It’s open season on rehab, finally. Rehab has been nigh onto sacred, at least in popular culture, for years now. As one with more than a little familiarity with 12-step meetings myself, I come from a place of complete respect  — but am often disappointed by the humorless, sanctimonious and often just plain bizarre treatment treatment has received.

There have been cracks in the facade all along, of course. In Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) Peter Gallagher confesses he goes to meetings not because he has a problem but because he does business there. And in both The Sopranos and Rachel Getting Married (2008), AA meetings were shown to be places to have sex with hot strangers right after the serenity prayer. (As if.)

Always it was the person who was at fault, who was not literally with the program. Gallagher’s producer was a tool; Michael Imperioli’s Christopher relapsed and was killed by Tony Soprano for his sins; and in Rachel, Anne Hathaway’s addict gives one of the most embarrassing wedding toasts ever captured on film, presumably a result of not working the steps herself.

Now we have the spectacle of drug dealers trying to sell meth to addicts in the final weeks of AMC’s Breaking Bad, and Russell Brand’s rock star Aldous Snow running from his ginormous joneses to greatly comic effect in Get Him To the Greek. (“When life slips you a Jeffrey, stroke the furry wall.”) Could Bill W finally be getting a pie in the face?

Not that he would have minded, I think. As Susan Cheever’s biography of the AA founder revealed, Bill was complicated — one of the reasons the Big Book is so forgiving of sexual infidelity is because Bill himself was a man of legendary sexual appetites, and took a keen interest in LSD late in life. Killing Buddhas is way of life in recovery.

Meanwhile, Marshall Mathers ask Eminem has a new album out entitled (yep) Rehab, recounting his adventures in same. It’s hard being famous in recovery, it turns out. “I felt like I was Bugs Bunny in rehab,” he told the NY Times’s Deborah Solomon. “People at rehab were stealing my hats and pens and notebooks and asking for autographs. I couldn’t concentrate on my problem.”

If Ahab had been in rehab he might never have lost  his ship (spoiler alert!). The captain had a whale of a problem. But then Ishmael wouldn’t have survived to tell the tale, and where would be?