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Hank Stuever: 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.