The Longer I'm Sober, the Less I Can Tolerate Trash TV
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The Longer I’m Sober, the Less I Can Tolerate Trash TV

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watch-what-happensAugust 13 2009 was a big day in early sobriety for me. Did I take a day-counting chip? Find a sponsor? Resist an urge to drink? Nope. It was when I witnessed one housewife pull a wig off another in a now infamous episode of The Real Housewives of Atlanta and my entire summer was made.

In my mind, this iconic wine bar brawl encapsulates what the entire Real Housewives franchise is all about: pour liquor on fabulously unstable people and watch them implode. With just over seven months of sobriety under my belt, the Real Housewives’ reality provided an escape from my own. What a relief it was to watch someone else take the prize for biggest irrational drunken disaster in the room.

The secret to RHOA (as junkies who watch regularly call it) is high-strung personalities who become even more off the charts after a few glasses of white wine. (What is it with white wine and these shows anyway? They all guzzle it down like water. Does Bravo secretly own a vineyard?)

The appeal of the Atlanta cast was pretty obvious to me. Combative, erratic Nene Leakes is basically the human embodiment of my entire ninth step amends while slurring pot stirring Kim Zolciak serves as a visceral reminder of what it could look like if I started drinking again. My first summer sober, the ladies of Bravo provided the sort of first class mind-melting I so desperately needed.

I will go out on a ledge here and say that Bravo is the most drinkingest network on television. From Vanderpump Rules and Shahs of Sunset to Below the Deck and Ladies of London, every show on the network seems to feature at least one scene a week wherein the cast members meet for martinis to talk about someone else, meet for wine to talk about something that happened or meet for margaritas to find out what somebody said about them. There’s always a fashion show or charity event or over the top birthday bash where the loose lips are made even looser by booze. Even Watch What Happens Live, the network’s signature talk show hosted by Cohen, features a bar and cocktails every episode. It’s as if Bravo is saying, “Trust us. These shows will be better after a few drinks.”

It’s hard to argue with the formula. Lord knows the real drama always started for me after a few shots of tequila. Major confrontations, text wars and shoe throwing seemed to always go down around drink six. And yet, I didn’t find these shows triggering; they had a more “Thank freaking God that isn’t me” sort of quality, almost like they were anti-drinking PSAs but with more screeching and spray tans.

That summer I pretty much gobbled up every show the network had to offer. Bipolar judgey Patti Stanger of the Millionaire Matchmaker? Sign me up. The stylishly chaotic world of Rachel Zoe? Sure, why not? Any sort of competition with people making things and talking smack about one another? You bet. At this particular juncture, I wasn’t really in the mindset to ingest thought provoking documentaries or abstract foreign films. Bravo delivered fizzy buckets of crazy that I could enjoy from my living room without having to participate in real life. I’m not sure if watching reality TV made me a more compassionate person as some studies suggest but it certainly made the time pass and provided diversion from my own reality.

As I stayed sober, I still leaned on my Bravo crutch but also implemented things like novels, movies and TV shows that were actually scripted. TV was my first therapist dating back to watching Cyndi Lauper videos after a tough day at school so I wasn’t going to abandon it entirely. But around my second year of sobriety, something changed: I utterly outgrew the housewives and the rest of the hard drinking horses in Andy Cohen’s stable.

This coincided with the debut of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. The richest and most glamorous cast yet, the ladies of the 90210 were also the most problematic. As if watching poor Taylor’s life collapse wasn’t painful enough, there was the little issue of Kim Richards. Richards, for the uninitiated, is a former child star from delicious Disney camp like Escape to Witch Mountain who now as a housewife had certainly seen better days. Tanned to a point of blotchy redness and croaking every line with a two-packs-of-Marlboros a day rasp, Richards certainly looked like “one of us.”

From episode one, Kim and her beleaguered sister Kyle always had some sort of unspoken drama simmering between them that, as a longtime viewer of this type of crap, I knew would explode dramatically. After months of bizarre behavior, it was revealed that Kim had indeed battled addiction and she even admitted to being an alcoholic in season 2 on the reunion show, no less. Despite stints in rehab and People magazine articles, Kim did what a lot of we alcoholics do—she relapsed. A lot. But unlike most of us, her struggles were fodder for a TV show. And just like that my Bravo obsession was lifted. It felt inherently icky to watch this poor woman and her real-life recovery treated like some kind of sideshow for a cable network. I knew firsthand how hard it was to get and stay sober and so grabbing the bucket of popcorn and watching someone try to do the same thing felt like it crossed the line. Likewise, I found other shows like Hoarders or Intervention to be really gross as they paraded out mental illness as some sort of entertainment. The rest of the world could enjoy Andy Cohen and his chablis sipping sirens but I was done.

Well, sort of. I’d be flat out lying if I told you that I didn’t watch reality television anymore. But in my defense, shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race and The Great British Baking Show make the world a better place by simply existing. Likewise, watching The Bachelor makes me grateful to be sober, gay and great at Twitter.

Alas, I do hold onto a bit of Bravo: Try as I might I just can’t quit Top Chef. But I can justify this—like, did you know that Top Chef often has sober contestants like last year’s finalist Gregory Gourdet? Maybe it’s because the show actually requires some skill and creativity instead of just a host of sad women drinking and yelling or maybe I just really like seeing people screw up risotto or maybe I want to secretly be Padma Lakshmi but year after year, I tune into this cooking competition.

And so what? I’ve quit hot mess TV. If I hit a Bravo bottom and have to get reality TV sober, I’ll let you guys know.

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About Author

Sean Paul Mahoney is a writer, playwright, blogger, tweeter, critic, podcaster and smartass for hire. He lives in Portland, Oregon with two ridiculous cats and one amazing husband. His book of essays Now That You’ve Stopped Dying will be published by Zephyr Bookshelf in fall 2018.