Abscess Hollywood –
June 6, 2019 – Fatal Addiction: Hollywood’s Secret Epidemic, which premiered on Wednesday night, is built around a perceived tension at the core of the entertainment industry: widespread celebrity addiction, juxtaposed with the lavish party lifestyle that’s often glamorized in Hollywood productions. The special lists “offenders” like Ted and Superbad in the same ominous tone it uses to read out celebrity overdoses, insisting that these films beat “drugs make you cool” messaging straight into the soft, developing brains of our nation’s youth. This overdone argument could also be seen as hypocritical, coming from a sensationalizing special that occasionally careens into lurid true-crime territory. When Fatal Addiction tries to go big, like making sweeping arguments about the societal effects of binge-drinking in high school comedies, it falls short.
