A&E Cancels ‘Intervention’
A&E has canceled Intervention after 13 seasons.
The final five episodes of the award-winning series will begin airing Thursday, June 13 at 9 pm. The docuseries took home the Emmy for outstanding reality series in 2009.
“As Intervention comes to an end, we’re proud to have paved the way for such an original and groundbreaking series,” said David McKillop, executive vice president of programming at A&E Network. “We’re honored to have been a part of the 243 interventions since its premiere in March of 2005, leading to the 156 individuals that are currently sober to this day.”
A&E is calling the final five episodes the most “intense” and “gripping” stories yet. The premiere episode will focus on Jessica, a 29-year-old squatter who is addicted to heroin. Subsequent episodes will introduce Dana, a mother addicted to painkillers and crack cocaine, 34-year-old Gina, a heroin addict, and Kalia, a young woman suffering from a fatal eating disorder.
Intervention has not been without its criticism. When the show premiered in 2005, The Boston Globe writer Matthew Gilbert called it “an exercise in fraud, as it fools its addicts into participating.” Gilbert slammed the series for using false pretenses to encourage addicts to “expose their darkest behaviors to the cameras” and said, “The addicts are not aware they’re about to have a very extreme makeover forced upon them.”
Similarly, Salon questioned if the series was “the most exploitative reality show ever, or a necessarily brutal snapshot of the perils of addiction,” and cited examples of addiction memoirs such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces(which we now know to be fabricated) and Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story.
“Twelve-step programs are often focused on the lowest moments in an addict’s experience, in fact, and those in recovery tend to recount these moments freely if they think it can help someone else,” Heather Havrilesky wrote. “… That doesn’t mean that, on the whole, Intervention doesn’t serve some greater good.”
Are you disappointed that Intervention has been canceled? Do you think the show has done more good than harm?
