YMMV / Hoarders

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• Ensemble Dark Horse: Matt Paxton. Cory Chalmers is liked for also being a bit hard hitting when his temper flares and being a deadpan snarker.
  • Glen, the man who had thousands of rats in his home. He was loved by the fans because unlike a lot of the other people on the show, he fully acknowledged that his living conditions were not ideal and completely cooperated with the cleaning crew. He's very sad to see the rats go, as he saw them as his friends due to the crushing grief and loneliness he felt after his wife's death years earlier, but again, agrees that it's the best thing for them to be taken into care.
• Hate Sink: Plenty.
  • Dick from S9 E7, who refused to admit he had a problem even after 26 tons of trash was removed from his house, his apartment, and *nine* storage facilities. His hoarding also damaged his girlfriend's home to the point where she was unable to pay for the repairs, and ended up choosing his hoard over his partner of 30 years.
  • Sir Patrick, who turns out to be a sex offender who kept dolls because they reminded him of his 9-year-old neighbor.
  • S3 E19 has Hanna, who abused her 16 kids and countless animals, seems very nonchalant about having 6 deceased kids and multiple animals dying during filming, and is physically and verbally abusive with her family and cleaners, and ultimately refuses to let the cleaning staff even touch her hoard.
  • From the same episode is Gary, a manchild who refuses to even *talk* with counselors despite him and his disabled wife being threatened with eviction, intentionally sabotages discussions between the counselor and his wife, and acts like he's being discriminated for owning bunnies (which have roamed free for so long that they have eaten through the wiring and walls, and volunteers must remove the feces coating the floor with shovels.) He ends up storming off mid-episode while his landlords discuss whether or not to evict him.
  • S4 E15's Eileen, who routinely yells at her kids while her husband, a firefighter who refers to their home as a "death trap" watches and ignores the problems, and says that she'd be fine with CPS removing her 4 kids because it'd "teach them a lesson", while refusing to get rid of her hoard, merely just moving it outside.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • The story of Al, a widowed father who lost custody of his son, Frankie, because of his hoarding, is ultimately this. His cleanup is unsuccessful, and Cory Chalmers predicts that he will never get his son back. However, a follow up episode reveals that Al did manage to regain custody of his son. It is also revealed that the county inspector who had Frankie taken away in the first place provided help and support to Al during the whole process, even while suffering from advanced prostate cancer. He died shortly after the follow up was filmed, and the episode is dedicated to his memory.
  • Ray from Season 9. He and his brother Tony live together, but Ray takes full responsibility for the hoarding. After Tony died the day before cleanup was supposed to start, Ray vowed to continue in his memory, and didn't hesitate to throw out anything (unlike basically everyone else on the show). Overall, he is definitely one of the most likable and sympathetic hoarders featured on this show.
• Memetic Mutation: The possum from the Carolyn/Jo episode.
• Narm: The melodramatic reactions the hoarders have to the prospect of parting with things, as well as the family arguments that result from their hoarding. ^note Keep in mind that many of the people on this show are mentally ill — not just the hoarders themselves, but family members. However, according to some people on the crew, these situations are sometimes played up for the camera.
• Nausea Fuel: And plenty of it!
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • One old lady had cat skeletons in her house.
  • Hanna kept dozens of animals stuffed into small cages and barely cared for them at all. At one point, the cleanup crew found a dead chicken that had been squashed completely flat by the weight of the cages and junk piled on top of it.
  • Shannon, a woman who suffered from paranoid delusions who thought her house was full of demons. She tried to keep them away by wrting 'JEHOVA' and 'YASHUA' on her door in red paint that looked like blood and praying to a cat's skull she named 'Friend'. She also gave Friend offerings of bones, dead rats, and vacuum cleaner dust.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • At least I'm not that messy, one may think as they make a way through the corridor of boxes between the kitchen and the living room. I will definitely get this Christmas stuff put away by Cinco de Mayo!
  • Try watching this show and then looking at any type of collection you might happen to have. Just try.
  • If you are a book person, watch the book episode, Claire and Vance.
