Gee golly, our popular culture is so sick, here's a new low. Danny Bonaduce has a new reality show and the nation can watch him descend into his own self made hell. I'm gonna pin the NY Times article up. Lets just pray that Jesus touch him, that the Lord have mercy on him and send someone into Danny's life to minister the Word of Grace.

I thank God He had me get rid of that lousy satellite dish a few years back. Brethern pray for the man, but don't watch the show.

(as you read this article, you will realize the only reason they all go forward with the show, is their god money tells them to continue with it.)

An Excruciating Excess of Reality


By KATE AURTHUR
Published: September 4, 2005
DURING a scene in the fifth episode of VH1's new reality series "Breaking Bonaduce," Danny Bonaduce, the former child star from "The Partridge Family," is playing with his 10-year-old daughter, Isabella. "Daddy, what happened to your wrists?" she asks, looking at bandages he is wearing. As she swings in and out of the frame, Mr. Bonaduce lies to her. "Oh, it's nothing," he says with a slight grimace. "Daddy's just not a very handy guy when it comes to installing windows."




What actually happened to Mr. Bonaduce's wrists is that he slashed them after his wife, Gretchen, asked him for a divorce. It was the last desperate act in a long, crazy night that started with hours of drinking and taking pills, and it caused him to land in the psychiatric ward.

Before she raised the subject of divorce, Mrs. Bonaduce had asked the cameras to leave, so her husband's suicidal gesture and subsequent hospitalization were not filmed. But the events that led up to them were: when as he drank himself into a rage, when he yelled at the television production crew ("I will cripple him for the rest of his life!" he says about a producer) and when he made threats toward his wife ("If she doesn't get on the phone right now," he says at one point, "there will be no stopping me."). These are just a few of the excruciating moments from his life as it fell to pieces. And they will soon be broadcast for all the world to see beginning Sept. 11.

That wasn't the plan when VH1 conceived of the show. "No normal person expects someone to slit their wrists on your reality show," Michael Hirschorn, the channel's executive vice president of programming and production, said in a recent interview. "If you're taking your sailboat out, you'd like a strong wind, you just don't expect a hurricane."

The rough weather, however, was not completely without warning. Over the years, Mr. Bonaduce has attracted a good deal of negative publicity because of multiple arrests and his struggles with addiction - though he was also able to achieve success in radio and as an occasional talking head (on shows like VH1's "In Search of the Partridge Family"). But his marriage of 15 years suffered a blow recently when he had an affair. His dodgy kind of fame well suited the Bonaduces for VH1's brand of "celebreality" programming, and the Bonaduces agreed to allow the network to chronicle their marital counseling.

Soon after the show began filming, however Mr. Bonaduce fell off the wagon. Not only did he binge drink - viewers will see him downing an entire bottle of vodka in a single guzzle at one point - but he also started taking Vicodin and, as part of an obsessive exercise regimen, injecting steroids. During the show, he becomes increasingly muscular and tightly wound. He also becomes verbally abusive toward his wife and their therapist, Dr. Garry Corgiat. After the suicide attempt, Dr. Corgiat refused to work with Mr. Bonaduce until he got in-patient treatment for his substance abuse. VH1 executives found a clinic near Los Angeles, and Mr. Bonaduce checked into rehab.

Over breakfast at the Argyle Hotel in Los Angeles last month, the Bonaduces, who are still together, recounted their experiences of the past few months. "My behavior is humiliating," Mr. Bonaduce said about what the audience will see on the show, which neither of them has watched. "Right now, I'm embarrassed in front of a crew of 20, 1 doctor and 1 wife. Sept. 12, I will be embarrassed in front of millions."

AS the life of the Bonaduces, including Isabella and Dante (age 4), shaped up to be less like the endearing dysfunction of "The Osbournes" and more like the viciousness of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" VH1 considered abandoning the project. Jeff Olde, the channel's senior vice president of series production, said that even the earliest sessions the Bonaduces had with Dr. Corgiat gave him and the channel's other executives pause.

"Therapy was a very revealing process for them," Mr. Olde said. VH1 had shot the pilot, along with the couple's first sessions with the psychologist, during the fall. In those early sessions, Mrs. Bonaduce expressed uncertainty about her commitment to her husband. Then months passed before therapy and filming began again. "I think they were ready to explode, really," Mr. Olde said. "That gate had been opened up. Some really, really intense stuff was coming up in their therapy sessions, and at the end of the day, we didn't want to get in the way of these people's marriage."

The Bonaduces wed on their first date, which was in 1990. Faced with the news that there would be no sex without marriage, Mr. Bonaduce - drunk at the time - called a minister. Despite this harebrained beginning, they say they have been devoted to each other ever since, even through some very rough patches. And that, he says, is why the recent fissures between them were so unsettling, and why he returned to substance abuse and other irrational behavior.

"This is where I get all psycho - everybody was out to facilitate my demise," Mr. Bonaduce said, trying to explain his delusional thinking during the filming of the show before he entered rehab. "Dr. Garry thinks I'm no good for her, that I'm a big mistake for Gretchen. 'You're trying to kill me,' is the way I saw it. So it became very adversarial."

