Now I just feel dirty

A little sidenote: I know that I often post on shows days after they originally aired, but sometimes that's how it goes when you have a baby. Thank god for Tivo. I finally watched last week's episode of Celebrity Rehab last night. Like I mentioned in a previous entry, I don't really feel good about admitting that I watch this show. For a while, I could sort of argue that it actually provides a service, giving outsiders insight into what rehab is really like, what drives people to use and become addicts. But now, after last night's show...I'm not so sure.

Last week's episode was titled "Graduation," which was a little bit odd to me because it led up to but did not include the graduation. In fact, by the title alone, I assumed it was the last episode, but it's not. Anyways, the main focus of this and (partially) the last episode was pushing the celebs into going to a "sober living" program after graduation. And here's where I start to feel dirty because I'm sorry, from what I can tell, these people seem nowhere near being ready to go back out into the real world, even "sober living," which I'm assuming is a euphemism for halfway house. To me, it seems to border very precariously on professionally irresponsible to release them, especially the ones who still won't admit they have a real problem! This is when I start to really wonder about the artifice of the whole show. Why was the program only 18 days? Is that a standard course of treatment (for some reason, 28 days seems to be a common number in my head), or is that just what they decided they up front would be an adequate amount of shooting time? I'll give VH1 and Dr. Drew a small small amount of kudos for at least managing to provide them with 3 months of the sober living program, all paid for, but it still doesn't seem right to me. Especially since it seems like everyone is looking for excuses not to go, even though it's going to be gratis (again).

This show makes me sad. Sad for the people on it, sad for the people not on it, sad for America. But I've committed this much time to it, so I may as well see it to the end. Thank goodness there's only one episode left.