You know how sometimes your friend is like, “I can’t hang out, I’m cleaning my apartment,” and you’re like, “Oh my God, please let me come over and watch you?” And then, before they can respond, you head over to their house and, enraptured, watch them slowly empty the dishwasher, and they stare at you, frightened, but don’t say anything because they’re worried you’re going to start crying if they ask you to go home?
Good news: NBC really gets you, my profoundly Type-A friend who I hope is engaging in some form of light therapy. Deadline reports that the network is developing The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, a half-hour comedy from Burning Love creator Erica Oyama and “veteran” (not of war, likely of television) Greg Malins. The series will be based on The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing—the wildly popular, New York Times-best-selling guide to home decluttering from Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo.
Yes, you’ve read this correctly: NBC is creating a TV series based on a book about cleaning your house. It should be noted, however, that Kondo is not your garden-variety Japanese cleaning consultant. Kondo has sold more than three million copies of her book worldwide, been named one of Time‘s “100 Most Influential People,” and has never once had her mom tell her she isn’t allowed to buy a white coat, why doesn’t she buy the brown one because then when she spills hot chocolate on it, nobody will be able to tell?
Kondo’s particular decluttering philosophy is based on the following concept: If an object doesn’t “spark joy,” you must throw it away. Those Bar Mitzvah sweatpants from eighth grade: Burn them. Your toilet brush: Hurl it off your porch and never think of it again. Your inhaler: When you hold it in your hand, does it bring you joy, or merely the possibility of continuing to breathe, which is a very basic and joyless function? Right then. You know what to do.
While I personally think there’s a huge market for a reality series that follows ordinary people calmly cleaning their homes while listening to NPR’s All Things Considered, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up will instead “center on a young woman in a moment of crisis who attempts to get her messy life in order.” It’s possible that this woman’s crisis is that she has inherited a very nice white coat and must change her entire life so that she might be able to wear it. Oyama—who was recently hired to write a comedy called Schooled for Amy Poehler’s production company—will write the script, while Malins will “supervise,” making sure she does not spill anything on it.
