HBO’s new docuseries Neighbors is billed, at least in some quarters, as a comedy, but it’s the most sobering non-news content I’ve seen on my TV in a while. Created by Harrison Fishman and Dylan Redford, the six-episode series, which debuts new episodes on Friday nights, builds each installment around a pair of neighborly disputes, usually connected by some tenuous thematic thread—the first, for example, centers on feuds over access to public lands in rural Montana and the Florida panhandle, respectively; the second, on animal odors. By the time the A24 show, which counts Marty Supreme’s Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein among its executive producers, catches up with them, the people involved have already been driven past the point of reason, often egged on by a crowd of raucous social-media rubberneckers, so it’s easy just to write them off as freaks and loons and thank your stars you don’t live next to them. (Like Safdie’s movies, the series has a thing for eccentrics and outsiders—there are multiple psychic healers and former strippers, as well as a nudist college student with her eyes on a career in the music business—that lingers right on the edge of gawking.) But not far beneath the show’s surface is a portrait of a country whose residents have forgotten how to share space with other human beings, or simply reject the obligation to do so altogether.
Although the pandemic is only mentioned in passing a handful of times, it’s clear that COVID-19 was an accelerant for many of Neighbors’ subjects, amplifying an ascendant strain of radically anti-communal ideology. In the first episode, Seth, a lanky, pockmarked landowner in Shawmut, Montana, recalls moving there with his wife in 2016 to flee the “plague” that he says he saw coming, as it has in the 20th year of every century. (Escaping all the “crazy that was going on in Portland” was a bonus.) Josh, a more recent arrival, is a self-proclaimed homesteader who assumed relocating to the middle of nowhere would insulate him from interpersonal conflicts, but he immediately drew the ire of his new neighbors by surrounding his newly acquired land with a fence and a locked gate that blocks a formerly public road and prevents his neighbors’ horses from grazing where they have for years.
It’s never clear just how public that public road was. We hear Seth and Josh shouting their sides of the argument at one another, along with the occasional threat to life and limb, but there’s no voice of reason to settle the matter, and even when a court-appointed mediator gets involved, he essentially ends up throwing up his hands. (We’re told the police have been involved in the past, but they never show up on camera.) Considering that their combined families make up a double-digit percentage of Shawmut’s population, there are precious few uninvolved parties to act as referee. Being out on your own seems like a great idea until you realize there’s no one to watch your back.
In Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, the problem is not too few witnesses, but too many. The fight between oceanfront property owners and other residents over who has the right to sun themselves on the fine white sand draws tourists and troublemakers, including a self-proclaimed “First Amendment auditor” whose modus operandi is to stick his iPhone in people’s faces, claim he’s exercising his rights, and pepper-spray them if they push back. Even before the show’s camera crew shows up, the combatants seem to be performing for an unseen audience, goading their opponents into making an on-camera mistake they can one day turn to their advantage. Sara, who claims the law gives anyone access to any portion of the beach below the high-water line, taunts the security guard hired to chase off undesirables as a “sunburnt scarecrow,” while Eric, whose sprawling porch looks out on the wide stretch of sand he claims as his own, declares his exhaustion with “screaming tirades by hysterical liberals.” While he claims to mourn the lack of “productive debate” and facts-based conversation in contemporary society, it’s pretty clear he believes he has all the facts, and his version of a productive debate is one that ends with the other side admitting he was right all along.
In Neighbors’ second episode, Kokomo, Indiana’s Darrell holds up a copy of the local newspaper with a front-page headline about his fight with his neighbor, Trever, who has set up a makeshift farm in the yard of his grandmother’s house. Right below the story, another headline reads “Divide in American Politics.” The series rarely makes its subjects’ political leanings explicit—although one New Jersey man engaged in a Christmas Vacation–style bid to outdo his neighbor’s Halloween display dons a MAGA hat for an on-camera interview—but they’re more likely to brandish firearms than they are to threaten a lawsuit, and the collective portrait that emerges from the series is of a people who have come to believe that looking out for anyone but themselves is a form of weakness, if not delusion. (Perhaps liberal NIMBYs don’t make for such colorful on-camera subjects.)
Christina Cauterucci
Conservatives Are Terrified That People Like Me Are Buying Guns Now. Maybe They Should Be.
Read More
-
The Ice-Dancing Judging Scandal That Has American Fans Furious
-
Why a Floppy-Haired 27-Year-Old Olympic Skier Is Making Conservatives So Very, Very Angry
-
The Winter’s Most Controversial Movie Has Revived a Decades-Old Debate. There’s Still No Clear Answer.
Some of the episodes’ subjects are longtime friends whose relationship has turned vicious for reasons the show is either powerless to explain or simply not interested in. There’s the white divorcé who claims the elderly woman next door took him in as his “Black mama,” before a misjudged joke led to both calling the other racist. What caused the rift between two women in West Palm Beach whose kids once played in each other’s backyards and who are now ready to shoot each other dead over a small stretch of lawn between one driveway and the next? We’ll never know, because the show is more invested in the conflict than its origins. But there’s an overriding sense of a vacuum in public life, a common agreement that abruptly vanished and left a dangerous void in its place.
Social media emerges as a major culprit (and also, though it’s never acknowledged, the show’s primary means of scouting its subjects). Josh’s 2 million TikTok followers allowed him to move his metalworking business to what he approvingly calls the middle of nowhere, and a later episode’s complainant openly yearns for one of his videos to go viral, believing that a mass outcry is the only way to tip the odds in his favor. (The injustice in question involves his front lawn.) But making their case to an invisible jury turns them away from the people with whom they’re supposedly trying to coexist. They’re not trying to make peace; they want submission.
Neighbors frames its territorial battles as a sideshow entertainment—it’s hardly a surprise when one skirmish, between a Philadelphia cat lady and the owner of a nearby row house who wants to rid their street of the stench of urine, ends up being referred to Judge Judy. But as each episode ended, I kept wondering what happened next, whether any of its borderline unhinged protagonists went as far as they threatened to. Two lifelong friends involved in a vicious fight over a few inches of lawn makes for juicy TV, but when they start brushing up on their marksmanship and quoting the same portions of Florida’s “stand your ground” laws as The Perfect Neighbor’s deadly Karen, the joke stops being quite so funny.
