(TV) Junkies in Need of an Intervention
On Addictive Spectatorship and Recovery Television
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11660770 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hunter Hargraves (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 71-99 |
| Publication date | 2015-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Camera Obscura Feminism Culture and Media Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0270-5346 • E-ISSN: 1529-1510 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/02705346-2885453 |
| OpenAlex | W2283665836 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
This article charts the emergence of a subgenre of reality television, recovery television, in which individuals with compulsive behaviors or addictions to unhealthy substances are profiled and reformed through a staged intervention. It argues that recovery television is instrumental to theorizing addictive spectatorship, a concept that takes seriously the notion that television may act affectively as a drug. Recovery television, it claims, helps viewers negotiate their own relationship to television consumption. Furthermore, such a negotiation augments notions of neoliberal citizenship advanced by scholars of reality television; if the genre of reality television is linked to consumer technologies of self-improvement, recovery television focuses instead on the more stigmatized—yet equally as necessary—forms of citizenship embodied by addicts. Using an episode of the reality series Intervention (A&E, 2005–13), the article contends that reality television's structuring of affect provides audiences with a motive to disidentify with its subjects—in essence, a spectatorial practice of embracing discomfort—in order to disavow one's own addictions
Addiction · Advertising · Business · Intervention (counseling · Psychiatry · Cinema and Media Studies · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,4 |
| Citation span | 2016 - 2023 (8) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |