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TV JUNKIE (review)

Review by Tony Pacitti

At one particularly depressing low-point in this found footage documentary, former TV newsman and crack fiend Rick Kirkham is about to be arrested in his kitchen and just like almost every other moment in his life, he has a camera rolling.

The cop asks him to turn it off. Kirkham tells him it’s a press camera, so the cop, deadpan, points out that it’s a Sony handy-cam before following up with an almost sympathetic, “Are you in a working capacity?”

Kirkham is rarely seen in a working capacity, even when he is at work, first for local TV news, then at his career zenith as Inside Edition’s resident daredevil reporter in the early 1990s.

The film, which covers the better part of a decade as culled from over 3000 hours of film and video footage Kirkham had shot of himself since he was a teenager, is a curated self-portrait of the contradicting monster that is drug addiction.

One minute he loves his kids and couldn’t be happier to be clean, the next he’s ducking out after his son’s first birthday to score crack. We see him give his testimonials, outlining calmly what he hates about himself and the drug, while he makes a tin foil pipe and blazes away.

The film is almost entirely a series of low points, often punctuated by Kirkham knowingly telling the camera that it can’t really get any lower followed immediately by him running out for drugs and managing to find some new low.

The work apartment he rents in New York during his time at Inside Edition is almost clichéd in how shitty and TV-drug-den it looks. We see him lose two jobs. He almost loses his children on several occasions and ultimately loses his wife. The only high point to come in this story happens in the end after a six year leap forward where Kirkham finally manages stay clean because this is framed as a redemption story and that’s what’s supposed to happen.

If that bit about redemption sounds cynical it’s because it’s supposed to, but that cynicism is aimed at the filmmakers and not Kirkham’s own struggle.

The directors and editors who combed through this footage tacked two cheesy, simplified bookends onto something savagely personal and far from simple. They tinkered where they didn’t need to, almost as if they were trying to establish a pre-addiction Kirkham for the audience to hang their heart on and pull for in the end. They failed in that respect because even when he’s apologizing to the camera during brief bouts of sobriety Kirkham still comes across like a smug asshole in, not surprisingly, that phony TV news host kind of way. It just seems unbelievable that given how much he filmed of himself there was no better pre- and post-addict Kirkham footage to use than what they give us.

Documentaries on addiction will always come and go, but this intimate self-portrait is tragically unique in spite of its curators’ attempts to present it as something more typical.

The fact that Kirkham is a full-tilt crack addict and had the nerve—or just the minor TV star ego—to document it all is sort of mind blowing. This is a man who seemed to have everything yet he willingly filmed himself smoking crack. Lots and lots of crack. It’s a confession that only Kirkham could have coaxed out of himself; all of the sadness and dishonesty of an addict amplified by all of the canned charm of a TV anchorman.

TV Junkie can be seen via iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, Playstation, Xbox, SundanceNow, Google, Youtube and is now available on DVD
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