‘Weirdness, paranoia and extremes’: Why HBO’s Neighbors is the most amazing show on TV | television

HeyOnce upon a time, she worked as a local reporter in a small town in Montana. The job, where I had to make actual phone calls and attend local council meetings regularly, was very rewarding; Nothing teaches you about people’s idiosyncrasies like showing up at their door and listening to the concerns of their community. During my time there, we published several very strange stories about a farmer’s proposed water bottling plant, which was strongly opposed by neighbors because of its offensive sight and sound (and, second, potential pollution). The details of the fight – and it was a highly controversial fight – are blurry now, but the lesson is not this: If there is one thing I have learned from local reporting, it is that nothing, absolutely nothing, turns people into the scariest versions of themselves like threats, real or perceived, to one’s property.

I was reminded of this water-filling fuss often while watching Neighbors, a brilliant new HBO docu-series that captures this lesson in its more contemporary, cancerous American version better than anything I’ve ever seen. (Taylor Sheridan’s megadrama “Yellowstone,” essentially a soap about property rights for parents, doesn’t come close.) Over five intriguing episodes — the sixth and final premiere tonight — Neighbors takes a highly stylized fish-eye lens to disputes over proximity and the fuzzy boundaries of personal space. The issues at hand are at once mundane and utterly disturbing: a gay couple in Kokomo, Indiana, angry that their neighbor has built a farmhouse, with its attendant smell of goats, on their cul-de-sac; A retired Texas state senator resents the woman across the street because she built a nine-foot concrete wall around her house; Two blond women in Florida fight viciously—physically and emotionally through competing surveillance systems—over a 35-square-foot sweeping strip of grass between their driveways. It’s largely trivial, extremely stressful (naturally – A24 executive producers and the Marty Supreme team include Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein) and often downright unhinged. It’s easily the best TV I’ve seen this year.

That’s partly because the show, created by Dylan Redford and Harrison Fishman, acts as a post-Covid fantasy of American weirdness, paranoia, and extremism. Back to Montana: The first episode takes place in the very rural central part of the state, where two men are fighting over a gate. The dispute seems relatively simple: Seth, who moved to the country from Portland to escape the city and raise horses, and Josh, who moved his family back home during Covid to escape people, want to keep the road on his property open, lest his horses lose access to grass; Josh, feeling threatened and protecting his castle, wants the portal.

But it’s never just about the portal. Like Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal and How to With John Wilson, HBO’s most obvious prestige docs, Neighbors is a feat of editing and relentless curiosity, with each digressive episode slyly creeping into increasingly dark places. Seth seems very rational regarding the portal, but he is also deeply immersed in QAnon; Josh may seem tough and stubborn, but he is also vulnerable to the pressures he is under to provide for his family, which he does through custom weapons sold online. Josh knows his neighbor is crazy, he says, because Seth uses the word “liberal” as an insult. He’s also, of course, a TikTok personality buoyed by interest in his overly dramatic tales of his pestering neighbor, as well as his various mythical characters.

So too are several people on this show — a white man in Nashville who fell out with the elderly black couple next door over a racist joke, and earned $26,000 in interest on videos of their fight. A former adult performer in California posts daily snapshots of the nagging woman next door. A man in Florida attended every Ellen DeGeneres show filmed in the state and turned his home into a mosaic of security cameras. Almost without exception, every dispute boils down to a battle of Ring cameras — without documentation, how can you prove your point? (In court, you can’t.) What is the benefit of documentation if you cannot monetize it?

In Neighbors, every interaction is another step forward in the panopticon, a trapdoor to a weirder, darker side of American culture, which might as well be its mainstream; Anyone with a Ring camera can get millions of views. The people the film presents are on the fringes and hot center of society: almost none of them have a standard nine-to-five — if they work, it’s in the gig economy, fostered by personal branding. They are all online. Without a workplace, they spend all their time at home, feeling grudges towards the person next door. Many of them are avowed republicans, and their commitment to the principle of personal property ends at the limits of their property; At least one is the guy in the neighborhood who drives a Maga-ified car to provoke. Probably half of them profess occult beliefs, either through Jesus, Q, or their previous alien life. They’re all at least somewhat paranoid about being photographed, and seem eager to attract attention.

For the most part, these topics are presented more or less neutrally, even sympathetically, but like all good reality TV, Neighbors skirts some moral lines and comes dangerously close to punching; The Florida man in episode three seems like a veritable nightmare neighbor, constantly filming and harassing one (wholly unsympathetic) resident to the point that he seeks a restraining order, but his eventual profession of extreme paranoia—he truly believes everyone in his neighborhood is secretly conspiring against him—suggests worryingly more about untreated mental illness than destructive conflict. Everyone seems, at best, a little uneasy. The threat of violence looms strangely and provocatively in this show that shares voyeuristic DNA with cable television. Many participants owned and carried a handgun; The camera follows a woman to a gun store in Florida, where buying a gun remains very easy. Given the heated emotions and illnesses at stake, it’s not hard to see how things could quickly shift from “Neighbors” (intriguing) to “Perfect Neighbor,” the Netflix documentary about Florida laws where a perceived threat permits the use of deadly force.

Of course, the line between mental illness and character defects, maladaptive habits and coercion is often impossible to define. Amid this murky swamp, Neighbors is not only fascinating but cathartic. In this polarized nation, we’re all trying to figure out how to get along with people with whom we feel completely at odds. It may not be with the crazy person in the area, but it can seem completely surreal.