Has MTV ‘Gone Too Far’ this time?

By Allen Salkin

updated 8:49 a.m. ET Oct. 20, 2009

Halfway through the first episode of the new MTV reality show “Gone Too Far,” the star, Adam Goldstein, better known as DJ AM, is shown speaking to a heroin addict named Amy, a 23-year-old from Philadelphia he is trying to persuade to enter rehab.

“My dad died when I was 19 of AIDS and he was a full-blown drug addict,” says Mr. Goldstein, 36, in a humble, matter-of-fact tone. “And I didn’t deal with it for a long time. I didn’t get sober until my 25th birthday, pretty much.”

Amy, whose last name is not revealed, breaks down. The first part of the show profiled her broken-hearted family and showed her injecting heroin into her hand. “I used to be a good person,” she says, sitting next to Mr. Goldstein in her family’s home. “I just don’t think I’m meant to live like this, disappointing my family and disappointing myself and stealing and being a loser.”

“What’s crazy,” replies Mr. Goldstein, “is you sound exactly like me.”

By the end of the hourlong show, which had its premiere Oct. 12, Amy is shown having gone through rehab successfully with Mr. Goldstein’s support, her hair nicely cut and a healthy glow in her face. It is a happy ending, much like the one Mr. Goldstein seemed to be living when he filmed the seven-episode series last spring and summer.

But despite presenting himself as the model of a recovered addict with more than a decade of sobriety, Mr. Goldstein, a celebrity disc jockey known for his talent spinning as well as the women he dated — like Nicole Richie and the actress Mandy Moore — did not have a happy ending.

On Aug. 28, he was found face down on his bed in his Lafayette Street apartment in SoHo with a pharmacy’s worth of prescription drugs and a crack pipe nearby. The New York medical examiner concluded that he had died from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs and cocaine. The toxicology report said Mr. Goldstein had ingested OxyContin, Hydrocodone or Vicodin, Xanax, Ativan, Klonopin, Benadryl and Levamisole.

The reality show built around this celebrity recovering addict, setting an example for others of how to pull their lives together, had been scheduled to premiere less than six weeks later, Oct. 5. It was immediately pulled from MTV’s lineup.

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The network says it has since received the approval of Mr. Goldstein’s family to televise the series, but the decision has raised many questions: Is MTV exploiting the attention the tragedy received in order to chase ratings? Does Mr. Goldstein’s death undercut the show’s message? And — as some drug rehabilitation experts ask — did Mr. Goldstein’s role in the production, which exposed him to the chaos of active addiction, contribute to his relapse?

In the end, the questions may come down to this: how well did MTV know its host?

“Doing this show could certainly have been a relapse trigger for Mr. Goldstein,” said Dr. Harris Stratyner, the vice president of Caron New York, one of the oldest drug rehabilitation centers in the country, who had not met Mr. Goldstein but watched the first episode of “Gone Too Far.”

Dr. Stratyner said that many 12-step programs recommend that recovering addicts perform public service such as counseling others. But recovering addicts are also warned to stay away from people and situations that offer temptations.

The series certainly shows graphic drug use, with young addicts sniffing aerosol computer cleaner and smoking crack. Those connected with “Gone Too Far” say they never intended to put Mr. Goldstein in harm’s way, but some wonder if that was an unintended result. “It crosses all of our minds, a terrible tragedy,” said Tony DiSanto, the president of programming for MTV.

He pointed out that the series grew out of outreach work that Mr. Goldstein was already doing to help addicts. Mr. Goldstein originally had approached MTV, but with another series idea in mind: during a meeting in the summer of 2008 in Mr. DiSanto’s corner office on the 23rd floor of the MTV building in Times Square, Mr. Goldstein and his manager, Paul Rosenberg, pitched a show “like a reality ‘Entourage’-style show focused on Adam,” Mr. Rosenberg recalled.

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