Do you like your neighbors? Do you have barely any contact with them or are you all good friends? Or do you wish your neighbors should move as far away from you as humanly possible? Many people are in the third category, and some of these disputes are documented in HBO’s new late-night docuseries Neighbors.
NEIGHBORS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: We start at a shot of a nebula, then zoom all the way in, past the moon (the U.S. flag smacks the “camera”), then to the Earth, landing in Shawmut, Montana. We also end up landing in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida.
The Gist: Neighbors is a docuseries, produced and directed by Harrison Fishman and Dylan Redford for A24 studios (Josh Safdie is also an EP), that examines two funny but escalating neighbor disputes per episode. In the first episode, Seth Collins and Josh Alpshaw fight it out in Montana; Sarah Day and Eric Wilhelm are in conflict in Florida.
Seth has a problem with Josh putting a gate up on a road that Seth thinks should be publicly accessible, and it was publicly accessible until Josh bought his property five years prior to filming. For his part, Josh hates that Seth’s horses keep running on his land, and both Josh and his wife run them off with dirt bikes and other machinery, a clear violation of the law.
In Florida, Sarah thinks all of the beach leading up to the water is public, whereas Eric and other beachfront property owners think that the only public spot is a narrow strip of sand between two homes. Eric’s view is that the people on what’s supposed to be a private beach do some nasty and downright scary things, and he leads a group of residents who have hired a property manager to come down to the beach and tell people to vacate while filming them. Sarah and an anonymous Instagram poster named “Shoreline Defender” have created an app to tell beachgoers where they have the right to sit.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Neighbors has the quirky feel of another late-night HBO docuseries, It’s Florida, Man. It’s not a coincidence that three of the six disputes in the first three episodes take place in Florida.
Our Take: The disputes that Fishman and Redford try to document in Neighbors are ones that had extensive amount of pre-shot video — all the better to document what someone’s doing! — in place before their crews showed up. In other words, the dispute is pretty far down the insanity road before they even get there, and it shows in how they portray both ends of each of these disputes.
Some of the incidents that begin the disputes are a bit confusing, like the small strip of land that has come between two Florida women who used to be friends, or the mowing incident that has set a former male model vs a Vietnam vet in the same episode.
But some are so “normal” they’re crystal clear: In the second episode, for instance, Kokomo, Indiana resident Darrel Blasius hates the fact that his neighbor Trever Yeakley continues to bring in more and more farm animals to the house where he and his wife live with his grandmother. In Philly, Jean Galliano feeds nine outdoor, near-feral cats, and her neighbor Marice Johnson can’t even let his daughter play outside because of all the cat crap around.
It’s disputes like the ones in the second episode that feel more real to us, where one neighbor is living a nightmare because they happen to live next to someone who is doing something extreme. Other disputes feel more extreme, with both parties being simultaneously right and wrong and completely out of their minds.
We see Seth Collins’ conspiracy takes and Jean Galliano’s screenplays and “energy enhancement system” healing sessions, for instance. Fishman and Redford try not to take sides when documenting these disputes, but sometimes they just can’t help themselves to show the entire breadth of how out there some of these people are.
Are the disputes indicative of something greater? A microcosm of a society that can no longer talk things out rationally? Maybe. But dealing with disruptive neighbors has been a thing for decades, we just haven’t had phones and social media to document those disputes. That might be the difference.
Performance Worth Watching: Seth Collins and his wife Starla are… interesting. And their case isn’t helped by the fact that their house looks like it’s a plywood shack with electricity.
Sex And Skin: Aside from seeing Darrell Blasius and his husband Bruce lounging in their indoor hot tub (!), there’s no skin.
Parting Shot: Seth says, “If you can’t get along with your neighbors, it kinda says something about you.”
Sleeper Star: Basically, someone in the cast who is not the top-billed star who shows great promise.
Most Pilot-y Line: Fishman and Redford shoot many scenes like they’re movies, with pull ins, push outs and other fancy shots. The cinematic scenes enhance the insanity of the disputes.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Neighbors is a fun look at how quickly things can go downhill between two people who have no other relationship other than living next to each other.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.