Do You Remember: Celebrity Rehab, Perhaps the Most Evil Reality TV Series of All Time

VH1 and Dr. Drew Pinsky decided that exploiting vulnerable addicts would make for great TV.

I have an extremely low tolerance for reality TV. Yes, the genre is vast and there are exceptions to my own rule but it’s a field I’ve largely avoided for various reasons. I’ve never seen a single episode of Love Island and everything I know about the Real Housewives and their various spin-offs has come from cultural osmosis. I’ve no time for cringe or performative cruelty and these shows of “structured reality” tend to leave me either cold or deeply irritated. Maybe it’s the Brit in me but I can’t deal with people hating one another over absolutely nothing. But these shows now take up a huge part of the modern entertainment landscape. They’re written about in publications like The New Yorker. Last year, “Scandoval” was such a breakout drama that it earned nationwide coverage. Dare I say it but we might be in the age of reality TV being its most “legitimate.”

Okay, when I say “legitimate”, I  specifically mean that they’re being taken seriously as pieces of entertainment that were crafted by a team of people in front of and behind the camera. That and the increased audience awareness of how these shows are made – and how much of it is proudly manufactured for maximum pleasure – means that the genre isn’t instantly written off as tawdry. Don’t get me wrong, that stuff is still there. We’re still embroiled in scandals of manipulation of contestants and a startling lack of aftercare for those who the camera turned into characters. But the conversations are there, and it wasn’t so long ago that they weren’t. There are reality shows from only 15 years ago that just wouldn’t exist today. Case in point: Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew.

For four years, VH1 aired a show where vulnerable people dealing with the hell of drug and alcohol dependencies were put into treatment, surrounded by cameras for 24 hours a day, and "helped" by an attention-seeking quack, all while the directors looked for ways to turn these very real and traumatized people into heroes and villains for an audience looking for something to watch in-between Flavor of Love and I Want to Work for Diddy. Do you ever wonder if humans are just too evil?

VH1 was conceived as the more adult version of MTV. Like its fellow music network, it moved away from actual music in the 2000s and moved towards reality programming. Where MTV offered the likes of The Real World and Teen Mom, VH1's programming was often more music themed, as well as focused on African American audiences, e.g. Love & Hip Hop, Basketball Wives, Flavour of Love (and the rise of Tiffany "New York" Pollard), and so on. They also loved themselves a dating show, from Bret Michaels' Rock of Love to The Pickup Artist (ew) to For the Love of Ray J. One show, Megan Wants a Millionaire, was pulled from the air after it was revealed that one of its contestants had been accused of murdering his wife. I think this subgenre of reality dating programming needs its own piece, but they helped to solidify the basic tone of the typical VH1 show: mean, scathingly funny, soapy in their dramatics, and full of people who were very easy to laugh at. It’s not the network you’d expect to offer an empathetic and taboo-busting depiction of the harrowing throes of addiction. And they didn’t.

Celebrity Rehab was the brainchild of Dr. Drew Pinsky. While he is an actual doctor and has training in treating addicts, although he’s neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist He's best known for his work on radio and TV. For over 30 years, he co-hosted the nationally syndicated radio talk show Loveline. At one point, it was so popular that it received a TV spinoff, also hosted by Pinsky. A New York Times piece from 2008 described him as the “Gen-X answer to Ruth Westheimer [Dr. Ruth], with an AIDS-era, pro-safe-sex message.” He was and remains a TV regular, appearing on everything from Dawson’s Creek to Family Guy to any number of news/infotainment series where he acts as an “expert” on the mental and physical health of people he’s never met. There’s a good living to be made in marketing yourself as an expert in a specific field then offering unsolicited advice and diagnoses to people in need of help. Super helpful, much altruism.

Pinsky claimed the idea for Celebrity Rehab came about because he was concerned about how the tabloids of the time misrepresented and derided those dealing with addiction. It was seen either as a completely preventable symptom of being spoiled and decadent, or a folly experienced only by the rich and famous. The year before the series premiered, Britney Spears went through her extensively covered mental health issues, culminating in her shaving her head and losing autonomy over her own life. At the time, Rolling Stone called it “the most public downfall of any star in history.” It was seen as her fault, and it took a long dang time for her to be viewed by the world as the victim as she was. Public and medical attitudes towards addiction have changed  from that time of scolding and “pull up your bootstraps” rhetoric (although not by that much.) I can see how it would have been easy for Pinsky to sell a network on this idea, but it’s hard to imagine anyone involved doing so with remotely decent intentions.