• Squick: With a show like this, it's a given. These people's houses are positively littered with trash like milk cartons and old newspapers, and that's not counting bedbugs, moldy food that's beyond rotten, and pet feces. Need we say more? invoked
  • The cleanup crew often finds large amounts of the hoarders' own urine/feces around the house if the plumbing is broken or the water has been shut off. Shanna took it up to about 11,000 - using multiple buckets instead of the toilet, and then dumping it in bottles or the front yard, with one of the specialists saying it was the worst home he'd ever been in. The structural damage was so bad that it would have cost less money to demolish and rebuild her home than to clean and repair it.
  • Rotting animal corpses are sometimes found at the bottom of hoards.
  • The phrases "fecal dust" and "dead cat juice" being used when describing a particularly filthy home.
  • One episode featured a woman who ran a ramshackle poultry farm cooking and eating unrefrigerated excrement-covered eggs. Even worse, she makes her living selling said eggs, which makes you wonder how many of her customers have contracted salmonella.
  • While cleaning out a mansion whose former owner was about to be evicted, the crew found a hidden passage whose walls were lined with decades' worth of mold - and evidence that the hoarder had recently been down there to stuff it full of junk.
  • One animal hoarder's house had a carpet that was so thoroughly saturated with urine and feces that it was too heavy to pull up by hand. The cleanup crew had to cut it apart and haul it out in chunks.
  • Sherry's garbage-filled home was essentially a giant cockroach hive, epitomized by the scene where an exterminator takes a portrait down, revealing that there's dozens of roaches clustered together behind it and presumably every other picture hanging on the walls.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Laura, a wife and mom fighting cancer whose aim was to get her house cleaned up and her hoarding under control before she died. She didn't live to see the episode air, but she was at peace having achieved her goal.
  • Ray and Tony, a pair of elderly brothers living in a squalid San Francisco rowhouse. The night before the cleanup starts, Tony dies in his sleep, leaving Ray to deal with both his passing and cleaning their condemned house.
  • Ruth, who lost her husband to lung cancer just as he came back from the hospital (she was unable to remove his trousers from where he left them before he died), lost her oldest son to a heart attack on Christmas, and lost her youngest son to suicide 8 months after her other son died. Seeing her talk about how she's been in recovery from hoarding for five years as of early 2017 can turn her story into one of happy tears.
  • Wilma's children's reactions to their mother saying she doesn't love them. Her son Ben later says he has given up hope on having a loving relationship with her.
  • In the same episode as Ruth was Doug, a man who suffered from brain damage after an ATV accident and lost his memory. He began hoarding in an effort to trigger his memories and lived with his father up until he died of suspected suicide. By the time he's given an intervention, he's living in complete squalor and prefers to spend his nights digging through gas station dumpsters for aluminum cans to sell and old lottery tickets. And while his sister and uncle are initially late to the clean up, it's due to the fact that they also haven't been to the home ever since their father/brother died and they're also still deeply affected by his death. But in a happy conclusion, Doug is able to clean his house, receives a special makeover to give him a clean start, and has reconnected with his sister and uncle, who help him out.
  • The reason for Glen's rat obsession? He lost his wife decades ago, and she was just 39. So when the rats were taken away, that feeling of loneliness and grief bubbled up again, and oh, how he wept.
  • If you love dogs or cats, you should probably avoid any episode wherein someone is hoarding animals as well as objects.
• The Woobie: A number of family members and spouses who just can't seem to fight back against the hoarding on their own. Some of the hoarders are woobies themselves. The biggest woobies are probably the children of hoarders though with #1 being a middle child who basically left a suicide note to her mother. The child's age: 7.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Hoarders that had some really traumatic childhoods can also have the nastiest reactions to the cleaning process.
  • Glen, whose escaped fancy rats had completely overrun his home, was unable to bring himself to capture any of the escapees once they'd started breeding. At one point he breaks down and, weeping, reveals that he's terrified that the female rats' litters, hidden in the walls or flooring, will starve to death if their mothers can't get back to them. Later, a rat that's had its belly ripped open in a fight is found, and poor Glen has to give the nod to its euthanasia.
    • Producer Jodi Flynn later revealed that the crew went to considerable lengths to save as many rats as possible, working with the Humane Society to capture them alive, bringing in special trucks and taking them all to a facility in northern California. From there, they were sent to rat rescues all over the country. There were well over a thousand.