(Sort Of) Quick 'Celebrity Rehab' Thought Of The Day

Posted at 3:45 PM Nov 20, 2008

By Kenny Herzog

I've been the first person to exalt the twisted, if pioneeringly exploitative, virtues of VH1's Celebrity Rehab. However, I had an admittedly belated, entirely appropriate response to their most recent episode (which I caught in fittingly belated fashion during A.M. reruns), one likely to carry over to tonight's latest installment and permanently impede my objective attraction to Dr. Drew and his addiction-addled B-listers.

Model/human opiate closet Amber Smith was reveling in her license to be a epithet-sewing bitch during a group session, lamenting that she was always made to suppress her anger in real-life situations. They flashed to Rodney King, who flashed a supportive grin and made a quip to lighten the mood.

And then I thought, "Wait a second, this is Rodney Fucking King? What on earth about any of these peoples' private traumas parallels the grand, culturally shifting scale with which his moment of public downfall was played out?" Sure, I'd considered King's christening as a "celebrity" for the series a bit odd from the get-go. But as the participants' treatment has evolved, and they begin to connect in many ways, there's also an increasingly apparent separation between the police-abuse victim's perdicament and that of, say, Rod Stewart's kid.

It seems King's story would be better told, his path to recovery better documented, for a more individualized project. At the very least, a la Tom Sizemore's bizarre-o self-chronicled downward spiral, and certainly at the highest plane of expectation a formal, hour-long interview/short film for a network like HBO.

Which leads my cynical mind to wonder (since the latter suggestion had to have crossed the minds of serious journalistic outlets by now): Is King himself agreeing to undermine the gravity of what happened on March 3, 1991, in order to get the simultaneous catharsis of rehabilitation and a degree of fetishized pop-culture relevance? I wouldn't deign to presume anything about, or be able to relate to, the head state of a man like King, given what he's been through. But you can't help but wonder. And if it were in fact true, perhaps be compelled toward an even greater degree of sympathy.