production. I immersed myself in the recovery world. I was attending 12-step meetings all the time. Jeff and Candy were two names that kept coming up.
Jeff VanVonderen (interventionist): I didn't hesitate to do the show. I've been doing interventions for decades, and before the show, half the time people at the intervention would say, "Wow, I didn't even know there was such a thing." Or, "I wish I would known about this five years ago, my dad might still be alive." And I thought, Well, shit, there is such a thing, and it's really effective and more people need to know about it. I always picture a mom and dad flipping channels. They have a drug-addict son, they've kicked him out, turned off his cellphone, he's on the street somewhere. And they're wringing their hands and then they see on TV there's one more thing they can try.
Dan Partland (executive producer): When I came in late in Season 2, I think the show was still trading in too much on its own novelty. It still was very shocking to see this kind of stuff on TV. Seeing addicts confess their addictions. Seeing people putting needles in their arms and neck. Getting access to an otherwise unseen world. That's such an incredible thing that documentary can do. But eventually, over time, that tires and it became too difficult to find newer and newer angles about addiction. We stopped seeing the show as a way to document how strange or unusual addicts' behavior can be, and instead [as a way to document] how complex their family conflicts were. We developed a new criteria for the show: Is this still a great story without addiction?
Candy Finnigan (interventionist): Addiction makes love between family members conditional. That's, to me, the saddest part of addiction. The addict has so many conditions on so many people. Their heart's almost unmendable.
Partland: We wanted to tell stories that had interpersonal complexity, and that addiction just amplified the stakes. A fascinating and complex relationship with one's mother would need the crucible of addiction to compel viewers. When we had this breakthrough, we felt that we had an infinite amount of things we could do.
Finnigan: I personally couldn't imagine wanting to call up a TV show so I could air out my dirty laundry in order to get help. I was such a secret drinker. I drank while my kids were at school. I went from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. My kids were the secret keepers. I didn't want to be recognizable as an addict. But when we started doing the show, we found the main motivator for addicts agreeing to be filmed was that they did not want other people to live how they do.
Mettler: I think the network was very brave. Their advertising person was certainly nervous — who would want to run ads during this show? The New York Times did a feature on the future of reality TV and it was all about our pilot, over the fold, in the Arts section with an arrow pointing from Oprah to Jeff VanVonderen. The network ordered 13 more episodes the next day.
VanVonderen: People tell me that I look like a better-looking, svelte Dr. Phil.
Elaine Frontain Bryant (A&E senior vice president of non fiction and alternative programing): It was the first time I had seen addiction portrayed on TV without the cheesy Afterschool Special vibe. After we saw the first episode about Gabe, the gambling addict, the network asked producers something they always ask after seeing a great pilot: "Can you do this again?" They did it over and over again for eight years.
Jeff Grogan (co-executive producer): I think many people wanted to know if a person was going to go to rehab or not, but also, were these family conflicts going to get resolved? Is the father going to forgive the son? Is the mother going to stop enabling the daughter? Are the husband and wife going to reconcile? That's what I think the audience was really sticking around to find out week after week.
Mettler: People who sayIntervention is exploitive know nothing about it. They don't understand or want to understand the message of the show. They don't know the care that this production team has taken over the years.
Partland: Great drama has no bad guys. This is a show about good versus good. Nobody has bad intentions, and they are guilty of the feelings that a lot of us have.
