South City Confidential

Liveblogging Hoarders

It’s back! A&E’s Hoarders is a guilty pleasure.  These people are literally consumed by their possessions.  I watch a lot of shows about people’s issues.  Actually, most reality television is ultimately about people’s issues, but none seem so intimate, so shame-inducing, so hopeless as Hoarders.  At least with shows like Intervention, the show offers some type of realistic help (and, with it, hope) to those they profile.  With Hoarders, the show’s format (hoarder has a 1-800-GOT-JUNK crew for two days, plus either a therapist or life coach) doesn’t even allow for much help.  The hoarder won’t just give up their “stuff” cold turkey.

ANYWAY, onward to our new season.

9:01 Opening montage of tonight’s hoarder, Augustine.  So far, it looks like far and away the worst Hoarder house ever.  That’s saying a lot, since last season we saw a lady with multiple rotting pumpkins in her dining room.

9:02 We meet Augustine’s son, Jason, who was taken out of Augustine’s home as a child.  Cut to dog shit dried into the carpet and a cat conquering a veritable mountain of trash.

9:03: Black Screen of Justice informs us that in the past two decades, Augustine has paid more than $30,000 for city-mandated cleanups.  Think of all the dog shit she could have bought for that.

9:05 Augustine’s daughter informs us there is no working stove or laundry.  And that her mother has no teeth.  I guess she didn’t hoard toothbrushes.

This house is fucking disgusting.  I mean, I’m down, to a certain extent, with clutter of useless junk bought at clearance sales, but straight up squalor?  This is unreal.

Jason informs us that he had to sleep with the fan on as a child because if he didn’t, he’d hear the rats in the trash and it would scare him.  And he was the smelly kid because of all of this and got picked on.  Lord.  He had to go live with the sister when he was in 8th grade.  Sister was in early 20’s.

9:06 Jason: “I mean, how hard can it be to NOT fill your house with garbage?”  Black Screen of Justice informs us that Jason hasn’t seen his mom in four years.  He up and moved to Seattle.

9:07 Augustine blames her own mother, who also sounds like a gem.

Sister’s name is Susan, and she’s been trying to help Augustine for years. Susan claims Augustine’s blames Jason’s father, who didn’t want to be in his life, for the progression of her hoarding.  Susan: “But Jason’s 28 years old.”  Right.

The neighbors are obvs not having any of this noise.  Or smell.  Or rats.

9:09 Jason and Susan know her health is failing, and if she dies, they have to deal with the “nest”.  His words, not mine.  <shudder>

Cut to shot of Jason feeding his pet rabbit a carrot before he leaves to go to his mom’s.  I just lost all sympathy for him.  How the fuck do you grow up in squalor and then have a FILTHY, DIRTY, CONNIVING rabbit as a pet?  You wrong for that, Jason.

9:14 Jason looks like a slightly-skinnier Hurley from Lost.  Susan just started crying.  Both children know that their mom’s house will get condemned if they don’t clean it out.

9:15 Please welcome Suzanne (pronounced Su-ZAHN, yeah, I know, whatevs), the therapist who will *help* Augustine with her hoarding, which is a manifestation of OCD.  Augustine just said that she couldn’t pick up the clothes in her bedroom “Because they are both summer and winter clothes mixed together, and I haven’t washed them, so they smell.”  That kind of rationalization will get you…well, it will get you a house full of trash and animal feces, I suppose.

9:16. Wow.  Augustine has no plumbing.  Also, when it rains, her bathroom floods.  This seems really ironic.

They are also bringing in ANOTHER hoarding expert.  Dayum.  Defcon 5 in here.  No really, Augustine is a “Level 5 Hoarder”.  That’s the worst.  You aren’t even allowed on an airplane.

9:18 Did I mention that Jason looks suspiciously like a larper?  Was he in Monster Camp?  Who cares?  He’s still, far and away, not the most fucked up person currently on my screen.

9:19 Damn, Augustine used to be a stone fox back in the day.  Tragical.  Jason just pointed at a pile and said “I have sat on that couch in my life.”

WHOA.  WHAT IS THAT?  Did he just hold up a bottle of pee?  Really?  WTF?  Please, editors, why are you not telling me what that jar of yellow stuff was?  You can’t just skim over that?

9:20  Dayum.  Looks like a dookie-bomb went off in the bathroom.  This is almost bad as The Road, y’all.  Except there are no cannibals on Hoarders.  Yet.

9:26  I get the distinct impression that Jason wants nothing to do with his mom and he is only in town to support his sister.  Brutal.  She’ll never clean up unless she has a reason to live.  She’s like passively and slowly killing herself.

