Bar Rescue belongs to a particular genre of reality television: the business makeover. These shows unfold according to a strict formula: a business is failing due to inept owners, many with psychological problems. An expert in the business arrives to scream at the proprietors until they admit their incompetence. Then he suddenly turns counselor, solving interpersonal problems of many years’ standing with a few probing questions and a furrowed brow. Or more shouting. Having restored everyone’s sanity, he remodels the facility and changes everything about the business, including the name. At the reveal, everyone says, “Oh my god!” and the expert smiles, as though to say, “Well, maybe not a god, exactly . . ..”

But Bar Rescue is only partly a business makeover show. The other part is an extended commercial for the alcohol industry, not just for Jack Daniels or Diageo or Anheuser-Busch, though those companies and their representatives get a lot of air time, but for a set of ideas, pretty much the same ones that underwrite “responsible drinking” campaigns or industry lobbying. One of the most important ideas is this one: alcohol does not cause drunkenness; drunks cause drunkenness.

In order to sell this idea, which is preposterous on its face but almost universally accepted, the show presents intoxication, not as something you would expect to see fairly often in a bar, but as a disgusting freak occurrence arising from individual pathology. Fortunately, the host of Bar Rescue, Jon Taffer, has a sure-fire remedy for drunkenness that works every time: insults and threats.

A great example is the episode called “Sticky Situation,” and, no, the title is not a metaphor. The bar being rescued is Park 77, near San Francisco State University, and the drunk is Angelo, the general manager. Angelo is a classic lampshade-on-the-head drunk. He chugs beer out of a pitcher, does shots non-stop, pokes his straw into customers’ glasses and sucks up their drinks too. He burps, whoops, and dances while wearing an idiot half-smile. His mission in life, he says, is helping people have fun.

A caricature of the party drunk, right? But there’s more! Angelo, we soon learn, once allowed a porno to be shot in Park 77! Jon Taffer has the proof right on his phone! He can’t turn the X-rated phone toward the TV camera, of course, but viewers can easily find the video themselves, thanks to four hotlinks on the Bar Rescue web site. But you don’t actually have to see the porno to know the most horrific thing about it: it shows people having sex on a big sofa in the middle of the bar, a sofa customers are now sitting on!

Yes, that sofa is the “sticky situation” of the title. Shocking, right? Jon Taffer and his colleagues certainly think so! When his spies, three young women pretending to be customers, settle on the offending piece of furniture as he watches via hidden camera, Taffer loses his mind. “I can’t let them sit there!” he cries and runs into the bar to pull them off. Reaching the young women, he shoves his phone in their faces, forcing them to watch the porno, whereupon they all scream and leap up from the sofa as though it were a hot grill. Now everyone is in a frenzy of disgust at Angelo the drunk.

But wait a minute. Let’s think before we join them in that frenzy. How many sofas in existence have never been fornicated upon? The one you’re sitting on now, for example: do you honestly believe that upholstery is virgin? If sex ruined sofas for any future use as seating, then city sidewalks would be so full of discarded sofas every morning that pedestrians would have to walk in the street! So, I’m sorry, but I just cannot get very disgusted about the porno sofa. I was more disgusted when Jon Taffer stuck the actual porno under the noses of his undercover agents to make them scream. In fact, I’m not entirely certain they weren’t jumping away from Jon Taffer, rather than the sofa. But I digress.

Back to Angelo who now rubs his face on the offending sofa three times to an alarmed chorus of “oh my gods.” Funny how many different uses that phrase has! Angelo figures he has consumed “seven to ten” drinks, probably a low estimate because his idiot smile has changed to the dazed look of someone who just took a baseball bat to the head. Before long, he passes out in a booth and, upon waking, sticks his head into a trashcan and pukes.

In short, Bar Rescue does everything it can to make Angelo utterly unique and utterly revolting to viewers. Then it reforms him.

“I’m gonna change,” says Angelo when Jon Taffer stops yelling at him to take a breath. Taffer doesn’t believe him, so he yells some more then orders Angelo’s family to give him an ultimatum: if he takes a single drink at the bar, he loses his share of the business.

That works instantly! Understand that Angelo has told us he drinks “seven to ten” drinks every night and has shown us that his math isn’t very good, so we should probably make that twelve to fifteen per night. In other words, the episode has portrayed a character with a serious, ongoing alcohol problem, whether that portrait is accurate or not. Such a man should display signs of physical withdrawal, such as shaking hands, if he abruptly stops drinking that much.

Nope. No one ever has the shakes on Bar Rescue, even when we’re told they have a history of consuming large quantities of alcohol all day every day. Taffer yells; they feel contrite; they quit; problem solved. On Bar Rescue, there’s no such thing as addiction; quitting is easy, and it takes just a teensy-weensy bit of willpower. There’s no alcohol use disorder, just ugly, disgusting drunkenness, horrible but easily banished with threats, shaming, and a little resolve.

I trust you can see that Angelo reflects the alcohol industry’s (largely successful) effort to divert attention away from its own role—and that of bars—in promoting intoxication and alcohol use disorders. Both the alcohol industry and the hospitality industry depend upon dangerous levels of consumption, yet they cannot appear to do so. They must ostentatiously disavow the customers who provide almost three-fourths of their profits, while at the same time burdening them with full responsibility for the social, legal, and medical costs of their consumption. They can’t do it directly, of course; eventually people would catch on. So they do it indirectly through shows such as Bar Rescue.