TV Maven: "Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew": Taking It Seriously (Except for the Ads)

 

Eight isn’t enough for VH1’s Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew—episodes that is. The hit reality mini-series starring and exec produced by Dr. Drew Pinsky will tape a reunion of the celebs who participated in the 21-day drug and alcohol rehab program. The special goes before cameras Feb. 25 in Los Angeles and will include a studio audience, many of whom are recovering addicts. They will be invited to “interact” with the celebs and Pinsky.

 

Filmed in a Pasadena, Calif., clinic, Celebrity Rehab (10 p.m. ET, Thursdays, with lots of repeats) just telecast its fifth and best installment. Each week another layer of the celebs’ problems peel back to reveal more layers underneath.

 

This week, former WWE star Joanie “Chyna” Laurer talked to Pinsky about horrendous abuse in her childhood, but continued to deny that she’s an addict or alcoholic. Troubled by her stonewalling, Pinsky finally addressed “the elephant in the room,” as he described it, and suggested that any anabolic steroids Laurer may have used during her days as a pro wrestler could have triggered other addictions or caused “severe disturbances in behavior.” She vehemently denied steroid use and said she resented the implication. Will she have a breakthrough or a breakdown? Such cliffhangers are part of the allure of this show.

 

The TV reunion will be a chance to see who’s stayed sober since production on Celeb Rehab ended last summer. But listeners to Pinsky’s two weekday radio shows—the nationally syndicated Loveline and LA-only Dr. Drew Live—already have heard several reunions between the doctor and his famous VH1 patients over the past few months. Rocker Seth “Shifty” Binzer has sat in on Loveline (heard 1-3 a.m. ET on Westwood One stations) and confirmed that he’s stayed clean, even moving into a sober living facility. Laurer also dropped in on Loveline recently, though she didn’t talk much about her rehab experience and it’s not clear where she is in the recovery process (if anywhere).

 

This week actress Brigitte Nielsen was a call-in guest on Dr. Drew Live (11 a.m.-1 p.m. PT, KGIL-AM/1260). She, too, has stayed drug- and alcohol-free since Celeb Rehab, moving with her husband out of L.A. to get away from “the party scene.” Nielsen praised Pinsky, saying that her four sons are “very pleased with Mom, thanks to you, VH1 and the show.” Nielsen has even stopped smoking.

 

Pinsky shared with Nielsen (and their listeners) an update on the condition of Celeb Rehab’s most public failure, former American Idol finalist Jessica Sierra. Soon after filming ended on the show, during which she successfully dealt with multiple addictions, Sierra returned home to Florida, relapsed and ended up in an altercation with police that sent her to jail. Pinsky flew to Florida in the middle of his almost ’round-the-clock PR push for the show in early January and helped convince the judge in the case to allow Sierra to transfer to a rehab facility in Pasadena, where she’s now a month into a court-mandated yearlong stay.

 

On the radio show, Nielsen called Sierra and another of the show’s addicts, former porn star Mary Ellen (“Mary Carey”) Cook, “young, gorgeous but sad girls…it breaks your heart.” Pinsky invited Nielsen, who acts as a sort of wacky mother figure to fellow addicts on the show, to visit Sierra in rehab, saying the young singer now is “bright and cheerful.”

 

Nielsen told the doc that since the show premiered in January, her MySpace page has filled up with messages from young people confessing their addictions and asking for help. “People take this show very seriously,” Nielsen said on the radio. “VH1 finally has chosen to do a show that is an educational, actual show. It was an experiment that was worthwhile…It could very easily have backfired.”

 

This from a star of other VH1 “celebreality” fare that featured her stumbling drunk alongside an intoxicated Laurer.

 

“It was walking on the moon,” Pinsky said of the Celeb Rehab “experiment.” “You have no idea how anxious I was.”

 

Ever the flirt, Nielsen said she had never heard of Pinsky before signing up for Celeb Rehab and she’d imagined him as “an old, skinny little man with a long gray beard.” When she checked in, she said, “and you walked in, my mouth dropped open. Am I gonna stay sober? You kidding? If he’s my doctor, I’m staying!”

 

Deadpanned Dr. Drew: “Whatever it takes.”

 

So far only the New York Times has really gone after the show in a negative way. A Feb. 3 story claimed that “bloggers, recovering addicts, news media and addiction specialists” question Pinsky’s motivation for doing the show and “challenge his confessional treatment methods, which seem to play to the television cameras.”

 

The story quoted heavily from naysayers, but there are VH1 message boards (and Pinsky’s own MySpace page) crowded with overwhelming praise and support for the show. Example from a recent message on Pinsky’s page: “It is the only REAL thing on TV. I imagine many of its viewers only wish they could have seen something like this years before they screwed their lives up.”

 

Many of the messages also observe that Pinsky is "hot" for a 49 year old with silver hair and glasses. Prediction: He'll be one of this year's People magazine "Most Beautiful People."

 

Being taken seriously seems to be important to Pinsky, one of the rare TV (or radio) M.D.’s who actually practices medicine for real. But VH1 works against his demeanor of professional gravitas, as well as the authenticity of Celeb Rehab, with its ad placement during the episodes. This week’s hour included some heavy discussions about inappropriate after-hours text messages sent from rehabber Daniel Baldwin to Mary Carey. When Baldwin bolted the rehab and the show at the end of the first week (fourth episode), Carey revealed to Binzer and Pinsky that Baldwin had asked her for nude pictures and sent her photos of himself via cell phone. He later asked her to “destroy” the images (something he whispered to Carey but was picked up by microphones).

 

The group therapy session dealing with Baldwin’s betrayal of trust—a central scene on the fifth episode--was interrupted by two cringe-making commercials: one for a “sex text message” service; the other a promo for VH1’s My Fair Brady featuring Chris Knight and wife Adrianne Curry apparently fall-down drunk.

 

As Pinsky’s known for saying on Loveline when he wants to be really sarcastic: “Good times, good times.”