Media trends come and go, just as the last decade brought us the advent of the teen melodrama, this one that is quickly wrapping up has ushered in the era of reality television.  While the term “reality” is a misnomer when it comes to this genre of media, it is easily identifiable by the television audience.  Some “reality” shows offer viewers with adventures or contests that participants compete in such as The Amazing Race or Survivor.  Other programs allow the audience to witness home makeovers or personal transformations, for example The Biggest Loser or Extreme Makeover – Home Edition.  Other shows, allow individuals to become voyeurs, to watch in horror from the comfort of their living rooms as the sordid or disturbing details of people’s lives are aired on the small screen.  This sort of programming is perhaps the most disconcerting in the reality arena because people with real psychological and physical problems allow cameras to follow them into their troubled lives as a rapt audience watches from the sidelines, most often judging the toxic behavior those on television are exhibiting.

One example of this voyeuristic television programming is the A&E show, Hoarders (www.aetv.com/hoarders/).  The show’s premise is simple enough; the camera crew follows around two individuals who are struggling with hoarding for the duration of the sixty-minute program.  A&E provides the hoarders with trained professionals who will “try” to help the people in question deal with their inability to part with belongings.  The show which is touted as a “real life series” is described as follows on the A&E official website for the program:

Each 60-minute episode of Hoarders is a fascinating look inside the lives of two different people whose inability to part with their belongings is so out of control that they are on the verge of a personal crisis. Whether they're facing eviction, the loss of their children, jail time, or divorce, they are all desperately in need of help. In a fly-on-the-wall style, we'll capture the drama as experts work to put each on the road to recovery. But cleaning is just the first step, like taking drugs away from an addict. The healing won't be easy. For some, throwing away even the tiniest thing -- a sponge, a button, an empty box -- is so painful that they will not be able to allow the cleaning to be completed, no matter the consequences. For others, professional help and an organizer's guidance give them the strength to recover. At the end of each episode we'll find out who has been able to keep their hoarding behavior at bay and who, despite help, is still lost inside this painful disease.

After watching an episode of the series on Monday night I was shocked by the ability of the reality genre to exploit people’s demons all in the name of personal entertainment.  The episode in question, which aired on October 12, 2009, followed the lives of Linda and Steven.  Linda, a Washington state housewife had been hoarding for years.  Her husband had left her three years prior and she was now faced with the task of cleaning out her house due to a court injunction that stated the home needed to be sold as part of her divorce settlement.  Linda was assigned a doctor who specializes in hoarding disorders to help her deal with the massive heaps of goods and junk piled to the ceiling of every room in her house.  Through interviews with Linda’s children and ex-husband the viewer is exposed to the damage that Linda has caused to her family and herself due to her hoarding ways.  In a painstaking process Linda sets out to clean her home with the guidance of the good doctor and her son, but the process is futile.  In one week she manages to clean only one room, even with the help of a six-man crew.  The medical specialist insists that she be the one to make all the decisions in regards to what can be thrown out, recycled, sold and kept stating to the audience in a private interview, that hoarding behavior perpetuates itself unless the hoarder is the one who actively rids him/herself of the clutter suffocating his/her life.  At the end of the episode in the brief follow-up section, a message scrolls onto the screen stating that Linda gave up on trying to clean up her hoarded mess and simply sold the house.  The viewer has no idea whether or not she has been successfully treated nor does the audience have any idea what happened to the tonnes of junk that pervaded the house, clearly it could not be sold in that condition.  Regardless of these unanswered questions, A&E wraps up the episode by focusing on Steven, the other participant on the show, whose government-subsidized apartment was cleaned and redecorated with the help of a perky, yet weepy professional de-clutterer.

In essence, what the viewer watches for the hour in regards to Linda is the complete disintegration of a human life unfolding before their eyes.  Linda cannot handle her children or the challenge of getting rid of the junk that permeates every nook and cranny of her home.  She becomes frazzled when she discovers baby clothes in a bag, yells at her son when he suggests they throw out a broken down bicycle and begins to throw rotted cans into the truck that is unloading junk.  What the audience witnesses is a woman’s unraveling mental state.  Just like voyeurs we sit back in astonishment and question how someone could have accumulated so much stuff and live in such squalor; how a person can fill a house from top to bottom with every possible knick-knack and good under the sun.  We reel away from the screen as we see bathrooms covered in human excrement, floors littered in garbage, rotting food spilled all over the kitchen, and we question how anyone can live like this. 

There are many disconcerting issues in regards to this sort of programming.  One of the first questions we need to ask ourselves is how people end up on this show and why?  On the A&E website you can sign yourself up as a participant.  An obvious reason for getting onto the show is to get help with the cleanup of a hoarded living unit.  In the aforementioned episode both participants were forced to clean; one due to a court order the other due to a possible eviction.  As a viewer one has to wonder, however, whether A&E is providing monetary help as well to these people.  It seems hard to believe that a person that is so unstable would benefit from having large television crews follow their every movement and scrutinize their cluttered spaces. The second issue and more troubling one associated with this show is that of voyeurism.  As an audience we are watching dysfunction on screen and being entertained by it.  What does that say about us as a society?  In the horror film genre we are entertained by that which scares us or horrifies us, but that is figurative fright, based on the realm of the imagined.  In this instance, we are truly horrified by what we are witnessing, but there is nothing imagined about the situation transpiring in front of us.  We are disgusted by someone else’s life; whether we pity or judge the person for hoarding is not the issue.  The reality remains that we are watching someone else’s personal deterioration.  As young children we were told not to stare at someone who had a mental or physical disability, yet as adults we are being encouraged to watch these same people for an hour a week from the comfort of our couches – to be spectators of a human drama that was never intended for our eyes to