“Samantha Who?” and “Life”–great new TV shows with good portrayals of alcoholism
“Samantha Who?” and “Life”
The Fall TV season offers two terrific new shows featuring alcoholism as primary and secondary themes. “Samantha Who?” stars Christina Applegate, who has become an excellent actress (who would have known after her role as the daughter in “Married with Children”?). She plays Sam, who after spending eight days in a coma remembers nothing of her life. She is aghast to discover that she was not a “nice” person, but was instead an alcoholic slut who regularly cheated on her non-addicted boyfriend, was a spendthrift and was excellent in her job working for a disreputable company. The question is, can people change–or not? Those of us who understand the difference between a practicing alcoholic and one in recovery know the answer, but the show responds in what is so far a very amusing style. The irony that the uninitiated may miss is the reason she was in the coma: she’d been a victim of a hit-and-run accident. It’s a case of alcoholic runs into alcoholic, who is “cured” by the offending alcoholic.
The other new show is “Life,” which so far is comparable to “House” and the early episodes of “Law and Order” in terms of quality, but with a dramatically different flair. Charlie Crews (Damian Lewis) is a cop wrongly imprisoned for murder who, after serving 15 years, is released and returns to the force. (“Life was his sentence. Life is what he got back.”) His ex-partner Bobby Stark (Brent Sexton) may have framed Crews and the addiction aware will sense alcoholism, while his partner Dani Reese (played by a sultry Sarah Shahi) is clearly alcoholic (whose alcoholic behaviors so far have revolved around picking up strangers in bars). Crews practices Zen, which is an excellent technique to relax when dealing with the extraordinary injustice of having been wrongly imprisoned (rid oneself of attachment to impermanent things, including ego, and let go of all things that are not really important in order to experience a deeper meaning and understanding of life), and his style of dealing with crime is not dissimilar to Vincent D’Onofrio’s Detective Robert “Bobbi” Goren (“Law and Order: Criminal Intent”). It’s not perfect: a fellow cop asks Dani, “How come you’re at AA? It was drugs, not alcohol,” to which Dani responds, “It was a lot of things,” rather than the more appropriate response, “alcohol is a drug; it just wasn’t my drug of choice.” On the other hand, another alcoholic admits, “One thing I can always be honest about–I am a liar.” When there are so few accurate portrayals of alcoholism, we’ll settle for one that gets at least a large part of it right, especially when the rest of the show is superb.