In a year abound with bad dads - from Alec Baldwin’s phone blowup to the leaked tape of a puffy, slurring Hasselhoff shot by his 16-year old daughter - it’s ex-crack-addict Rick Kirkham who steals the show. As a billowy-haired reporter for Inside Edition during the ‘80s, Kirkham was first introduced to crack cocaine by officers on drug busts, and in light of his jetset excess and needy glamour he was hooked before you could say bad-career-move. But even as he eventually traded the glitz for married life, he couldn’t shake his love for the white lady. What ultimately saves Kirkham’s story from the glossy endzone of a million other wreck stories like it, is his chronic self-chronicling, having captured on home video the before, during and after of years’ worth of highs; totalling 3000 hours worth of footage, filmmakers Michael Cain and Matt Radecki, in an endurance test of editing, have streamlined this mountain of avowal down into the hellish-but-laboured 90 minutes that make up TV Junkie.

Watching Kirkham with such packed duress, it becomes clear that there’s only one thing he craves more than crack, and that’s an audience: Like the host of a reality-show-gone-wrong, he soberly guides his viewership through the crack-making process; attempts to justify hitting his wife; and, after a night of drunken needle-use, is sent into a paroxysm of fear about AIDS, crying confessionally into his home-video abyss. As with Tarnation’s Jonathan Coulette, it’s because Kirkham is so willing to offer himself up as an object d’degradation that any feelings of unwilling implication are ushered aside. But after having managed to establish this ‘priveledged space,’ it seems clear that the only insight he possesses is that he’s addicted to crack and regrets it. Once the initial shock of that fact wears off, the film becomes a tiring and masochistic cycle of use and remorse that leaves gaping holes - like the extent to which his wife intervened - unanswered. Meanwhile, Kirkham’s constant air of camera-mugging sleaze and nose for drama (coaxing his wife into declaring her love for him to the camera) tend to undercut the thrust of his struggle, meaning that in the end this is a film that derives most of its value from counterpoint: Namely, as a cold antidote to the luxurious high-times of Cocaine Cowboys.—David Levinson