SOME TV SHOWS are as great as our greatest literature. Programs such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad are Dickensian in their sprawl and Shakespearean in their tragic characters’ deceptions. But one show in this current Golden Age of television is the most oft-overlooked of its peers, one whose greater feat—or unfairness to screenwriters—is that it’s not scripted. I’m talking about A&E’s reality show Hoarders.
I’m not kidding. What often draws people to watch those suffering from hoarding disorder and the psychologists, professional organizers, and loved ones trying to help them overcome mental illness is the typical reality TV magnet: Seeing the life of someone worse off than you. But there’s more to Hoarders than that. A good episode is nothing less than a short story similar to those by Alice Munro, vivid in its deep analysis of real life, family dynamics, and psyches in danger and repair. Almost every night for the past month, watching has been like studying fiction writing in some of the best (and cheapest) creative writing courses I’ve ever taken.
“Televised evil,” wrote literary critic Adam Kirsch about TV’s failure to fully match the quality of great literature, “ ... almost always takes melodramatic form: Our anti-heroes are mobsters, meth dealers or terrorists. But this has nothing to do with the way we encounter evil in real life, which is why a character like Gilbert Osmond, in The Portrait of a Lady, is more chilling in his bullying egotism than Tony Soprano with all his stranglings and shootings.”
The real people in Hoarders underscore this. I’ve been more unsettled by some participants than by Heath Ledger’s psychopathic Joker in The Dark Knight. I’ve also been moved to tears and reminded that sorting people is never as easy as “good” and “bad.”
In this show I’ve seen a Christian hoard so many canned goods (which he had intended to give to the needy) that they nearly physically and emotionally swallowed his wife’s presence in the house and any hopes of saving their marriage. I’ve seen a young man hoard toys and items affiliated with adolescence because he was stunted by the faith of his Christian father, who loves his son so much he weeps, but to whom homosexuality is a sin.
Hoarding affects ordinary people. This show largely explores rural life, examining families across ethnicities and identities and revealing the commonalities in our traumas and our recoveries. It’s what the best literature is all about.
Da’Shawn Mosley (dashawn-mosley.com) is a former Sojourners associate editor and lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!
