On the Air with Dr. Drew and TV Maven

By Elaine Liner Archives
Cover image for  article: On the Air with Dr. Drew and TV Maven

 
UPDATE:
Like God and Google, Dr. Drew Pinsky seems to be everywhere and have all (or most) of the answers.
 
Thursday night’s 90-minute reunion finale of Vh1’s Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew was taped Feb. 25. It was telecast on a day when Pinsky was a more ubiquitous presence on TV and radio than the presidential frontrunners.
 
First he hit the early shift on morning drive-time radio as a guest on the nationally syndicated Adam Carolla Show. He sat in for an hour with Carolla, his good friend and former co-host of the late-night Loveline radio show.
 
After that dose of old home week, Pinsky headed for his own midday radio talker on Los Angeles' KGIL-AM. At 9 p.m. ET he popped up to comment ,for the second night in a row, on the Eliot Spitzer hooker mess on CNN’s Larry King Live. Wednesday night he’d also stuck around to do AndersonCooper 360.
 
After the Celeb Rehab finale, Pinsky was back on the air live at 12 a.m. ET for two hours of Loveline (now co-hosted with Stryker, who also moonlights as the DJ on Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show). And who was Pinsky’s special guest? Adam Carolla. Nice symmetry there.
 
The Celeb Rehab reunion was, by the way, full of all the emotion, confessions, recriminations, accusations and, at last, tears and hugs, that you could want from a good reality show (and precious few are this good). Pinsky was visibly moved in the final moments after each celeb addict thanked him for saving their lives and setting them on the path to recovery—tributes that seemed to come as a surprise to the doc.
 
His tears seemed genuine. But don’t discount a touch of exhaustion.
 
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An hour on the radio with Dr. Drew Pinsky is the closest one can get to a house call. The hottest doc in media invited me, the TV Maven, onto his Westwood One daytime show, “Dr. Drew Live,” this week (podcast here) to talk about reality TV and to preview tonight’s reunion wrap-up (10 p.m. ET) of Pinsky’s hit Vh1 show Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. (Glimpse the opening of tonight’s episode here.)
 
Pinsky’s daytime radio talker is heard 11 a.m.-1 p.m. (Pacific) weekdays on KGIL-AM/1260 in Los Angeles, plus stations in San Diego and Maryland, and via livestream and day-after downloads on the Internet. The five-month-old show covers a panoply of topics, from health to breaking news to pop culture. Pinsky hosts solo, a switch from his longtime gig sharing a microphone (now with Stryker) on middle-of-the-night sex-topic call-in show Loveline, still heard Sunday-Thursday on more than 100 stations in syndication.
 
The cable TV reality series has made Pinsky, 49, suddenly the go-to media doc for public comment on all sorts of matters mental, physical and sexual. When The Today Show, CNN or MSNBC need a medical expert to weigh in on the psychological health of Britney Spears, new studies on STDs among young women, or the sex-addict aspect of the Eliot Spitzer scandal, there’s Pinsky in his signature pastel shirt and tie and impeccably tailored suit.
 
Celebrity Rehab, which premiered Jan. 10, jacked up Pinsky’s fame exponentially, especially among young viewers. The silver-haired married father of triplets has become the latest elder-hottie. He recently was touted as “Hot Slut of the Week” by gossip blogger Dlisted.com, and check out his MySpace page comments from scads of gushing female fans barely older than his 15-year-old daughter. (It was those late-night on-camera visits to the Celeb Rehab clinic in jeans and a black tee that did it.)
 
The show also drew Dr. Drew a few eyebrow-raising barbs from critics. The watch-a-trainwreck concept of the series and Pinsky’s earnest  “performance” as the doc-on-call for nine C-list celeb addicts—including actor Jeff Conaway, wrestler-turned-actress Joanie “Chyna” Laurer and rocker Seth “Shifty” Binzer—took critical hits from Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times (log-in req). But he and the show were also praised by many other critics (including me) and by addiction medicine professionals for the no-holds-barred approach to showing the horrors of drug and alcohol abuse, and for how Pinsky didn’t coddle the celebrities.
 
During my conversation with Pinsky on the radio, we began by talking about the “culture of narcissism” that has produced a generation of kids who crave fame without effort (the American Idol auditions, for example), an empty pursuit that often leads to substance abuse. Pinsky published a research paper a few years ago on celebrity narcissism—people in showbiz being more prone to ego-stroking behavior, no surprise—and he has a keen interest in how personalities who crave attention also are likely to fall into addiction when their fame starts to unravel. In treatment, Pinsky refers to narcissistic addicts as feeling like “the crap around which the world revolves.”
 
Celebrity Rehab showed fame-seekers that stardom may not be all it’s cracked up to be (especially when you’re on crack). But it also seemed genuine in its efforts to get nine people, however famous or not, to get clean and stay clean. It wouldn’t have been the same show if it were nine “civilians” in treatment, said Pinsky. The celebrities he and his small staff worked with in a small Pasadena clinic came into the process (and they were paid to be on the show, don’t forget) already comfortable with being themselves in front of cameras. Several, including Laurer and actress Brigitte Nielsen, had starred on other Vh1 “celebreality” shows (often wasted on the alcohol those shows provided to produce outrageous behavior from them). Two others, Mary Ellen Cook and Jaimee Foxworth, had done porn. As Cook said on Celeb Rehab during a discussion about the presence of the film crews during detox and group therapy, “I’ve already done everything you can do on camera. This doesn’t bother me.”
 
Pinsky has repeatedly called his first batch of celebrity addicts “courageous.” And this week’s reunion will reveal how many of them were brave enough to stay sober (more than the average group of rehabbers, says the doc). A Celebrity Rehab 2 seems inevitable, though Vh1 hasn’t made any announcements yet.
 
Before reality programming took over the tube, television used to be about enticing viewers to become fascinated with interesting characters. With reality shows like Celebrity Rehab, it’s more about grabbing viewers with interesting personalities and then allowing true character to be revealed.
 
In the final moments of the radio show, I asked Dr. Drew if he felt that Celeb Rehab reflected who he really is. Before he could answer, his longtime radio producers Anderson Cowan and Dave Coelho piped up on the mic. “More than anyone you’ve ever seen, he was the most like he really is,” they said, almost in unison.
 
Somehow that’s not a surprise.
 
To hear TV Maven on “Dr. Drew Live,” go to this podcastfor listening or downloading.
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