Television, Culture, Television & radio, HBO, US television, Documentary
The Josh Safdie-produced docuseries draws us into a bizarre variety of alternately relatable and scarily alienating neighbor disputes
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.
Continue reading… The Guardian
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