With the greenlight given from VH1, producers started looking for contestants/patients. They offered upwards of six figures to celebrities to appear on the show. Pinsky wasn’t directly involved in choosing who would appear, but he did reach out personally to one person (Rachel Uchitel, a nightclub owner and former mistress of Tiger Woods) in a later season. According to executive producer John Irwin, casting for the first season was the most difficult for obvious reasons. If you're already receiving endless tabloid hate for your struggles, why increase the level of access the world gets to you at your lowest moments? There were some stars who the series was eager to cast. Actor Tom Sizemore was one. Lindsay Lohan was reportedly offered six figures to appear (she never did.)

In season one, the cast/patients/contestants (truly, I’ve no idea how to describe them) were: Seth "Shifty Shellshock" Binzer from the band Crazy Town, actor Daniel Baldwin, adult film actress Mary Carey, Jaimee Foxworth (Judy from Family Matters), Jeff Conaway (Kenickie from Grease), wrestler Chyna, actress Brigitte Nielsen, MMA fighter Ricco Rodriguez, and former American Idol contestant Jessica Sierra. Most of these people were decently famous people, certainly not the kinds you would expect to otherwise see on a VH1 reality series. But they’d all publicly struggled with their various addictions and faced the world’s wrath for it. Conaway had spoken candidly for many years about his substance abuse issues. By the time he appeared on Celebrity Rehab, he was almost inconsolable.

(Gonna be honest: There aren’t many images in this piece because I did not feel great about using screenshots for obvious reasons.)

Researching this piece, I was fascinated by how inaccessible it is. It’s not all available online, which makes me wonder if VH1 either had a crisis of conscience or wanted to keep this mess away from contemporary audiences (and hot takes merchants such as myself.) I was surprised by how little of it was available on YouTube, a site that preserves even the most bottom-feeding clips of cruelty. Thank you (question mark?) to DailyMotion for remaining the old-school favourite of pirates everywhere.

There’s no other way to put it: watching this show made me feel dirty. In the first 30 seconds, as we’re introduced to the series premiere, we see Jeff Conaway slurring, crying, and being brought into rehab via wheelchair. This is spliced in with brief intros of other guests but also the cliffhanger reveal that Conaway ends up in hospital at some point. Pinsky says that not every patient will be there by the end of the show, either because he’ll kick them out or they’ll leave of their own volition, like it’s Big Brother or something.

Celebrity Rehab is shot like a TMZ paparazzi chase or an early 2000s indie drama, complete with handheld cameras and a kind of cinema verité tone that is somewhere between serious and sleaze. The opening shows us mugshots and pap photos of various celebrities in bad states, including Spears shaving her head, before Pinsky's voiceover declares, "Celebrity addiction is one of the hottest topics in the country [...] We've reached a time when the excessive use of drugs and alcohol has become glamourized and has even become a rite of passage for today's generation." Included in this montage are Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie, not because of any experiences they may have had with drugs and alcohol, but because they’re “party girls.”

Pinsky may claim this show is intended to “demystify” the process of rehab and save some lives, but when it’s presented in this reality TV format, such things are simply impossible. The “drama” of watching Jeff Conaway try to get clean as he stumbles and slurs his way through treatment is apparently not enough for the show, which treats every outbreak and conflict like they’re filming two Survivor contestants squabble over a campfire.

Conaway is especially tragic to watch. He's often deeply self-aware of his situation, talking about how he was given severe amounts of strong prescription painkillers after sustaining an injury on the production of Grease. "At this point, the cocaine... it just makes me feel normal," he says, after listing all of the pills he takes. He arrives at the treatment centre drinking champagne, and Pinsky seems outwardly snarky towards his "patient." I imagine he sees his approach as tough love but he sounds like every other reality TV side character. By the end of the first episode, he’s in an ambulance, sobbing and shaking from withdrawals. The teaser for the next episode focuses on two women in a pool with their nipples blurred out.

It’s hard to escape the sense that you’re meant to laugh at these poor people. When Chyna talks about believing she doesn’t have an issue with alcohol, the show cuts to her on The Surreal Life downing mini bottles of whisky and acting erratic. “I don’t need rehab,” she says, before moving onto her talking to Pinsky. The tone of how she says that phrase suggests the sentence wasn’t finished, but the show got what it wanted her to say. Keep in mind that she’d also just admitted to having experienced a life full of pain and abuse. It certainly wasn’t the time for the doctor in charge to ham it up for the camera.

