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Sex Rehab With Dr. Drew
10 p.m. Sundays, VH1 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14, suggestive dialogue and coarse language)
Drew Pinsky, M.D., first started dispensing syndicated radio advice 25 (!) years ago, about our bodies, ourselves and the gooeyness in between.
In "Sex Rehab With Dr. Drew," a convalescent slog Sunday nights on VH1, one starts to wonder whether the doctor's workaholism is his own drug of choice, a behavior he cannot curb, mixed with an addiction to being seen. How many Dr. Drew radio and TV shows and books do there need to be?
Whatever contact high we got from the first season of "Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew" (when pathetic Jeff Conaway screamed his way through weeks of enforced therapy and detox with a group of other addicted has-beens) wore off by the second season, and visiting the "Sober House" spinoff series seemed a bleak proposition indeed.
Now it's sex. Which has always been Dr. Drew's forte, but as the black Town Cars and tinted-windowed SUVs pull up once again to the teak-gated Pasadena Recovery Center and disgorge washed-up celebrity passengers for a 21-day stay, it's difficult to know why Dr. Drew has this need to treat them.
Then again, rare is the TV doctor-expert who is able to balance his own fame with the Hippocratic oath, and Dr. Drew has always hewed toward the high road. There's no real reason to doubt his professional concern; there's just a forlorn feeling to the whole enterprise. When will Dr. Drew realize that he cannot cure Hollywood of Hollywood, that the franchise has gone too far? It's gross, and you should not be watching this, and you should also scoot over to make room for me.
Anyone who has watched one of Dr. Drew's shows now knows that it's not hard to find celebs willing to spill their sex addictions here, because there's no such thing as bad exposure. But it's immediately obvious in "Sex Rehab" that the definition of "celebrity" is getting too broad.
One patient is James Lovett, a washed-up surfer, who now misses out on waves because he's indoors, surfing porn; another is Phil Varone, the drummer for Skid Row, up to his glassy eyes in groupies; Penny Flame, a dominatrix porn star, arrives and submits to being called Jennifer, her real name, and wonders why oh why she has intimacy issues.
Most sadly, former swimsuit model Amber Smith, a "Celebrity Rehab" alum, arrives and tearfully tells Dr. Drew that now that she's conquered pain pills, the real issue (really) is sex.
If that's what she wants us all to think, fine, but we wait in vain for the doctor to call her out on the actual disorder from which she seems to suffer - a problem he's actually written a book about already. Amber is addicted to her own narcissism, and to fame.
He's too kind, that Dr. Drew.
