Top of The Heap
One couple had what it took to be ambassadors of the United States of Disarray. But this is where reality TV fosters a national pastime: watching others conquer the clutter.

By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 29, 2008

TEMPLE, Pa.

The only satisfying thing left to do on television is clean up people's houses.

In a half-baked, slovenly era of sub-accomplishment, organizing closets can feel like God's work. Symbolic outsiders (sassy black women, gay men) swoop in and sort the "keep" from the "toss."

These houses you see on cable makeover shows all seem to have the same kind of blobby Americans living in them -- shopaholic victims helpless in the face of their own affluenza, people you can judge and yell at, while you sit there on your own crummy couch not cleaning your own cluttered house. These are the houses where the bedrooms all look like the closets have vomited. The family rooms all foretell what a Kmart might look like if every third customer were a suicide bomber.

* * *

Phil and Mindy Wheeler had one of those houses, before "Clean House" came and saved them from themselves.

It's a small, white, timeworn Cape Cod on the Allentown Pike, outside Reading. Their home faces a Sam's Club, a Wal-Mart, a diner and a Dunkin' Donuts. It's the perfect stretch of road to become totally disgusted with yourself and others, and also find redemption through the voodoo rituals of reality TV.

In the last year or so, "we've gotten more spiritual," Phil said, and then asked, "Have you seen that DVD called 'The Secret'?" Because that is where he and Mindy got the idea to make "vision boards."

On his vision board, Phil, 37, wished away the work-related back injury that laid him flat three years ago (he was driving a sidewalk sweeper) and had him popping pain pills all day. Mindy, 29, who works off and on as a nanny and home-decor catalogue sales agent, wished for a baby and a check made out to her for $100,000.

More than anything, they wished for a "clean house." Then Mindy saw the ad on TV, for the cable show "Clean House," searching the nation for its annual "Messiest Home in the Country" episode. That's us, Mindy thought.

She wanted to submit a video to the show's Web site.

Phil said no, at first: "Why subject ourselves to that sort of humiliation?"

But he relented, and Mindy got out the camcorder and chronicled a horror so gross that anytime the doorbell would ring, the Wheelers wouldn't answer it, embarrassed by their own filth:

In about 1,000 square feet (including a living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, a bathroom and the walk-in attic at the top of the stairs), the Wheelers were down to two relatively clear spaces: part of a kitchen counter between the stove and the sink, and the surface of their bed, where Phil would spend most of his days and where, Mindy sighs, "I had to do all my Christmas, because there's really no place else to do it."

When you walked in, all you could think was dog pee. (Where? In the rugs?) Clutter was stacked high as the ceiling in every small room, including the plastic-shelf clutter one accumulates in hopes of organizing clutter. There were at least eight computers in different rooms and lots of pieces of other computers, and several dozen black phones that Phil rescued years ago from the aftermath of an office park bankruptcy. He intended to fix these phones and sell them on eBay, and of course he never did.

Piles and piles and more piles: paper, magazines, books, boxes, old video game systems, outdated LaserDisc movies, broken things that were part of gizmo things that once went with other things. Wires and cords. Busted dressers. Heaps of clothes. Lots of board games, which Mindy and Phil say are their favorite pastime, games you never heard of or wouldn't want to play -- Topple and Outburst and Who Knew?

There were, of course, stuffed animals, knickknacks, bric-a-brac, ackety-ackpht! They're always there in such houses: those sweet, cutesy items that are meant to cheer you up but somehow bring you all the way down. There was all of Phil's ham radio stuff. (Are the houses of ham radio enthusiasts ever tidy?) There were even computers in the couple's tiny bathroom, where the toilet and tub have not been scrubbed, at all, in more than a year.

In the messiest part of the house -- the attic -- Mindy poured on a little of reality television's favorite sauce: If the house could somehow get clean, Mindy narrated, she might get what she really wants -- the chance to adopt a baby.

Weeks later, a producer from California visited and took notes.

'Let's Get to Gettin' '

Weeks after that, on a cold, wet, late April morning, the trucks and RVs come to the Allentown Pike and park at the curb, disgorging production assistants, segment producers and post-production producers, a director and an assistant director; an executive producer and a network vice president; sound guys and lights guys and camera guys; hair and makeup people and, finally, the four-person cast of "Clean House," for an 11-day shoot. (The episode will air Wednesday at 9 p.m. on the Style Network.) They all keep asking Mindy and Phil, over and over and over, for the camera, and even when the camera isn't on: How did it get this bad?

"I don't know what happened," Mindy says. "It almost happened so slowly we didn't notice it. But it also happened overnight. You know?"

