Kultur: (About) 100 Words on...A&E's Hoarders (Monday Nights, 10:00/9:00PM CT)

Kultur: Songs, Scenes and Sunday School

A Blog on Culture by C. Michael Bailey

Kultur

Kultur is a Webblog primarily devoted to the discussion of music but often addressing movies, books, politics, religion, media and popular culture.

This blog offers me the opportunity to develop ideas and receive feedback in an effort to understand why King Solomon states in Ecclesiastes 1:17 (KJV):

Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind.

When not writing this blog, I serve as a Senior Reviewer for the online magazine All About Jazz. This blog is an outgrowth of and will eventually replace my previous blog: Kultur.

Kultur: (About) 100 Words on...A&E's Hoarders (Monday Nights, 10:00/9:00PM CT)

(About) 100 Words on...A&E's Hoarders (Monday Nights, 10:00/9:00PM CT)

Hoarders

Monday Nights, 10/9 Central

Arts and Entertainment

A&E's Hoarders is a spin-off of Obsessed (on hiatus after the 11-episode first season in 2009) which, itself was a tangent from the highly successful A&E series, Intervention. Obsessed dealt with obsessive-compulsive disorder generally with an occasional episode on pathologic hoarding. Hoarders is all hoarding all of the time and each story has the same theme:

Jane Doe is a middle-aged mother of two who has been hoarding since the premature death of her dog, Bowser. Her house is filled with Bowser's feces and new and old doggy toys from floor to ceiling in every room, including bathrooms. Jane sleeps on the back stoop of her house in a sleeping bag as she can no longer get into her bedroom. Jane has had to rent a port-a-potty, which she is now filling the dog paraphernalia. Jane's children were taken from her long ago and have since grown up, retuning home to help their mother.

Enter Dr. Kimberly K. Psychologist, and expert in OCD and Meagan Ann Organize, a professional organizer. The two meet with Jane and form a plan of action. Things start swimmingly, with Jane receptive to throwing away Bowser's feces. By midafternoon, Jane has become anxious, unable to choose which to keep among Bowser's 25 Bo-Boes. The staff of fifteen people stand by while Jane rationalizes, in a sing-song baby's voice, why she must keep Bowser's dog bowl full of 10-year-old Purina Dog Chow. By that evening, Jane has retrieved Bowser's feces and has barricaded herself in what space remains in her garage. The show ends with Jane sucking her thumb on her back stoop.

A&E should consider a new show called Cure. In Cure, instead of a professional organizer, the show employs a company by the same name with a perfect record for cleaning hoarding domiciles. In this series, after the introduction, the Cure team enters the house, sits the hoarder in a chair, gags his/her mouth, nails his/her feet to the floor and cleans the house out from stem to stern with the principle watching. Each episode will be followed up to see if the hoarder has returned to hoarding and if so, what relapse treatment is prescribed. Forget all other shows, this one is a sure bet and this review is well over 100 words long.