Note: These will be updated as I think of more and if you have a question you’d like to add, please leave a comment.
Is this site the official site for Intervention?
No! Definitely not! This site is run by one person, Dizzy (that’s me), and I’m just a fan of the show. I have nothing to do with A&E or Intervention in any official capacity. I’m not responsible for the way an episode is filmed or edited, who gets followed up on, the availability of an episode online, or anything else. The only thing I do is build and maintain this website, which is purely for documenting episodes, giving updates on people and the show’s future, and providing sort of an online community of fans. But I don’t have any direct access to people from the show, I only find out about updates when readers comment here or email me.
How can I submit someone to the show?
Fill out this application. (I have nothing to do with that process, I’m just providing the link that A&E gives out).
Who from the show refused to go to treatment?
5 refused treatment and as far as we know never went even after the cameras were gone.
Sean
Larry
Alissa
Marquel
Adam
Wasn’t Intervention cancelled?
Yep. In 2013. Season 13’s Eric was the “final” episode. Then LMN picked it up for the next season, but A&E decided they wanted it back and now we’re on Season 18. No idea what was going on behind the scenes with all that, but the show’s been hanging on by a thread ever since.
How successful is Intervention in getting addicts sober?
Moderately successful. Although I don’t have access to ‘who’s still sober’ numbers since 2013 when the “last” episode aired and it stated how many addicts were still clean, (You can read those stats here) it looks like about a 64% success rate. It’s VERY successful at getting people to go to treatment though. Read more about that in this discussion post.
Why doesn’t Intervention do followup episodes anymore?
I don’t know, but I really liked those followup episodes, I wish they still did them. Now we get 30-second Legacy Updates during episodes, which are cool too, although a bit awkward and obviously not as compelling or informative as a whole episode.
How can I watch past episodes (legally and without accidentally downloading viruses)?
- A&E’s Intervention website. Most all of the episodes are listed here, although most are locked and require a cable login to view. There are a few unlocked though; sometimes A&E will make kind of a playlist along a theme and unlock those specific ones. However, there are quite a few episodes listed on A&E that are not available to stream (see next FAQ).
- Right now Hulu has several middle seasons and it had a bunch of the Intervention Canada episodes but as of yesterday those seem to have disappeared. Weird.
- Amazon. Most episodes are at least available to purchase for $2-3 per episode or $20-26 a season.
- YouTube. The video quality may not be great but there are a bunch of episodes uploaded by fans and they’re free, so there’s that.
- iTunes. About the same cost as Amazon for an episode.
Why are some episodes not available on any of the streaming services?
- The addict has died since the show aired and I’m guessing out of respect for the family, the network pulled it. Almost none of the episodes from this page are available to watch on the A&E site. However, some of the paid streaming services seem to still have those episodes. Amazon’s “Season 5” (actually Season 4) includes FOUR episodes featuring addicts who have since died that don’t seem to be available elsewhere.
- I think because there was something weird about production or something happened after the episode aired and the episode was removed from circulation. Betsy, Mike/Randi, Mike/Jenny are episodes that haven’t been available to stream for many years. There are rumors about why they’re not available, but I don’t know for sure.
Why are the season and episode numbers different on Amazon than on A&E, Hulu, iTunes, and this website?
I’m not exactly sure why this happens, but it’s hella annoying. For clarity’s sake, all episode numbering on Intervention Directory is consistent with A&E’s numbering. You can consider it official. I get a lot of people telling me that my numbering is off because it’s different on Amazon. That is incorrect. Amazon’s numbering is off because it’s inconsistent with A&E. Mine is just fine thank you very much.
I suspect that when an episode was pulled from circulation by A&E or there were followup episodes and specials (i.e. Heroin Highway), and Intervention Canada episodes started to be added, the numbering was adjusted on the streaming sites like Hulu and Amazon to be chronological, when they aren’t necessarily chronological A&E.
So Episode 4 Season 6 on A&E might be Episode 3 on Hulu and Episode 1 on Netflix and even Episode 1 Season 7 on Amazon. This is because if Amazon, for example, does not have an episode, they re-order the ones they do have instead of skipping that episode number.
Why does this site use overall episode numbering in the post title instead of Season/Episode numbering?
Because the episode-by-season numbering varies depending on which site you’re looking at, but the overall numbering from A&E never changes. I would love it if all the numbering was the same on all the sites but they all do their own thing and it changes constantly. This was the only way I could keep the numbering consistent. That said, I did recently go back and add the Season and Episode # at the top of each post.
With the recent site redesign I updated the numbering to be Season/Episode because A&E is no longer using the overall numbering system, which means this site was the ONLY place that used that schematic, and what’s the point of that?