"Clean House," the Style Network's most watched series, features a bossy, bosomy black woman -- a comic actress named Niecy Nash -- who shows up to people's houses to sass and shame them into getting rid of their accumulated junk. The sentimental things apply, but Nash deems such messes "the foolishness of it all." She wears a giant flower in her hair and a tight outfit with a plunging neckline, swivels her neck and sucks her teeth in soulful disgust and then suh - naps her fingers with a command of "Let's get to gettin'."

On each episode, crappy-on-the-inside houses are emptied of whatever this week's misguided homeowners held weirdly dear -- their gargoyle collections, their Beanie Babies, underplayed compact discs, seldom ridden exercycles -- and sold at a yard sale.

Then a fastidious designer, Mark Brunetz, jumps in and performs interior design hocus-pocus: new paint, sitcom-set furniture and the brutal but true law of less is more. A blond hottie with a Southern accent, Trish Suhr, coordinates the yard sale and makes sense of closets; a hunky "go-to guy," Matt Iseman, makes off-color jokes while wielding a power drill.

In each episode, the homeowners must be cajoled into letting go of some object they cling to, often because it belonged to someone who has died. In the final few minutes, the homeowners take off their blindfolds for the "reveal" and wind up crying, usually because they are happy. The rooms all look like the love children of Pier 1 and Real Simple magazine.

"Clean House" is addictive, not because of who's on it, or what happens, but because of what you see in the margins of the camera's frame: real-real life, bad taste, the stuff of stuff that comes from having too much stuff. You start out asking What have we become as a society? and get all the way to Look what they did! Pretty!

The Shock of It All

The first day of the "Messiest Home" shoot at the Wheeler place is necessarily dispiriting: It is cold and raining buckets. In their sit-down interview for the camera, Phil and Mindy present a united front; before taping even began, they agreed to not say bad or blameful things about each other.

The condition of their house approaches an area that "Clean House" usually tries to avoid -- a level of filth that suggests psychological disorder. "Clean House" walks the line of becoming a show about hoarders and crazy cat ladies and Unabombers. "We're very careful about that," says executive producer Gina Rubinstein. "But it's hard to know until you're in it -- why do they live like this, how did it get this way?"

Mindy is a crier, which the producers like.

Angie Brown, the no-nonsense show producer, who is never seen or heard on camera, is tasked with the Mike Wallace-style interrogation tactics that will tease out a confessional narrative: Why would an adoption agency let Mindy and Phil have a baby if they've never cleaned their bathroom? How come Phil never gets around to selling items on eBay that he's keeping for the express purpose of selling on eBay? Why does Mindy keep a complete set of "Baby-sitters Club" novels for young girls? ("It reminds me of being young. . . . I didn't have a lot of friends," Mindy will say. "Every character is special to me. They're real to me.")

By midday, Nash and the cast members are shooting the scenes where they arrive and get their first look at the mess. Phil and Mindy's German shepherd, Zeus, was raised and trained by the Philadelphia fire department, leading designer Brunetz to quip: "When your search-and-rescue dog can't get through the house, then you have a problem."

Phil and Mindy reluctantly show them the hall closet. It's so bad that the producers, who are outside in their own "video village" trailer watching a live camera feed, yell "Cut!"

"They've got to be more horrified," says Esquire Jachem, the supervising producer, from his seat next to Brown, over the microphone.

"The problem," says Renee Simon, a vice president for the network, also sitting in the video trailer, "is that it's so awful in there that everyone just looks -- too shocked. They're too still."

That may have something to do with what's in the closet: There's a large hole in the floor, and a nasty stench. Phil and Mindy explain that the litter box for their two cats was down in the hole. "Where are the cats?" Nash asks.

And here is where we learn that the cats have been gone for a couple of years. Yuck! In the production trailer, there are screams of both repulsion and delight: Desiccated cat poop is good television.

Union rules -- we have to break for lunch. Four of the producers splash across the pike to eat veggie burgers at the diner. An episode of "Clean House" never seems more desperate than on the first day of shooting, when the homeowners start to see themselves as America will see them.

"Phil and Mindy's fortress is being knocked down," Rubinstein says.

"But they are still in denial about how it got this way," Jachem says.

The important thing now is to get scenes of the Wheelers actually learning to clean, and taking sponges and mops in their lazy hands. The episode is a failure if "Clean House" does a makeover but the people don't change. The taping so far portrays Phil and Mindy living in suspended adolescence, where hobbies (ham radio, community theater, scrapbooking, amateur ghost-hunting in a paranormal club) and Phil's back problems won out over basic chores; where money woes somehow led to more shopping, more acquiring.

"It's the land of excuses," Simon says.

