What's the Most Accurate TV Show About Recovery?
Television producers have been telling stories about alcoholics and recovering alcoholics with more empathy and accuracy than ever, and there are more than a handful of shows with characters in recovery.
TVGuide.com assembled a panel of five alcoholism experts -- that is, recovering alcoholics -- to help determine what contemporary show has the most accurate depiction of recovery from drug and/or alcohol addiction.
TVGuide.com's panel of recovering alcoholics sat down to watch episodes of each of these shows and discuss how true to their own experiences each of these shows are.
Recovery Road, which premiered in January and was canceled last week, was a teen drama based on a novel by Blake Nelson.
The pilot opens with Maddie waking up on the lawn after a night of partying with no memory of what happened and no idea where she parked her car and ends with her admitted to rehab and ready to try getting sober.
Barring the oxymoron of "residential outpatient" and a certain frothy falsity of tone, Recovery Road gets a lot of details right, according to our panel of experts.
The panel's consensus is that Recovery Road is not as emotionally heavy as their own experiences, but does a good job at depicting recovery for a young audience.
"For young people watching this, it's good for them to see that you can be doing well on the outside, but none of that really matters when you're going through active addiction," says Olivia.
The Netflix dramedy Flaked, about a long-sober man who begins drinking again but continues to act like an upstanding member of his local recovery community, is at least partially rooted in co-creator and star Will Arnett's own experience.
Two members of the panel do think Flaked accurately reflects a certain strain of AA usually seen in small towns where everyone is all up in each other's business and a large percentage of AA members are middle-aged men, as well as sad, petty dry drunks who got sob