If Celebrity Rehab’s intention was to show the cold hard reality of addiction and withdrawal then it does that to an extent, if only because putting a camera in front of someone coming down from cocaine and doing nothing else gets the job done. There’s certainly no glamour to seeing Seth Binzer smoking crack and admitting it’s ruining his life. Sending a camera crew to follow him around pre-rehab while he tries to buy drugs makes you wonder if the producers were excited to get such footage. What were their priorities for themselves and Seth, and which came first?

It’s almost impressive how the show found new lows to sink to as the years passed. In the third season, one of the patients was Heidi Fleiss, the former Hollywood madam. Prior to entering treatment, Fleiss was living in the middle of the desert in Nevada running a rare bird sanctuary. She was broke, alone, and dealing with addiction to methamphetamines, Xanax, and Valium. She was clearly in need of help, and seemed to be making some progress over the first couple of episodes. Then, they bring in a latecomer patient, Tom Sizemore. He and Fleiss had dated for a while, then he was convicted of domestic violence against her in 2003. The idea of Pinsky and his team deciding to put an abuser and his victim in a house together, while they’re both trying to withdraw from hard drugs, then film it and turn it into entertainment is a kind of evil that I’m shocked exists. They might as well have left some cocaine scattered across the table, such was the craven lack of care given towards them both. It's made all the more excruciating by how palpably real the emotions are between the pair. When they’re first brought together, it’s an agonizingly personal moment you feel like you shouldn’t have been allowed to watch.

Season three also features Mike Starr, the original bassist of Alice in Chains. Starr had a long and detailed history with drugs and alcohol. He had spent time behind bars for possession in 1994. Three years after Starr left the band, Alice in Chains went on permanent hiatus following the death of lead singer Layne Staley from an overdose. On Celebrity Rehab, Starr tearfully confesses that he believes he was the final person to see Staley alive. It’s hard to watch, as are most scenes with Starr. He doesn’t seem committed to treatment and often lacks lucidity. He frequently berates his fellow patients and is belligerent in a way that makes him easy to root against, like a typical reality show villain. Starr’s former bandmates were furious with the show, saying, “Mike deserves a better life than that.”

In season five (whose patients included Amy Fisher, Lindsay Lohan's dad, and actress Bai Ling), one individual was removed from the show supposedly because she didn't have any actual addiction issues. Michaele Salahi was a Real Housewives of D.C. star best known for that time she and her husband sneaked into a White House event. A Radar Online article said she had "a ton of issues but she clearly has no addiction issues, whatsoever." According to Salahi's husband, she had agreed to go on the show because Pinsky had offered to help treat her Multiple Sclerosis. The Celebrity Rehab "sources" said that Salahi was "complaining that Dr. Drew wasn't properly treating her MS" and that she was "all drama."

In its final season, Celebrity Rehab dropped the “celebrity” part and focused on real people, which only further exposed how gutless and greed-driven the entire set-up was. It’s highly doubtful that they were paid six figures to be there. I’ll be honest, I didn’t want to watch any of those episodes. By this point in the show’s history, it had long since stopped pretending to be in any way educational. This was just a TLC show. It was Intervention that didn’t stop when the patient entered rehab.

The old argument about the war movie genre is that it’s intrinsically impossible to depict the true horrors of war without glamourizing them through the tools of filmmaking. Films are meant to entertain us, so the craft of it cannot help but make something as abhorrent as the battlefield look cool. I wonder if there’s a similar case to be made for addiction: can you convey the pain and struggles of dependency without either making them look enticing or turning the subjects themselves into something to gawk at? Maybe Requiem for a Dream truly does convey the spiral of heroin and speed, but doesn’t Darren Aronofsky’s direction also do a lot of showing off that captures your attention first?

Here, it’s tough to separate the subject from the TV format. Reality TV is designed to add stings and build dramatic narratives out of the mundanities of our daily existences. Celebrity Rehab is not immune from this, with specifically-timed ad breaks and cliffhangers between episodes. This prioritizes format over people, and when the “stars” are drying out, how could they ever be positioned as anything other than puppets?

