The folks out at A&E sent a copy of Hoarders: The Complete Season One, and it’s a strange sort of show that manages to intermingle sanctimony and genuine concern into a strange little tapestry of a product, and the end result is going to be pretty wild.

Hoarders follows people with one big problem: their houses.  They keep most everything they come in contact with, have incredible difficulty in throwing anything away, and as a result, find themselves living in the center of enormous piles of items.  And it’s done horrible things to their lives–some are looking at losing their children, their homes, and even their lives themselves as they sift through the host of items in their houses.  Everything from rotting food to broken furniture is in their way, and they’re out to get it out and get their lives back.

The strangest part about this is that, so often, you look at these people, and you know, even agree, that they need to get it out of there.  Garbage, broken things, you can see just how badly they need to clean up.  But they have a way of couching it in so much psychobabble that it ends up grating on the nerves.

A lot of people will show up to watch this show just to see the immense spectacle that these targeted people make of their lives. And indeed, you can sense that even these “organizers” and “helpers” have the sense that they’re there to provide people with this spectacle, and the price of that spectacle is that they spend a couple days making a person weepy by cleaning their house.

Sometimes the drama is of the cheapest variety, and sometimes, it’s not.  Sometimes it’s powerful, and sometimes it’s distasteful. Sometimes it looks like they’re really helping people, and sometimes it looks like the most exploitative garbage ever released on an unwitting public.

And isn’t that, inevitably, the mark of the truest sort of drama?

There is the reality element, the ability to relate to it, and that makes things all the more emotionally reactive.  You can understand it, you can feel along with it.  Sometimes you’ll love it, sometimes you’ll hate it, but you will almost never be bored by it.  You will not walk away from Hoarders without feeling something. It may not be a happy something, but I can just about assure you, you WILL feel something.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives this ultimately successful drama an eight out of ten–Hoarders does too good a job of keeping you from being bored to earn much less.