Just another vapid pile of crap in the seedy “reality” TV squalor palace, or ingenious allegorical parody of all of us slack jawed gawkers hoarding our freak spottings by obsessively peeping through each other’s windows via the cam of vapid and seedy pile-of-crap “reality” TV?
I like it, though I prefer Hoarding on TLC because they work more gradually to get people help instead of rushing to clean out their homes.
I guess I like it because it is fascinating and I really do want these people to get help.
I feel sad for them, I guess.
Yeah, you do want to see the people get helped, but I don’t know how much faith I have in the counseling they show. Also, the reason Hoarders rush to clean out the house is because usually there is an eviction or something pending.
There was a marathon on Monday, with a follow-up show on at ten, and I watched a good bit of it. The follow-up show revisited some of the cases about a year later, and I think all but one were back to their old habits (as expected).
ETA: After I spent most of the day watching the show (and cleaning!), I had to go to my grandma’s house. I had to use her bathroom and was horrified to see that she’s using her shower stall as an extra closet, and the counter space was entirely covered with bottles of lotions, powders, sprays, etc. The adjoining bedroom also has many piles of movies and books and boxes, although she’s not quite down to goat trails yet. Fortunately, she lives with my mom, so the clutter hasn’t gotten too bad in the rest of the house. It’s a situation to keep an eye on.
The worst one was the lady who was hoarding food. Having piles of stuff is one thing; having rotting food everywhere is entirely another. “That 4 year old yogurt is still good!” Gross.
“Hoarders” always makes me feel better about my house. But my wife and I always get into a debate over who is more like the people on the show. I’m more willing to live in squalor, but she’s more into repeatedly buying the same items on sale (shampoo, bedding, toilet paper, etc.) and never throwing anything away because it might be useful some day.
You know, that lady pissed me off. I know it is irrational, but she did.
Nothing gets me cleaning my apartment faster than an episode of hoarders.
And she kept the seeds from the rotten pumpkin on her floor. Ugh.
There was clearly more crazy in her than the average hoarder. I did enjoy the irony that she was “saving” food but really was wasting it.
No, they just about all piss me off. How about the lady who said, “I still don’t think I’m a hoarder”, although her daughter was ready to cut her off because they had cleaned the house before and it kept getting piled up again. The daughter was crying and saying, “You always choose this, you never choose me”, and the lady would shrug. That lady made my smackin’ hand tingle!
I’ve seen a few of these. The worst one was a woman who didn’t even have a tiny goat trail left. She was stepping on and climbing over things to get to this tiny little clear space where she slept.
My mom is a little bit of a hoarder, but so far she can still keep most of her stuff out of sight. The house looks pretty normal, just a bit cluttered, until you open a drawer or a closet.
I watched a half an episode of this show for the first time the other day and I was nearly brought to tears. What sad fucking people. Christ, there was this woman who was living in knee deep filth. Not clutter; filth. They found two dead cats under all of it, one they estimated had been there for 10 years. And they were talking to the woman as though she were a child … “Now we know you love animals, right?” “Mm-hm.” “And you can’t let your cats die here, right?” “Mm-hm.” “You have to take care of them, okay?” “Mm-hm.”
It was so pathetic I seriously had to choke back a tear.
Gool old American freak show tradition. Good thing it’s all on the TeeVee to get them Snicker bars sold.
Yeah. Maybe they should have a ‘Hoarders’ show and a 'I’ve got cat fossils under rotting pumpkins, and three feet of feces filled diapers on my bathroom floor" show. Because those two things aint the same.
Yeah, because that pumpkin had been so pretty, she just couldn’t bring herself to cook it and eat it or throw it away once it rotted. :smack:
I love these shows because, as said upthread already, nothing motivates me more to clean out a closet or junk drawer than the cautionary tales of Hoarders.
Thank you for this phrase. I have just the situation to use it today!
Did you manage to keep watching to the part where the crew discovered that the bathroom was caked in feces?
Sometimes I feel sorry for the people featured on this show, but some of them just piss me off – like the woman who wouldn’t let her pre-teen daughter donate clothes that didn’t fit anymore.
If there’s any doubt that hoarding is a mental problem, I think this show clears that up completely. It’s classified as an anxiety disorder, and one thing they don’t do a very good job of on the show is showing how wrecked these people are by the idea of throwing away their stuff. If they could easily part with junk, they wouldn’t have a problem. Every piece of crap in a hoarder’s house is part of what they consider their safety, their calmness. We’ve got lots of people on this board who refuse to do things because of anxiety problems; these people on these shows refuse to throw things out because it makes them panic.
There’s an element of looking at the freakshow to these shows, but I also think they might actually be helping people who might watch the show and see the mirror held up to their own lives. Of course it would be better to show how the whole treatment process would go (it would take months, I imagine, if effective), but they are also in the business of entertaining.
Thankfully, I think I’d flipped over to So You Think You’re America’s Next Top Idol Who’s Smarter Than a 5th Grader … with the Stars by then.
The ones that get me are when the kids have been (or are about to be) taken away by CPS because the house is effectively a garbage dump. There was one where the mom spent six hours in the bathroom with the counselor, agonizing over every empty shampoo bottle that had to be thrown out, while her 12 year old son was downstairs directing workers and trying to get everyone else moving – really an heroic (if futile) effort.
While I sort of understand the impulse, I don’t think it’s appropriate to be pissed off at these people. They’re ill. Would you be ticked at an autistic person for being rude and anti-social? (Obviously it can’t be helped that their behavior makes them very frustrating, but that’s different.)