‘Neighbors’ Review: Josh Safdie-Produced HBO Unscripted Show

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.

Wait. No. To watch Neighbors is actually to bear witness to a reasonable amount of America’s poisoned discourse.

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 series inherently an exhibitionist, but they were exhibitionists even before granting appearance waivers to HBO.

Several of the participants are social media sensations or generally successful in different fields that the series treats as disreputable. The first episode features a guy who has 2.1 million TikTok followers as The Bearded Bard, and has used this platform to humiliate a QAnon-loving Montana neighbor ticked off that the bard put a locked fence up on what seems to be a public road. The owner of the offending Bin Ladin-esque wall earned the money to build said wall thanks to an apparently successful series of books combining New Age quackery and extraterrestrial quackery. There’s a woman who once mud-wrestled Andy Kaufman and runs a successful soft core streaming channel that she can’t concentrate on because of the intrusions from her neighbor. Another guy, at war with the former friend who he claims once asked him to call her his “black mama,” has made $26,000 off his YouTube videos exposing and calling out her moral, if not literal, trespasses. Once these people are already profiting off their own peccadillos and escalating misfortunes, why shouldn’t HBO?

Sometimes, mind you, the show can’t be bothered to find actual weirdos and eccentrics, and it settles for treating the bad guys as simply “Republicans” — like the MAGA New Jersey-ite whose Halloween decoration rivalry with a Black neighbor is one of the series’ dullest plots, but points to a reality: Neighbors treats this type of dysfunction as a primarily red-state phenomenon, or in one or two cases started by people who probably would be happier in red states. The first four episodes draw their characters exclusively from territories that voted for Donald Trump in 2024, with a lot of time and plotlines set in Florida, a state whose oddballs are already decently derided on HBO’s It’s Florida, Man, a show that often makes the effort to understand its characters beyond their surface-level peculiarities.

There’s a version of Neighbors that plausibly could get into the connection between micro ideology and macro ideology, how your behavior toward the people in your backyard mirrors your approach to global citizenry. I can imagine, in that case, how Neighbors would work, then, as a semi-satirical counterpoint to the very serious and dark Oscar-nominated The Perfect Neighbor. But Fishman and Redford are far more interested in whiz-bang filters and digital effects, distractions to appeal to short-form entertainment devotees, which had the ironic side effect of wildly shortening my interest. Though there are moments at which there’s affection for the featured characters — the conspiracy-spouting Montanan seems genuinely regretful that the fracas with his neighbor has kept him from playing D&D with The Bearded Bard — the ratio of “laugh at” to “laugh with” is perhaps 95 percent weighted toward the former.

I feel like I want to at least acknowledge the sixth episode, the only one to actually lean into pragmatism, albeit by breaking the format entirely. What starts off as a relentless mocking of Danny, a 70-something San Diego man who likes to do very public physical activities in a decency-challenging yellow banana hammock — much to the chagrin of his more puritanical neighbors — finds some depth when the neighbors are abandoned entirely and Danny goes to a nudist getaway in Florida. This is the only episode that takes the time to ask whether “abnormality” is a function of context, to wonder what it looks like when a person whose behavior deviates from one set of values finds a place in which he represents the norm. It doesn’t go as expected.

There’s complexity in this episode that nothing else in the series attempts, and it’s an iron-clad guarantee that most viewers who enjoyed the earlier installments will be too busy going “Tee-hee, wrinkly penises” to ponder the eventual message, such as it is. And that probably sums up the entire series: There’s substance, but it’s buried in salaciousness.