Fuse Does “Intervention”: Compelling TV Or Really Icky Way For Bands To Get Publicity?

noah | October 3, 2008 2:00 am

In an effort to distinguish itself from its increasingly distracted-from-music competitor MTV, music-video channel Fuse has decided to develop a few pieces of original programming that take beloved shows from TV past and present and refashion them to be more about music–for example, the Queen For A Day Mach II show Redemption Song, or the rock n’ roll dating game You Rock, Let’s Roll. But the new Fuse show I was most intrigued by was Rock Bottom, which is basically aiming to be like Intervention, but for bands. The first seven minutes of the premiere are above, and they kind of gave me an icky feeling–but one that was distinctly different from the agonizing curiosity I feel when I happen to catch the A&E show.

Maybe it’s the fact that the first band profiled, the post-grunge L.A. band Motor Gun Hotel, describes itself as a “high dose of adrenalized euphoria known as rock n roll”–and that description was inexplicably cut and pasted over to the site for a show that’s, you know, supposed to be about one of the members trying to quit the sorts of things that one takes in “doses.” Look at the group’s MySpace page, and you see that it’s one of the many Los Angeles bands that are working the city’s overstuffed circuit, aiming for a slot on the Motley Crue tour, trying to figure out just what can make them “different.” And you can almost hear the gears turning: Hey! What about a reality show? It worked for Flickerstick (sort of).

This is not to discount the fact that the focus of the Motor Gun Hotel episode may have serious problems with addiction, and may actually need someone to say, “hey, quit it with the opiates, you’re fucking up our chance at stardom/your life.” But it’s hard to take the motivations behind the show seriously when so much of its promotional site is about glorifying the bands’ rock and roll lifestyles, or putting their music in front of an audience (the copy for a future episode calls the band depicted “your new favorite twin-fronted band, which is a description that makes no sense.) In contrast, Intervention–which has exploitation issues of its own, don’t get me wrong–does all it can to semi-anonymize the people it’s cameras are trailing (only using first names, etc.) in a sort of nod to 12-step programs, as well as a tacit acknowledgement of the idea that they may need to take their lives in an entirely new direction in order to truly get better, instead of just repeating old patterns minus the drugs that helped them live in the day-to-day in the first place. But the idea that so much of Rock Bottom‘s focus seems to be on getting better as a means to the end of “making it big” makes me wonder just who, if anyone, is actually going to benefit from this in the long run.

Rock Bottom [Fuse.tv] Motor Gun Hotel [MySpace]