Hoarding nation

The A&E network may have discovered the Higgs boson of television: the smallest unit of entertainment ever postulated. I realized this when I made a conscious decision to sit through an entire commercial break just to find out whether a dusty box in an abandoned storage unit was filled with worthless junk — or with almost worthless junk.

This is not the central drama of A&E's Storage Wars. It's the only drama of A&E's Storage Wars.

And yet on the strength of this and other offerings, A&E is now worth around $19 billion, according to the terms of a sale announced recently by part-owner Comcast. This is the same network that actually built a series around the Philadelphia Parking Authority.

For that and other reasons, A&E long ago ceased to stand for (or reliably deliver) "Arts and Entertainment." But that hasn't prevented it from accreting some wisdom for the age of eternal downturn. Arguably, Storage Wars and its lurid mirror image, A&E's Hoarders, constitute an incidental investigation of the nation's acquisitive overdrive just when it's beginning to fail us.

Storage Wars follows the non-adventures of a small group of people bidding for abandoned self-storage lockers, of which there appears to be an implausibly inexhaustible supply in Southern California alone. The storage warriors name their prices based only on what they can see through an open door, hoping that whatever lies inside can be sold for a bit more than they spent. In other words, they are attempting — and often managing — to subsist on the oceans of junk being cast off by their fellow Americans.

This is a remarkable but inglorious project. In fact, the producers try to liven things up with valiant but ultimately absurd attempts to force traditional dramatic roles on the cast. Dave Hester, for instance, is positioned as a villainous "mogul" just for having a reasonably successful small business (as well as a slightly annoying personality). As A&E notes with its trademark lack of intentional irony, Hester must reap enough profit from abandoned belongings to "feed his massive machine of over 15 employees."

Hester probably isn't the junkyard Warren Buffett they're trying to make him out to be, but it's worth noting that he and others are making a living at this. In an era of supposed austerity, that raises the question of where all this stuff comes from. Storage Wars' executive producer once told USA Today that he deliberately avoided the unhappy stories behind the orphaned possessions, explaining, "All you see is misery there, and I didn't want to trade on that."

Right, because that's another A&E show. Hoarders documents the travails of people who have compulsively collected so much stuff that it has become debilitating and even dangerous. The hoards' contents range from usable goods all the way through junk, garbage, debris, animals (in various states of being), and stomach-churning accumulations of organic waste.

Hoarders is a weekly reminder that, as Micah Zenko recently explained in the Atlantic, Americans are as likely to be crushed by our own furniture as we are to be killed by terrorists. Our population of compulsive accumulators is about as infinite as our supply of abandoned storage units. This is not a coincidence.

There was a time when I found Hoarders even more senselessly engrossing than Storage Wars. Then I realized that the only reason I was watching it was Matt Paxton.

The series has drafted a small army of professionals to attempt to restore some semblance of order and function to hoarders' homes and lives. They all pale next to Paxton. While the shrinks and social workers of Hoarders stand in corners mouthing unhelpful bromides, and while friends and relatives work themselves into apoplexy over the recalcitrant pack rats (and actual rats) at hand, Paxton possesses not only the best self-appointed title — extreme cleaning specialist — but also a transcendent equanimity and effectiveness. You might call him Zen-monkish if he weren't always getting so much done while dispensing such aphorisms as "We're all about four or five decisions away from [defecating] in a bucket."

Yes, life in America can be tough these days — crappy even. But most of us are more than getting by, or at least in a position to do so barring a sustained series of very bad decisions. As A&E accidentally teaches us, our wealth is so great that the vast excess can sustain untold others — even if it ends up killing us first.