‘Weirdness, paranoia and extremity’: why HBO’s Neighbors is TV’s most fascinating show

2 hours ago 9

Once upon a time, I worked as a local reporter in small-town Montana. The job, in which I had to make actual cold calls and regularly attend local council meetings, was extremely instructive; nothing teaches you about the idiosyncrasies of people like showing up at their door and hearing their community concerns. During my time there, we ran several extremely in-the-weeds stories about a rancher’s proposed water bottling plant, which was vehemently opposed by neighbors for its offensive sight and sound (and, secondarily, potential pollution). The details of the fight – and it was a very contentious fight – are hazy now, but the lesson is not: if there is one thing I learned from local reporting, it’s that nothing, absolutely nothing, turns people into the most ghoulish versions of themselves like threats, real or perceived, to one’s property.

I recalled this water bottling brouhaha a lot while watching Neighbors, a brilliant new docuseries on HBO which captures this lesson in its most contemporary, cancerous American iteration better than perhaps anything I’ve ever seen. (Taylor Sheridan’s mega-popular drama Yellowstone, essentially a property rights soap for dads, doesn’t come close.) Over five riveting episodes – the sixth and final premieres tonight – Neighbors takes a hyper-stylized, fish-eye lens to disputes of proximity and the fuzzy limits of personal space. The issues at hand are at once mundane and completely unhinged: a gay couple in Kokomo, Indiana, are furious that their neighbor has built a farm, with its attendant goat smell, in their cul-de-sac; a retired state senator in Texas resents the woman across the street for building a nine-foot-tall concrete “cartel” wall around her house; two tanned, blond women in Florida viciously fight – physically, emotionally, via competing surveillance systems – over a cumulative 35 sq ft strip of grass between their two driveways. It is extravagantly petty, extremely stressful (naturally – executive producers include A24 and Marty Supreme team Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein) and often completely unhinged. It is easily the best TV I’ve watched this year.

That is partly because the show, created by Dylan Redford and Harrison Fishman, operates as a post-Covid fantasia of American weirdness, paranoia and extremity. Back to Montana: the first episode burrows into 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, wants Josh, who moved his family to the homestead during Covid to escape people, to keep a road on his property open, lest his horses lose access to grass; Josh, feeling threatened and protective of his castle, wants the gate.

But it is never just about the gate. Like Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal and How to With John Wilson, the show’s most obvious prestige doc antecedents at HBO, Neighbors is a feat of editing and relentless curiosity, each digressive episode slyly sneaking into increasingly dark places. Seth seems eminently reasonable about the gate, but is also deeply into QAnon; Josh may seem abrasive and stubborn, but he is also vulnerable about the pressure to provide for his family, which he does via custom weaponry sold online. Josh knows his neighbor is loony, he says, because Seth uses “liberal” as an insult. He’s also, naturally, a TikTok personality buoyed up by interest in his hyper-dramatic tales of his harassing 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 has made $26,000 off interest in his videos of their fights. A former adult entertainer in California who posts daily footage of the haranguing woman next door. A man in Florida who has attended every Ellen DeGeneres show filmed in the state, and has turned his house into a mosaic of security cameras. Almost without exception, each dispute boils down to battle of Ring cameras – without documentation, how can you prove your point? (In court, you can’t.) And what good is documentation if you can’t monetize it?

On Neighbors, every interaction is a step further into the panopticon, a trapdoor to a stranger, darker underbelly of American culture, which also may be its mainstream; anyone with a Ring camera can get millions of views. The people it features exist at once on the fringes of society and its white-hot center: almost none of them have a standard nine-to-five – if they work, it’s in the gig economy, fostered by personal branding. They’re all online. Without a workplace, they spend all their time at home, stewing in their rancor for the person next door. Several are avowed Republicans whose commitment to personal property doctrine ends at their own property line; at least one is the guy in the neighborhood who drives a Maga-ified car, to provoke. Probably half profess occult beliefs, either via Jesus, Q or their former alien lives. All are at least mildly paranoid about being filmed, and seem eager for the attention.

For the most part, these subjects are presented more or less neutrally, even empathetically, but like all good reality television, Neighbors skirts some ethical lines and comes dangerously closing to punching down; the Florida man from the third episode seems like a true nightmare neighbor, constantly filming and harassing one (admittedly unsympathetic) resident to the point that he seeks a restraining order, but his eventual profession of extreme paranoia – he genuinely believes everyone in his neighborhood is secretly conspiring against him – queasily suggests more untreated mental illness than corrosive conflict. Everyone seems, at best, a little unstable. The threat of violence looms awkwardly, provocatively over this show that shares its voyeuristic DNA with cable television. Multiple participants own and carry a gun; the camera follows one woman to a gun store in Florida, where it remains shockingly easy to buy a weapon. Given the heated emotions and pathologies at hand, it is not hard to see how things can quickly turn from Neighbors, the curiosity, to The Perfect Neighbor, the Netflix documentary on Florida’s stand-your-ground laws, where perceived threat licenses lethal force.

Of course, the line between mental illness and personality flaw, maladaptive habit and compulsion, is more often than not impossible to determine. Amid that murky swamp, Neighbors is not only fascinating but cathartic. In this polarized nation, we are all trying to figure out how to coexist with people with whom we feel diametrically opposed. It may not be with the crazy person on the block, but it can feel just as surreal.