The twice-a-week sessions with Dr. Corgiat - a psychologist whom everyone calls Dr. Garry, following the standard set by teletherapists like Dr. Phil (McGraw) - were filmed at the Sunset-Gower Studios in Hollywood, in a replica of his office. On the show, he asks Mr. Bonaduce directly whether he's using steroids, he grills Mrs. Bonaduce about whether her husband has ever hit her or their children (she adamantly says he has not) and as weeks go by, he grows visibly and outspokenly alarmed at what he sees.

In a restaurant in Venice Beach, Dr. Corgiat - tanned, fit and inquisitive - recently recalled what those counseling sessions were like. "Oh, man," he said, rolling his eyes. "I thought it was going to be celebrity shrinkdom. And I was going to tell them some very clever, insightful things, and they would integrate them. And they were going to get better! It's a lot more real than that. Everybody really has their pants down on that show." If "Breaking Bonaduce" rewrites the rules about how far televised therapy can go, it also does something even more daring - practically unheard of - for an unscripted program: it acknowledges that these events are being filmed for broadcast. Dr. Corgiat and the Bonaduces, for example, regularly refer to the show and the cameras during sessions. Most poignantly, in the fourth episode, Mr. Bonaduce says to Dr. Corgiat: "I never expected any of this. I thought this would be the best thing that ever happened, because I'd have another TV show and it makes me happy and it's what I'm good at. But now I see my marriage is dissolving." He starts sobbing.

The day after his suicide attempt - the "deal breaker," in Mr. Olde's words - executives met to discuss canceling the plans for the show. "We've all worked on a lot of reality shows where a lot of people get really, really drunk and do some crazy things, but Danny's behavior was on the edge," he said. "We would not have continued shooting that show, there was no way."

They consulted with Dr. Corgiat, who recalled saying: "He's in a drug-induced psychosis. This is not O.K. I'm not doing this - this is unethical, immoral. We need to take care of this guy."

But Mr. Olde said that when he and Claire McCabe, an executive producer for VH1, talked to Mrs. Bonaduce, "she really begged us to keep filming."

Mrs. Bonaduce explained: "I wanted to use every leverage that I could to get him to get help. Because Danny loves to be on TV. I expected them to say, 'You know what, you guys are just too crazy and we don't want any part of this.' And when they didn't, I literally started to cry because I couldn't believe they didn't cut us loose. They stuck around. It was amazing to me."

Mr. Bonaduce insists he would not have agreed to go into rehab had VH1 abandoned the project. "I pushed them to film," he said. "VH1 said: 'You've gone too far. We can't film you - you're dying.' I thought, What are you talking about? You'll have a great show if I die. What's wrong with you, not rolling on my death? So that surprised me."

Was sticking with their troubled star - and finding him a rehab facility that would allow cameras - a true act of beneficence on VH1's part? "I think the psychotherapeutic term is 'codependency,' " Mr. Hirschorn said, "where the network becomes codependent to the subject." If filming had stopped, of course, there would not have been a series. But Mr. Hirschorn insisted that wasn't the network's motivation. "Even the most cynical, self-serving interpretation would suggest that if somebody really did themselves harm, that would be really terrible for a television network," he said. "That would be something both personally I could not have on my conscience, and corporately would be horrible for VH1."

Mr. Bonaduce completed the drug-and-alcohol program at the beginning of June, and since then, he said, he has been sober. He was fired from his radio job, which he said paid $1 million a year. (The radio station, Star 98.7, did not return calls asking for comment.) Today he attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings daily, and hangs out at home.

At the Argyle Hotel, the Bonaduces said they were nervous, about both the show's looming premiere date and about their being interviewed. Mr. Bonaduce's hands shook, and he had to be talked into ordering food. "I didn't sleep last night," Mrs. Bonaduce said. About her desire for divorce only a few months earlier, she said, "I was just trying to shake his reality - he just had lost control completely, and everything he was doing and saying was really freaking me out."

Mr. Bonaduce said he felt nearly worshipful of his wife, but added, "It makes me nervous to give her too many compliments, because when do I become obsessive again?" Since rehab, he said, "the old me is kind of dissipating, and that's a good thing." He added: "But there's no new me. It's a bizarre, precarious place to be. I'm really going to miss me."

Mr. Olde said he hoped that critics and viewers were able to see past the sensationalism of "Breaking Bonaduce." "It's such an easy shot to say, 'Oh, this is reality TV going to the next level,' " he said. "This is not in the same bucket as reality shows. It's more in line with a very intense documentary series that is relevant to our audience because of who Danny is."

And that is - still - in Mr. Bonaduce's words, "a B-lister who might die." If therapy is about changing the narrative of your life, having a television show expose it, then preserve it in reruns, might seem to endanger all that therapy accomplishes. In any case, it's scary. "Telling people to watch this show in some ways seems dishonest to me," he said. " 'Watch this show: I disintegrate.' Why would I want to do that?"