'Neighbors' Courtesy of HBO Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Logo text Directed by Harrison Fishman and Dylan Redford, HBO's new Friday late-night series Neighbors is accurate and occasionally even perceptive about how social media and surveillance technology have combined with Trump-era polarization and COVID-era alienation to create something profoundly toxic out of the previously benign way we used to interact with our most proximate strangers - by which I mean our neighbors. To watch Neighbors is, I think, to understand a reasonable amount about America's poisoned discourse. Neighbors The Bottom Line A little substance buried under a lot of sensationalism. Airdate: 11 p.m. on Friday, February 13 (HBO)Creators/Directors: Harrison Fishman and Dylan Redford Wait. No. To watch Neighbors is actually to bear witness to a reasonable amount of America's poisoned discourse. Related Stories Movies Directing Oscar Nominees Weigh In on Awards Season and Navigating Reviews (Plus Chloé Zhao's Love of Letterboxd) at Santa Barbara Tribute Movies Where to Watch 'Marty Supreme' Online Understanding is not, for the most part, what Fishman and Redford are interested in, which is why Neighbors is so thoroughly unpleasant, regardless of how simultaneously revealing it might be. Neighbors is not wholly without empathy, and its best episode is its most revealing, or at least its most exposing, insofar as it features more boobs and dongs that than almost any recent TV show not set in Westeros. But even at its most empathetic, it's still a leering glimpse at a very American version of dysfunction. If one just came away from most of the episodes of Neighbors feeling gross - one episode also bored me, and then there was the episode in which sadness and introspection are upstaged by nudity - it would be one thing. But Neighbors is pandering to an audience that's likely to mistake the grotesque for carnivalesque (neither would be the same as treating anybody as "human"), an excuse to point and laugh at a whole lot of damaged people in need of serious therapy rather than reality TV exploitation. I'm sure Fishman and Redford would argue that most of their subjects exploited themselves first, which makes the gawking fair play, but almost nothing in Neighbors felt completely fair to me. The theoretical premise of Neighbors can be summed up in a paraphrasing of Robert Frost's oft-misapplied poem: Good fences make good neighbors, but bad fences make good TV. Each half-hour episode focuses on - well, "focuses" on, because "focus" is not a thing Neighbors does effectively - two sets of neighbors in various disputes. Sometimes the pairings are thematically or logically connected. Sometimes it's obvious the directors or editors said, "Eh, just squish things together." Sometimes the conflicts reach logical conclusions within 30 minutes, while other times episodes just stop because life, kids, is often inconclusive. I'm not sure if either thing is better or worse. The first episode, I was so sick of the featured people that I was desperate to get to the end so as never to spend another second watching any of them. Then the episode wrapped up abruptly, and I briefly forgot the premise of the series, thought all six were about these two horrible pairings of rivals and grew pissed off at having to spend five more episodes following these two unengaging storylines. But then the second episode starts over with two different sets of neighbors, and I lost the ability to articulate how I was feeling - other than "unsatisfied." At least a quarter of the time, the drama really does relate to fences or walls or just general boundary disputes. In one episode, the fight is over a small sliver of grass between two houses. In another, the fight is over the height of a wall that has caused a Texas mansion to resemble Osama bin Laden's compound - a thing you know because the offended non-wall-owner keeps using that description over and over again in a way that first mocks the wall owner and then becomes, itself, a mocking commentary on the lack of creativity from the perturbed party. And more than a quarter of the time, the problems could be solved with a wall or at least a better wall. In the majority of episodes, either both parties are equally stupid and wrong or one party is so manifestly in the right that all you can do is sit and wait for somebody to get crushed for the temerity of crimes like "inopportune mowing" or "owning too many chickens." At no point are both parties in the right, because if both parties were in the right, the storytellers would have nobody to make fun of. And if the storytellers had nobody to make fun of, Neighbors would not exist. The theory, as I understand it, is that the mockery is acceptable because not only is everybody in the serie