'Recovery Road' Review: Sobriety Is Complicated
Give credit where it’s due: Recovery Road is a reasonably realistic portrait of the recovery process for a high schooler, even as it arrives swaddled in the uniformly-attractive-performer package that characterizes so many shows on Freeform, the former ABC Family.
Premiering on Monday night, Road follows Maddie (Jessica Sula), a fairly accomplished alcoholic by the time she’s semi-voluntarily committed to an addiction treatment facility, Springtime Meadows. Alternately charming and bratty — realism: what adolescent is not? — Maddie fights the program and surrenders to it depending on what mood she’s in, and those moods fluctuate wildly, of course.
The sober house is overseen by counselor Craig (David Witts), who is all too cute, British, and cool (“You’re crushing it!” is his professional phrase of encouragement), and there are frequently times when the production comes across like an episode of late-period 7th Heaven.
But at its best, Recovery Road does a good job of capturing the complex web of both emotions and actions that are taken in the journey to sobriety suggested by the show title. The show is expansive enough to also show us the parents of the kids in Springtime Meadows—how they contributed to their children’s problems, and how they tried to solve them.
The opening hour sets up a budding romance between Maddie and another in-recovery resident, Wes (Sebastian de Souza). But the second episode puts that subplot on the back-burner, to explore more of the nuances of various patients’ various addictions (not just alcohol but all sorts of drugs as well). The show wants to attract the audience that precedes it — The Fosters — while also pushing a little further into a dramatic realism. That’s a good strategy to continue pursuing.
Recovery Road airs Monday nights at 10 p.m. on Freeform.
