Bobby Berk’s New Show May Be About Decluttering, but It Left Me Wanting More

Interior designer Bobby Berk strikes a resonant chord with his audiences, and not just for his taste in furniture or wallpaper. In his rocket to stardom as part of Queer Eye’s Fab Five on Netflix, he seemed to approach his assignment—to revamp the living spaces of the show’s heroes (aka subjects), many whose internal struggles seemed to manifest in their living rooms and bedrooms—with a certain relentless energy, punctuated by a subdued sadness. In Season Two we learned that Berk was a runaway who was shunned from his ultrareligious family after coming out. It’s no wonder that he remodels those on-screen spaces with such care and attention; he understands what’s at stake when someone feels alienated by or trapped within a house that fuels their unhappiness. In Berk’s work as a designer, we are pulled not just toward his overhauled interiors, but to his raison d’etre.

So even though he left the Fab Five in 2023 after eight seasons, a new home renovation show starring Berk that dropped in December 2025 seemed to fit his story. Junk or Jackpot, the first season of which just aired on HGTV, brings Berk to the world of niche collectors and their enormous libraries of stuff. The show sees Berk design custom spaces to store and display each participant’s beloved items, but more importantly, his mission is to help them regain control of their homes as they’ve allowed their passions to run amok, filling their living spaces with junk. For each of the six collectors featured across as many episodes, their overflowing closets, living rooms, and bedrooms have hindered their abilities to live full lives. To fund their renovations, participants must sell a portion of their treasures (hence the show’s title), forcing them to go down the rabbit hole of trinkets, vinyl albums, clothing, and more, saying goodbye to the old and rare to make way for what’s to come.

It’s a perfect premise for Berk, who brought harmony and efficiency to his Queer Eye renovations, clearing out clutter to make way for their hero’s newly made over life. But unlike Netflix’s hit reboot, Junk or Jackpot is a miss. The problem with the show isn’t its concept, but its run time: In just 30 short minutes, we are introduced to our antiquarians and their homes, hear what Berk has proposed for their spaces, watch them sift through boxes of precious objects, sell some of that stuff, speed through the renovation, and react to their new homes. The rich subject matter is simply too good to cram in, leaving so much story unfortunately untold. It signals that, perhaps, audiences have grown to expect something more nuanced, or more human, from our home renovation reality-fantasy television.

The emotional burdens on display on the show are as varied as the collections. The first episode features a couple, one of whom has spent his life buying Disney ephemera; his partner moved out of the house, feeling that there’s no room for him to live. In another, a couple’s vinyl collection has filled their common areas—there’s nowhere to sit to enjoy listening. There’s a singleton who has an expansive Wonder Woman collection, and a couple who believed they couldn’t have children and instead devoted their home to collecting sci-fi action figures and vintage video games, only to be surprised by the birth of their son some years into their collecting. One woman turned to collecting dolls while she was undergoing cancer treatment, but now that she’s in remission, she has no room to spend time with her grandkids.

It’s not that these individuals are hoarders, but the line between passion and compulsion is thin in the show. Sure, they might really love records, or dolls from the 1980s, or eccentric fashions, but as the subjects’ homes burst at the seams, audiences are also confronted by a strange emptiness. I’m reminded of the 20th-century psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose philosophy of desire helps us understand these behaviors through lack. At its most basic, all people operate under the premise that we are missing something within ourselves and engage in a lifelong search to find it. That "it," however, can never be obtained. We might find a way to hold onto our youth by collecting Disney toys; or feel powerful, beautiful, and unique by purchasing every piece of superhero ephemera we can get our hands on. The search process is filled with a yearning to feel complete, rendering it joyful when we get close enough to being whole, and painful when it fails. We keep trying, nonetheless, motivated by desire.

Junk or Jackpot is filled with this yearning, the desire to find oneself in objects in a process that ends in despair. But as Lacan theorized, desire’s woes aren’t a niche issue. We are all guilty of trying to find "the thing" that we hope will bring us satisfaction in our completeness; arguably, our entire consumer culture is built around the belief that maybe that next purchase will bring us such a thing. Not a lot of home renovation shows want to touch that level of messiness, so the possibility of bringing Berk’s sympathetic talents together with an ugly albeit relatable problem seemed refreshing. Junk or Jackpot, however, doesn’t give space for such complexity; much of the context surrounding why its collectors engage in their endless acquisitions appears on the screen via VH1 Pop-up Video-esque text. We are left only with the big "move-that-bus" moment—the interior unveiling—that barely transcends the tired HGTV trope.

The show’s final episode was primed to meet the moment: Berk connects with Hailie, a stylist who has filled her living room with racks of vintage designer clothing. Her collection has grown, too, after her mother’s death, which added a surplus of colorful womenswear that she inherited. Hailie’s girlfriend, who recently moved in, feels that there’s no space for her anywhere; the collection, Hailie tells Bobby, has ruined past relationships. The stylist was able to sell some of her pieces to fund a renovation that included two large storage closets for her clothing in a formerly half-finished garage studio, alongside a stylish living room revamp that cleared out the mess to make the home more welcoming to her new girlfriend. It was interesting to note, however, that she never touched or addressed her mother’s clothing. Perhaps the issue that was killing her relationships wasn’t the mountain of stuff, but that her collection was a way to keep her mother alive—there’s little room for a new love when you’ve been swallowed by grief.

The 30-minute run time doesn’t leave room for the somber drama Berk is known for; the subtle sadness he exhibited throughout Queer Eye that drew audiences to his unexpected tenderness for his subjects’ circumstances might’ve otherwise provided a perfect companion to a collector filling a void with surplus. Perhaps producers envisioned something akin to an Antiques Roadshow-meets-home renovation—each episode does spend quite a bit of time on the items’ appraisals, where Berk brings in experts to rummage through the amassed possessions. And that’s the problem with Junk or Jackpot: It absolutely yields some interesting objects and thoughtful interior design choices, but we’re left, well, desiring more. Perhaps it was Queer Eye’s success that reset the bar for what we might expect in a renovation show that is loaded with emotional complexity—these aren’t just people looking to shiplap their old kitchen, but complicated hobbyists who have allowed their belongings to tell their story, and they’re hoping to become their own narrators once more. Interior design is an avenue to tell these difficult tales, if only we’d give them the time and space they deserve.

All photos courtesy HGTV

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