Why are there some episodes not covered on this site?
Most likely it’s because that the episode hasn’t been available anywhere since I started the site in 2011 (Betsy, Mike/Jenny), so I couldn’t go back and watch it to catalog it. Or it might be because it’s the Gabe episode. I also haven’t gotten to all of the Intervention Canada episodes yet, but I intend to as time allows.
What’s your problem with Gamblin Gabe? That episode is iconic and should be included on this site.
The episode is iconic for being a disturbing portrait of a narcissistic man-child with a severe personality disorder who emotionally and physically abuses his elderly parents. That family’s problems go many miles beyond gambling. Yes I know that other families on the show were also dealing with someone with a possible mental illness who behaved abusively, but there was always the sense and the hope that if the addiction was treated, the disorder could begin to be managed. It doesn’t seem like that was the case with Gabe. His episode felt exploitative and deeply unsettling to me in a way that the others didn’t and I just don’t want to contribute to the attention it gets.
What’s the deal with these Canada episodes?
Welllll…… it’s complicated, but I’ll try to explain the best I can. Intervention Canada started airing in 2011 on the Splice network, a channel exclusive to Canada. Episodes were originally unavailable to non-Canadian viewers, they were not aired on A&E or streamed online. The show was basically accessible only to Canadians with cable who watched live. As far as format, it was pretty much exactly like the US version but used different Interventionists and all episodes and treatment centers were in Canada. The show aired for 2 seasons and then was apparently cancelled. From what I can gather, it was then picked up again for Season 3 in 2015 by Canada’s Documentary Channel and then promptly went away again. This is where things get weird.
In 2016, after Intervention US had been cancelled and then brought back to life, it started airing Intervention Canada episodes as part of its regular season (Season 15). Four Intervention Canada episodes from its first 2 seasons were in the lineup, passed off as if they were ALL NEW episodes when in fact they were several years old and had already aired on Splice, although American viewers had likely never seen them unless they found them on YouTube. Seasons 16 and 17 of Intervention US included 12 episodes from the largely unseen Season 3 of Intervention Canada – There were actually more Canadian episodes than American episodes for those two seasons. Again, A&E did not distinguish between regular US episodes and Intervention Canada in its promos or airing. However, these Season 3 episodes were not as old the others and had not been aired on Slice, and likely didn’t have much of an audience on the Documentary Channel. In other words, it made more sense for these Season 3 episodes to be passed off as part of the ‘new’ season.
What makes the Canadian episodes confusing for a lot of people is that, up until Season 15, there were quite a few episodes of Intervention that took place in Canada. They were just regular A&E episodes with our regular interventionists. As far as I know, since that season there has not been an A&E-produced episode of Intervention set in Canada. The other thing that makes it all so confusing is that Intervention Canada has its own numbering for its episodes, but then A&E gives it new numbering when it gets put in the regular season lineup. For example, Season 3 Episode 20 (Clint) of Intervention Canada is Season 17 Episode 4 of Intervention. Argh! As if the numbering wasn’t already confusing enough.
If you’re watching Intervention online and want to be able to tell if it’s actually Intervention Canada before the end credits, here are some clues:
- The music, graphics, and camera work seem slightly off
- The interview backgrounds are really blue
- The addict lives in Canada and the treatment center is in Canada
- The Interventionist isn’t Candy, Jeff, Ken, Donna, Seth, or Sylvia and has a Canadian accent
How do people who comment here know the last names of the people from the show?
Sometimes they knew them personally, or of them, before the episode aired. Other than that, I think a lot of fans are just pretty good at online sleuthing. I myself don’t bother searching without a last name, but I’m guessing that others are maybe doing searches with the first name and location to find arrest records, etc? I don’t know for sure.
Why don’t you include in your posts how the episode ended?
Well at first I didn’t include that because there isn’t really an ending to the story of an addiction, and also the ‘ending’ was always changing. Someone who was sober at the end would be shown in a followup as having relapsed. It just felt weird to put the ending in there when it wasn’t really the end, ya know? But honestly if I could go back in time I would have included the ending in the initial write up. I think it would be great to have that data now so we could look at different measures of effectiveness of the intervention. At this point though, it would be far too much work to re-watch every episode AGAIN, which I’ve already done a few times now.
Why was my comment not published?
Probably because it was too mean. But please understand that I don’t only publish comments I agree with, but I choose NOT to publish comments that are needlessly inflammatory and/or insulting. It’s up to my discretion on a case-by-case basis. Read this and read this for a longer explanation.
How can I contact you?
Send me an email at dizzy.buzzkill at gmail