The new A&E series blurs the boundaries between informative documentary and exploitative reality show, resulting in this viewer’s guilty pleasure

Chintzy knick-knacks, spoiled food, unopened boxes, and rotting trash litter the homes of compulsive hoarders—people who cannot throw anything away.  These pathological packrats star in the new series Hoarders, the disturbingly delicious blend between documentary and reality show that airs Mondays at 10 pm ET on A&E. (http://www.aetv.com/hoarders/)

This is not a show about Grandma’s cluttered attic.  Each episode features two compulsive hoarders, whose abnormal proclivity for accumulating stuff has rendered their homes unlivable—even unsafe.  Viewers meet people like Jake, a young man who cannot dispose of his shedding dog’s hair (“I feel like if I throw it away, I’m going to speed up my dog’s aging,” he says); Jill, a middle-aged woman who keeps food years past its expiration date (“Well, it’s not puffy yet,” she explains about why she is keeping a box of organic chicken broth that expired in 2008); and Shirley, an elderly woman who doesn’t even know how many cats she has (for the record, there were more than 70—both living and dead—in her home.)  As the camera pans around these disgustingly disorderly dwellings, viewers can’t help but utter uncomfortable giggles, gasps of horror, and bemused yelps of disbelief.

Not only is the gross-out factor captivating, the stakes are high.  In order to qualify for the show, according to the A&E website, participants must be “on the verge of personal crisis.”  The spotlighted hoarders face eviction, divorce, foreclosure, and even jail time.  Viewers feel the urgency—not only do these folks need help, they need it immediately.

A&E to the rescue—sort of.  The premise of the show is that a team of experts provided by the network will help the participants recover.  Each hoarder is paired with a “professional organizer,” a person who makes his/her living helping others decide what to throw away.  A clean-up crew (shameless free advertising for 1-800-GOT-JUNK) spends two days clearing out the houses based on the hoarders’ decisions.  The show documents the entire painful process—one woman agonizes over whether to throw away a broken vacuum cleaner, another literally fishes through a liquefied rotten pumpkin to retrieve its seeds.  Ultimately, viewers sense that merely cleaning up these homes will not cure these people.

A similar show, TLC’s Clean Sweep, with its perky narrator and team of enthusiastic interior designers, documents self-deprecating messy people while they clear out their stuff, have a yard sale, and redecorate their junk rooms.  Something darker is at play in Hoarders.  Only minutes into the first episode, it becomes obvious that compulsive hoarding behavior is a serious mental illness.  Apparently, A&E offers formal counseling to everyone who appears on the show, but many of them decline.  Unfortunately, the network misses their opportunity to truly expand public awareness.  Although text narration does inform viewers that three million Americans suffer from compulsive hoarding behavior, there is a dearth of additional substantive information about the condition, which is thought to be related to obsessive-compulsive disorder.  Occasional interviews with Dr. David Tolin, a clinical psychologist and a national hoarding expert, are fascinating but few and far between.

Even though Hoarders misses the mark educationally, it is voyeuristically irresistible.  Like rubbernecking on the freeway, there is something slightly embarrassing about delighting in the show—you know you should probably stop watching, but you can’t tear your eyes away.