Intervention Canada Debuts This Week

Now with 50-per-cent more polite interventions and much stronger beer!

We tend to roll our eyes and quietly ponder moving to New Zealand whenever we hear of another American reality TV show getting a remake for Canadian screens, but we'll make an exception for this Friday's debut of Intervention Canada. The Emmy-winning mini-documentaries on people struggling with addiction and the inevitable intervention by family and friends is one of the more fascinating (and often harrowing) products of the reality TV era, even if it always feels a tad too voyeuristic when you're watching it. The Canadian debut kicks off with back-to-back episodes on the Slice network this Friday, one of which features a family man whose life unravelled after smoking crack for the first time at the age of 50. Our hopes? That the producers take their cameras to the Arctic to show just how badly drugs and alcohol have ravaged some of the country's most remote communities, or make an expose on painkiller abuse in hockey.