9:27 They have a crew of straight DOZENS to help out.  The OCD expert says Augustine should throw everything out.  Augustine replies, “Don’t touch mah bottles, or my crochet.  She tried to throw out my crochet booties.” (points at Susan). Susan: “What do you need booties for?” Augustine: “I sell them for ten dollars apiece.”  Somehow I doubt that anyone with a child would pay you ten dollars for said child, knowing it came out of your house.  Just sayin’.

9:28. Augustine wants four of the cleanup dudes to sift through her living room to find one of two lost sets of dentures.  No, seriously.  She wants her teeth back from her shit/piss/dirt/mold/trash-laden living-room floor.

9:31 This lady gets on some serious misdirection.  She just got into an argument with her daughter about her mouth-breathing.  I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.

Black Screen of Justice informs us that the cleaning crew has already removed 3,000 pounds of trash from the den alone.

A worker just found half of one set of dentures, and Augustine has the nerve to complain that he didn’t find the other half.  Stay classy.

9:32  Aaaaaand, they just found a dead cat.  Like, 1/3 of a dead cat.  A mummified dead cat.  A DEAD CAT!  Su-ZAHN asks why she had a dead cat in her house.  Augustine says, deadpan, “because I wasn’t here.”

Apparently, Augustine mouth-breathes really hard when she gets upset.  Other than that, she has no change of affect.  This lady needs mental help.  Pronto.  Like, inpatient care.

9:34 Jason: “This is like an archaeological record of the past decade and a half.”  Um, sure.  Just like when they dug in a landfull and found a newspaper from the 50’s, right?

9:36  Another dead cat.  At the bottom of a pile. So, probably ten years old.

9:43  So the truth comes out.  Augustine has never thanked Susan for taking in HER 13 YEAR OLD BROTHER WHEN SHE WAS 25.  Has never admitted wrong-doing in all of this.  Again, I say: DAYUM.

9:45 Cut to her kids, wearing masks, sorting through squalor, while Augustine rocks on her chair.  See, this here is a problem, because this is just going to reinforce that all hoarders are simply too lazy to clean.  While I believe that this is part of Augustine’s shitstorm of issues, some of the hoarders legitimately want to change and don’t know how.  I’d like to see more in-depth psychotherapy for people like Augustine, who seem more fucked up that your average computer-duster-huffer on Intervention.  I mean, she has no affect whatsoever.  I honestly think the cat-pee fumes have fucked up her brain, and I don’t think she had much of one to begin with, along with a host of mental disorders.  How could you NOT be depressed living like that?  I mean, depression is probably the least of her issues.

9:52  Black Screen of Justice tells us the cleaning crew has mere hours to get the house up to code.  What is Augustine doing during this time of intense rush and stress?  Rocking on her porch, bitching about a tablecloth.

9:54  The cleaning crew had to “walk away” from the bathroom.  The dookie bomb was too much for even the 1-800-GOT-JUNK dudes.  One guy bravely soldiers on.

Wait, what?  Jason says this is the SECOND time an outside cleaning crew has come in here?  So you’re saying this is really only HALF of the nasty?

9:56  So, one of her living room chairs decomposed under garbage.  No, really.  And the 1-800-GOT-JUNK dudes pitched in and got her a new one.  I thought she’d zombie-out again, but after sitting in the chair, Augustine actually sheds a tear. “It feels nice to have someone care for you.”  So. Sad.j

9:58  OMG they panned through the clean house and Augustine has a hand chair a la The Ladies Man.  And they kept it in the room.  That’s awesome.

The house actually looks really clean.  It won’t last, unless she gets serious help.

Post-script: They removed 8,000 pounds of trash and fixed the plumbing.  The son doesn’t ever want to come back.  Augustine is getting long-term therapy.

So, who wants to shampoo their carpets, clean the litterbox, and scrub the grout with a toothbrush?

I think A&E must have heard from enough viewers that they needed to provide the subjects of the show with long-term therapy, which I think is desperately needed.  Even those on Intervention get at least 90 days of treatment.  This problem almost seems more severe, emotionally.  Not to downplay drug or alcohol addiction–it is brutal.  But this type of problem requires at least the same amount of care.

Hoarders isn’t the best show to live-blog, because I have somewhat of a conscience, and it’s hard to snark on people so obviously and painfully fucked up.  Even my standard rule of you-went-on-reality-tv-so-you’re-fair-game wavers in the face of people whose lives are taken over by filth, physically and emotionally isolating them from everyone who was every important to them.  I don’t know that they can top what they showed tonight.  The other thing that sucks about Hoarders is that there is rarely a happy ending.  There’s never some update of the people smiling and laughing and glad to be sober.  Nope.  Usually, they just revert back to hoarding.  I suppose I’ll have to pick a show filled with much more vile, deserving assholes at whom’s expense I make jokes.  Hoarders just leaves me feeling dirty and depressed.

KBO posted this article under Uncategorized on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 9:07 pm You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a comment or trackback from your own site.