‘Hoarders’ Season 12 Premiere Centers on ‘Master Hoarder’

Hoarders Season 12 presents more challenges for experts who hope to help people who hoard belongings, making it impossible to move around their homes. The experts hope they can help their subjects, who have seen their homes, relationships, and lives are thrown upside-down by their struggles. In the premiere episode, viewers will meet Eric of Rydal, Georgia, whose home is nearly impossible to navigate.

In a preview for the episode, the retired journalist, flight attendant, and electronic technician gives viewers a tour of his home, which is in a “chaotic condition.” When you approach his house, there are things all over the lawn and stuff packed onto his porch. “My porch is filled with stuff it doesn’t need to be filled with. It’s covered up with a tarp which is unsightly,” Eric admitted. “It just means I’m hiding something that I don’t want you to see.”

Once you get inside, the living is overtaken by boxes of things Eric has not even opened. There are piles of shoes on every step of his staircase. The books in his library are impossible to reach because of empty boxes blocking the bookshelves. He even has too many clothes piled on his bed to sleep. In one scene, he shows his kitchen, which has a path just barely wide enough for his dog to run through. Eric said he once de-hoarded his kitchen, but “give me five days, and I can hoard it up real quick.” At the end of the preview, Eric calls himself a “Master Hoarder… so I know how to hoard.”

This season will feature seven other subjects who meet with psychologists Dr. Robin Zasio and Dr. David Tolin and clean-up experts Matt Paxton, Cory Chalmers, and Dorothy Breninger. This season, A&E added another expert, Brandon Bronaugh, reports PEOPLE. The experts hope to help Eric and the other subjects clean their homes and help them understand the underlying issues that led them to start hoarding. Each episode runs two hours. The season premiere airs on Monday, March 22 at 8 p.m. ET on A&E.

In a recent interview with Distractify, Zasio insisted that nothing about the show is staged for cameras. “It’s all natural. It’s unscripted and it’s exactly as individuals see it,” the psychologist explained. “I think the reason why this question is so incredibly important is because what the viewers are seeing is the reality of other people in our society who are struggling at that very level and they’re living at that very level of hoarding. The conditions can be unsanitary and unsafe and even deadly in certain circumstances.”