Mourning Hoarders

Though A&E officially confirmed it last week, only yesterday did the news start to ooze out, like liquefied squirrel organs from a broken freezer: Hoarders has been cancelled.

I had a bad feeling that the show might be on its way out when the last season started incorporating off-mission gimmicks like having the "extreme cleaning specialist" assigned to a hoarded house spend the night in it before clean-up started (like, these people are here to try to make a horrible situation livable again, not confirm how horrible it is through direct experience), or giving the hoarder a makeover -- not the house, the person. I guess I'll still have TLC's pretty-good ripoff series, Hoarding: Buried Alive, but it's just not the same. Here's a countdown of what I'll miss most.

7. Matt Paxton

In Andy Dehnart's Reality Blurred article, linked above, Extreme Cleaning Specialist Matt Paxton self-deprecatingly comments, "I got used to being a TV star, and now that’s gone." I mean, I choose to believe he said it self-deprecatingly, because he should. More than any of the other helper-types on the show, Paxton did seem, in latter years, to start using the show as a platform from which to grow his personal brand: I definitely won't miss the awkward way he kept trying to work the phrase "five decisions away" into conversation in order to remind viewers about his podcast of the same name. ...That sound you just heard was Sarah D. Bunting divorcing me and writing me out of her will, because she loves him, and I get it -- I have loved him too, over the years, and all that other stuff I just said aside, I will miss his "are you fucking kidding me?" manner with the show's subjects and his refusal to take any shit off them. Often literally.

6. Dr. Robin Zasio

A therapist specializing in OCD and hoarding, Dr. Z made herself the Jeff Van Vonderen of Hoarders, urging subjects to agree to change gently but firmly, and managing to give her "This is one of the worst hoards I've ever seen" talking head interviews a new spin even though we heard her make the same claim in pretty much every episode. (I mean, if Dr. Z walks into your house and her reaction is, "Eh, this is probably about average," the cameras turn off and everyone goes home, without smelling dead cats or stepping in pee.) I'll never forget the episode where Dr. Z had to deal with a guy who kept dozens and dozens of not-especially-tame rats as pets, until it was more like they were letting him live with them than the other way around; someone I follow on Twitter -- and I think it was Kim Reed -- tweeted, "Dr. Zasio handled that like a G." And she did, guys. She did.

5. The Black Screens Of Judgment

"But when the crew gets to the bathroom, they make an unexpected discovery." Reader, when the BSoJ tries to warn you with that bland white text on a black screen, let me assure you: the crew is not about to walk into a surprise party. Whoever wrote that copy must have had so much fun finding different, decreasingly informative ways to say "You're about to see something awful."

4. City Code Inspectors

In real life, it must be soul-killing to be the person who has to pay a call to a person who is clearly mentally ill and unable to look after him- or (mostly) herself, issue a warning about a cleanup you know is only going to happen if the situation gets pushed to an undeniable crisis point, and return to see how hopeless everything is and that no one's ever going to be able to live on the property anymore because goats have literally been eating the walls. (Note: seriously, that happened.) But the judgy part of me -- haha, I say that "part" of me like it's not 67% of my character -- loves seeing the city code inspector show up and be like, "Yeah, no." Because, yes, it's a mental illness, but it's also kind of a choice, and I'll always be on the side of the person who enforces rules.

3. Dorothy Breininger

I can't really improve on what I wrote here. She virtually never lost her warmth and optimism, and God, she worked with some real garbage -- human and otherwise.

2. The Hoarders Who Refuse To Be Helped

I mean, this is the reason you watch the show, right? To yell at the TV that these people didn't deserve possessions or credit cards or the help of the poor, exhausted family members who were just desperate for the cleanup to work so the hoarder didn't lose his or her house and have to move in with them. Nothing gives the viewer a shot of pure schadenfreude like seeing a filthy jerk refuse the ministrations of people who surely would prefer to spend a weekend doing anything else. "I'm glad you're losing your house!" I would scream. I wasn't really glad, but...well, maybe I was. Hey, I'm not the one who told them to keep buying Christmas ornaments and Snuggies!

1. The Messes

I would watch the messes like I read true crime: for the shameful thrill of spying on the worst moment of someone else's life, in tortured suspense as to what might lurk around the corner, in the garage, or under that pile of empty two-liter bottles of Diet Coke. Each hoard was the unique life's work of its creator, a disgusting snowflake. It's these glimpses at an unimaginable life (hey, I already told you about my perfectly organized t-shirt drawer: I have my problems, but a hoard ain't one, and never will be) that I will definitely miss the most.