'I'm Speechless'

In an empty parking lot a block away, Nash, 38, sits in her trailer wearing fuzzy slippers and a long cardigan, waiting for a production assistant to bring her lunch from Chick-fil-A. All morning she has not been her usual television self. The minute the camera cuts, the Niecy persona is replaced with the dour demeanor of a CVS cashier. She's done six seasons of this show, along with a recurring part on Comedy Central's "Reno 911!" and a starring role in a prime-time sitcom debuting this fall. (At her first meeting with the Style Network, Nash says, the creators were thinking of calling the show "House Colonic": "I said, 'Change the name and let's go.' ")

The Wheelers' house clearly sickens her. "I think it's the worst I've ever seen," she says, "and come to find out, the entry did not tell us the full story about how bad it was. In a sense I'm speechless, because I have never seen two adults living in what I deem as squalor."

She is the picture of the put-out diva. She has two makeup and hair guys -- known on the set as "the vanities" -- and submits to this interview while tapping on her BlackBerry with her fuchsia Frito-size fingernails. "I've seen a lot, honey. I have been to the mountaintop of clutter and looked over and I still ain't seen anything as bad as this."

She says it's always the same story: "If I have learned one thing, it's about brokenness, in every house. You have to get in there and figure out what's really broken. We can turn around three times and make the magic happen, but if we don't fix what's really broken, then it's not going to solve the problem."

And Away It Goes

Somehow the problems are solved, at least to the satisfaction of television. After the "moment of truth" segment earlier in the week, where Nash issues the homeowners the thorough scolding that viewers depend on, Phil and Mindy are filmed scrubbing their bathroom and kitchen.

Five days into the shoot, the clutter is sorted and hauled out of the house, where it is arranged on tables under tents for the big yard sale, the most cathartic part of "Clean House." Hundreds of people show up on Saturday morning, even though it is still wet and cold outside, to paw through the detritus of Phil and Mindy's problems, to frown at the little Halloween decorations, the plastic chip-and-dip platters, the useless computer parts and the "2001 Snowflake Teddy" stuffed bear with the Santa hat and a tag that reads To Mindy, from Nanny & Pop Pop; someone buys the couple's old washer, but hardly anyone wants their furniture. Many of the yard sale shoppers simply want a glimpse of Nash, Brunetz, Suhr and Iseman. Some have driven 50 or 100 miles for this brush with minor celebrity.

Phil and Mindy's junk becomes some other problem for those who paw through it and acquire it (one woman waddles off to her minivan carrying their board games), and for the dudes who pull up in the 1-800-GOT-JUNK? dump truck to haul away what's left.

The stars of the show remain vibrant, punchy, with plastered-on smiles and tan makeup. Brunetz, Iseman, Suhr and a team of production people transform the kitchen into a '50s-style, mint-green Donna Reed paradise; the bedroom gets the sage-green mission-style treatment; the guest room is done in pale yellows, with a bed that can transform into a crib, should there ever be a baby. The living room is done in earth tones. All the dog-pee carpet has been replaced by wood-laminate flooring. All the cat poop has been removed from the hole in the closet. The house now smells of retail, with aesthetics that were out of the Wheelers' economic reach. The attic has been finished with sky blue walls and remade into home office space. A flat-screen TV is mounted in a creamy tan living room. All Mindy can do is cry.

As quick as it came, television packs up its trucks and leaves the Wheelers in a cleaned-up world, a bit bewildered and alone now in their lifestyle reboot.

Facing Reality TV

A month goes by. Phil and Mindy are sitting in their still-clean living room on a June evening. The kitchen still looks neat, and more human -- with groceries on the shelves, and a casserole dish soaking in the sink. Mindy gets on Phil's case if he leaves the change from his pockets on the dresser overnight. She fears the encroachment of clutter. The bed is made, the closets are still organized.

Upstairs in the attic, however, it seems the mess is beginning anew.

Because Phil and Mindy couldn't part with everything, they were left with a few dozen Rubbermaid tubs filled with their junk, which Mindy has been slowly going through, which in turn has started a mess, which Mindy swears is not a mess but a plan, as soon as she gets it sorted. She and Phil have been going to yard sales, and Goodwill, looking to replace some of the things they lost. "Stuff we need," Mindy emphasizes. "My wooden spoons. I don't know what happened to them, but they're gone. My good pieces of Tupperware . . ."

Phil says they're going to make new vision boards and dream bigger.

Now comes the part about being on television. The episode airs in a few days. Mindy knows that people will get online and talk about how she and Phil look, how they talk, what they say. Phil is embarrassed about how they were living "before." The message forums on the show's Web site can be a vicious arena. "I'm really nervous," Mindy says. "I understand they want good television. I just don't know if we're going to come out looking good or looking like idiots."

"Regardless, it was a free remodel," Phil says. "That's the price we pay."

The price they pay is that their house will always be "The Messiest Home in the Country," and they will be the people who lived like that, and the episode will always seem to be on, rerun after rerun, until a worse house comes along. Television comes into your life, fixes it, makes you Queen for a Day.

Phil and Mindy go on and on about how it's changed them. It still smells faintly like fresh paint, too, little wafts of what rolled through here.