How can any of this be truly selfless and for the greater good when it’s being made for profit and the patients are being paid to attend? When does this stop being just another job? Many of these patients over the various seasons are reality stars and you can see them trying to juggle the expectations of both treatment and performance. The camera is there so you give it a little something, right? When Mary Carey brings her self-branded sex toys into rehab, and the shot lingers on her name across the box, is that a genuine oopsie on her part or a moment of self-promotion? And what is the producers’ responsibility there? As the New York Times noted when the show premiered, "Pinsky admits that using media to treat media addiction can seem fundamentally contradictory -- a way of baiting fame addicts with more fame." I don’t doubt the sincerity of many of these patients, but it’s also tough to ignore that many seem to be there because it’s a gig, and they’re going to take the money and use it for drugs. That seems to be what the show wants.

I doubt the good intentions of Pinsky but it’s made all the worse by the fact that Celebrity Rehab wasn’t taken seriously by audiences either. MadTV did skits mocking it. So did The Soup, and it was the patients who were derided. They were laughed at just like Britney Spears was. Addiction is an unpredictable monster with a surprisingly predictable series of expectations, and making jokes out of them is like shooting fish in a barrel. As Vulture wrote of the show in 2010, tying it into Charlie Sheen’s much-memed descent into public mania, “To anyone who has lived with one [an addict], they aren’t wacky, outrageous characters but an unmistakable collection of behaviours, assumptions, thought habits, speech patterns, and even syntax […] Even with all his wealth, career, and media access, Sheen does and says nearly the exact same things every other one does.”

Time named Jeff Conaway's distressing breakdown as one of 32 "epic moments" in reality TV history.

Addiction makes you awful. It makes you annoying and erratic, and you often have no idea how terribly you’re acting. You see that with Jeff Conaway, who seems barely conscious throughout the first season (he would return for the second) but is also outright cruel to many of his fellow patients. He gets into fights with Billy Baldwin, who seems to enjoy being the antagonist of the series. He acts like, well, a reality TV star, only he’s evidently not in control of himself for this performance. Celebrity Rehab was never sophisticated enough to engender empathy towards those who seemed to actively reject it. That’s what addiction does to you. It’s just easier to fit everyone into heroes and villains mode, even though the only “prize” they’re being made to fight for is their lives. The low-stakes squabbles of reality TV have no place among those who are perennially on the edge of death.

A year after the first season premiered, a spin-off was launched: Celebrity Rehab Presents Sober House. The idea was to show the recovering celebrities transitioning to a sober living facility after initial treatment. The house manager was Jennifer Giminez, a model and actress who had been through her own recovery journey with Pinsky. There was also a sex addiction spin-off, Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew (he sure does love to centre himself in every conversation, doesn't he?) All three shows were criticized by actual addiction experts for their poor treatment techniques and misguided priorities.

The central conflict between helping patients and making "good TV" was a key point of criticism. Dr. John J. Mariani, director of the Substance Treatment and Research Service at Columbia University, told The New York Times, "The problem here is that Dr. Drew benefits from their participation, which must have some powerful effects on his way of relating to them. He also has a vested interest in the outcome of their treatment being interesting to viewers, which is also not in their best interest. Treatment with conflicts of interest isn't treatment." Pinsky said that he was still working within the confines of medical decency, and that didn't clash with the demands of television. "The people that need what we have are watching VH1. Not the people watching educational TV, the NPR crowd. You gotta give 'em what they want so you can give 'em what they need." He saw it as a "bait and switch": offer trash but provide substance. Sure. Okay.

Hanging over the legacy, such as it is, of Celebrity Rehab is the death toll. As of the writing of this piece, 12 patients from the series have died: Seth Binzer, Jeff Conaway, Jason Davis, Rodney King, Tawny Kitaen, Joey Kovar, Joanie Laurer, Frankie Lons, Mindy McCready, Nikki McKibbin, Tom Sizemore, and Mike Starr. Not all died from drug or alcohol-related issues but most did. Addiction is tough to beat. The body can only take so much. When Mike Starr died, making him the first patient from the show to pass, Celebrity Rehab was still airing new episodes. He had been laughed at so much on the show and suddenly he was dead. Pinsky tweeted out his condolences upon hearing the news.

In May 2013, Pinsky announced that season six was the final season. He cited the criticism he received following those increasing deaths as an inciting moment. "I'm tired of taking all the heat. It's very stressful and very intense for me. To have people questioning my motives and taking aim at me because people get sick and die because they have a life-threatening disease, and I take the blame? Rodney King has a heart attack and I take blame for that? It's just ridiculous." It was always about him.

