ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that those cultural commentators and entertainment journalists who have somewhat carelessly lobbed the generic moniker freak show at all manner of reality television programs are not as far from the mark in their assessment as it initially might appear. It focuses almost exclusively on examples drawn from A&Es Intervention because, as the flagship reality addiction program, it laid the ground work both production- and reception-wise, both narratively and ideologically for subsequent offerings within the genre. While freak show is used to describe a wide range of deviations from the perceived status quo, the phrase gets an inordinate amount of mileage in discussions about reality television programming. The lived experiences of addiction, then, always and already pre-suppose the identification, containment, and annihilation of the addict. From the freak show and the inebriate asylums, then, contemporary Americans have inherited an image of the addict as what Rachel Adams has, in reference to freak show performers, termed the intolerable abject.
