Two hoarders get ready to cut a rug inside a tiny storage facility on television's newest dance competition show.
Even as it kicks off its 14th season of Dancing with the Stars, featuring such competitors as Martina Navratilova and Jack Warner, ABC has hitched its wagon to another popular reality TV phenomenon. This week will see a somewhat lower-rent version of their hit soiree show as viewers have the opportunity to enjoy Dancing with the Hoarders.
"These people who are pathologically unwilling to discard any of their belongings are fascinating and sad to watch," said an unnamed production executive. "And we're betting on the fact that they will be even more fascinating and sad when they're coupling up and doing some painstakingly rehearsed choreography."
To give the show a more real world feel that is reflective of the living situations of compulsive hoarders, the dance routines will take place in a two foot square area in the middle of a packed-to-the-gills temporary storage facility in Tarzana, California.
"A live audience will sit outside the storage unit on folding chairs, and, yes, they will occasionally have to step aside for customers who drive into the facility during taping and need to unload their crap," the executive added, explaining that this is exactly the kind of downtrodden, ultimately hopeless feeling the show hopes will be underlying the otherwise upbeat dance competition.
"These poor, marginalized people deserve to be held up as objects of morbid fascination as much for their probably excruciatingly substandard dancing as they already are for their seriously effed up compulsions," the producer concluded.
In place of a glittering mirror ball, Dancing with the Hoarders will feature a broken ceiling fan. And, in perhaps the show's master stroke of broad appeal marketing, the hoarding hoofers will be judged by a panel of ghost hunters.
James Napoli is an author and humorist. More of his comedy content for the web can be found here.