The indignities of Celebrity Rehab are all things that a true expert in addiction treatment would know to avoid, mainly by not putting it all on camera for a network that was home to reality shows about Scott Baio and Ted Nugent. Medical privacy is a sacred right we all have, and it’s all too easy for us to have our autonomy ripped away by government and media. The sham of the American healthcare system makes such exploitation all the easier (at the time of writing this piece, the doctor who sold Matthew Perry the ketamine that killed him – and referred to him as a “moron” who he could get lots of money out of – pleaded guilty.) Addiction treatment requires a deft touch, a safe space, and PRIVACY. Drew Pinsky opened the doors and sold seats for the humiliation.

Reality TV hasn’t gotten any less exploitative, but I do think it’s become less overtly mean. The current mould of the genre is that of high-camp performativity, an obvious show of exaggerated personalities and drinks-in-the-face that evokes classic soap operas more than “social experiments.” Many of these shows, like the American version of The Traitors, are packed with full-time reality stars who hop from show to show because they’re good at making TV out of nothing without descending into the outright seedy. That’s not to say it can’t be hurtful or bad for us all, but the paradigm shift still happened for a reason.

I could be wrong. Like I said earlier, this is so not my preferred genre of entertainment. Broey Deschanel’s video on the Scandoval issue showed how it doesn’t take long for the tangibly agreed-upon rules of structured reality TV to fall apart and for real people to get hurt (particularly when you invite an audience to pick sides and take things very personally.) TLC still loves to leer at fat people and call it educational. We’re also seeing way more reports of behind-the-scenes drama and a distinct lack of care towards contestants on various productions. But I do think there’s a difference between the era of Celebrity Rehab, Bridalplasty, There’s Something About Miriam, and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, and now. The closet we have to that now, I would argue, is the hellscape of MrBeast on YouTube, and generally, a lot of this content is now online (see every plastic surgeon posting TikToks of their operations.) I asked people on Twitter to name what they believed to be the most ethically repugnant reality show ever created, and the vast majority of responses were shows from the 2000s (although I was also introduced to a 2022 show called Adults Adopting Adults and hoo boy I will never sleep soundly again.)

When calling out the show for its treatment of his former colleague Mike Star, Alice in Chains drummer Jeff Kinney said, "It exploits people at their lowest point, when they're not in their right mind, and the sad part is, this is like entertainment for people when it's actually a life and death situation. I don't think it helps anybody and it makes entertainment out of people's possible death, and that's pathetic and it's stupid." The Boston Herald called it "heartless, exploitive and downright toxic" and said it "unwittingly documents an even more pernicious addiction awaiting clarification from the American Psychiatric Association: The craving on the part of some to win fame by living every moment of their lives on-camera, offering up every shred of dignity as if it will validate their worth." Both of these quotes really sum up how I felt by the end of my time with Celebrity Rehab. If reality TV’s pleasure, guilty or otherwise, lies in giving you permission to be a voyeur, this left me feeling like I’d committed a terrible crime. It’s stupid in the truest sense of the word.

Pinsky continues to offer his “advice” to the masses. He got on-board the anti-vaxx train in a big way after the COVID lockdown, which felt like a natural progression for his kind of quackery. Of course he was an RFK Jr. supporter.

It’s rare to see a show so undiluted in its cruelty, but for it to be cloaked in the insistence that its exploitation is for the good of some very vulnerable people makes everything that much harder to stomach. That’s why I find this show so evil, perhaps more evil than any other show I’ve seen.

Well, it’s this or The Swan, but that’s a topic for another day…

Thanks for reading. This one was… well, researching it was tough. Do You Remember issues are usually for paid subscribers only but I wanted to share this one with everybody because it was a big undertaking and I’d like the world to know just how much I hate Drew Pinsky.

You can check out more of my work scattered across the internet. For Pajiba.com, I reviewed Joker: Folie a Deux (it’s mostly dull but also kind of fascinatingly mean) and Megalopolis (hated it), and did a deep-dive (heh) into Steven Spielberg’s defunct submarine-themed restaurant.

The most recent issue of the Gossip Reading Club is available to all subscribers. It’s all about that time Vogue did propaganda for the Syrian dictator’s wife.

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