Hoarders is an interesting A&E television show about people who save everything — including their own feces and urine — and refuse to throw anything away.
The unfortunate thing about the spirit, intention and inflection of the series, now in its second season, is the focus on the ugly and the poor as the starring hoarders.
You cannot help but believe, after watching the series, that the only people in America who hoard are destitute and unkempt and it seems many of hoarders are not highly uneducated.
Take a look at this sad sack menagerie of Hoarders who have starred in the series:
A&E are doing a disservice to the mental disorder of mental illness by suggesting only the ugly and the poor are capable of hoarding when common sense directs us to believe this compulsive obsession is much more rampant in mainstream America.
Are there no rich hoarders living in mansions?
Are there no middle class hoarders who have a regular job and a car?
The uncomfortable fact about watching Hoarders is that it is really a car accident happening in real time over several years — and the hook of the show is to get you to turn you head just a bit to gawk at these misbegotten people as you sprinkle false pity upon them.
Unfortunately, for A&E, once you’ve seen one filthy house full of feces and dead cats
— you pretty much have seen them all.
Filth is filth no matter how many houses it fills and the sob stories are all the same: Unrepentant hoarder versus angry family who aren’t going to take it any more. Nobody ever seems to get better and that means the entirety of the show misses the mandate of irrevocable change over the arc of the telling.
There really hasn’t been a sillier conceit for a reality television series since A&E brought us the ridiculous God Or the Girl — but Hoarders does have more urine stains in the carpeting.