‘Celebrity Rehab” co-creator Bob Forrest says that, in retrospect, he regrets the direction the show has taken.
“If I had to do it all over again, I don’t think I’d walk into the office and say we should do this show,” Forrest, 50, told the Los Angeles Times in an interview to discuss “Bob and the Monster,” a new documentary about Forrest’s ’80s-era LA punk band, Thelonious Monster.
Forrest, a former heroin addict, is known to “Rehab” viewers as the show’s tough-talking, straight-shooting counselor who talks turkey with the drug-addled, B-list celebs. He also appears on the “Celebrity Rehab” spinoff, “Sober House.”
Forrest — whose familiar brown fedora has become his trademark — created “Celebrity Rehab” with Dr. Drew Pinsky in 2007 around the time that Britney Spears, in the midst of a meltdown, shaved her head in public then walked out of rehab.
“People were saying rehab is a joke,” he says. “Rehab is a real thing.”
But Forrest now says that, while he thinks the show has done a lot of good, he doesn’t like the way it has evolved.
“I don’t like the editing of it,” Forrest said. “I don’t like that they show the same thing over and over again.”
“I don’t like what it’s become, technically.”