You know the saying: ‘Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.’ Well, in HBO’s captivating new docuseries, ‘Neighbors,’ many of those battles are being waged right across the fence – often against their seemingly ‘loony’ next-door resident.
Or perhaps they are the quirky neighbor? It all depends on who’s telling the story. Premiering this Friday, ‘Neighbors’ is a dark-comic exploration of small-scale conflicts that, for those involved, become entirely all-consuming. It’s a show that feels eerily relevant in a time when getting along seems like an increasingly rare skill in America.
Directors Harrison Fishman and Dylan Redford embarked on a journey across the country, meticulously documenting these intense, localized disputes. From two women in Florida battling over a narrow strip of lawn to Montanans screaming at each other about a gate on a shared road, the series uncovers the surprisingly dramatic underbelly of suburban life.
These are not just minor disagreements; they are full-blown skirmishes over everything from Halloween decorations and backyard livestock to property lines and noise. Neighbors arm themselves with cameras, occasionally more intimidating tools, and seem to have the police on speed dial. Like a twisted take on Churchill’s famous words, they fight on the beaches, the fields, and the streets of their subdivisions, with no intention of surrender.
Beyond the surface-level squabbles, these stories delve into the subjects’ deeper anxieties, obsessions, and unique worldviews. Fishman and Redford skillfully weave a quasi-comedic narrative, unveiling characters who share eccentric past lives, delve into conspiracy theories, or even manage an OnlyFans page. The series has a tendency to occasionally lean into spectacle, using 360-degree camera effects to emphasize a character’s heightened agitation. Yet, it never loses a fundamental curiosity or the belief, reminiscent of ‘How to With John Wilson,’ that every individual possesses an inherent richness and deserves a measure of empathy. After all, whether it’s dreaming of raising goats on your suburban lawn or feeding every stray cat in the neighborhood, a dream is still a dream, and its loss can be profoundly painful.
A dispute over grass, it quickly becomes clear, is never just about the grass. It’s about personal autonomy, a sense of security, control, justice, and underlying fears. These micro-conflicts draw unsettling parallels to the more significant, highly publicized intra-American battles that dominate national headlines daily.
The conflicts depicted in ‘Neighbors’ are largely apolitical, but they are deeply intertwined with the foundational principles that fuel political divides: freedom of expression, property rights, the delicate balance between private and public spaces, and the fundamental question of where one person’s rights end and another’s begin.
Even within these intensely local feuds, the echoes of national politics are ever-present. A man in New Jersey, locked in a Halloween decoration contest with his neighbor, also vents about the neighbor’s extensive display of political signs and flags. In Florida, a homeowner furiously posts online about ‘hysterical liberals’ fighting for public access to a beach behind his property.
The internet, too, plays a crucial and often destructive role. It serves as a battleground, a bludgeon, and a relentless accelerant for these disputes. At the first flicker of conflict, cameras emerge. And while firearms are also disturbingly common (though violence mostly remains at the level of threats, like one woman rummaging through her ammo stash asking, ‘Who’s good with guns?’), the constant filming is the truly ubiquitous weapon.
Feuding parties train spy cameras on their neighbors’ homes, launch dedicated YouTube and TikTok accounts to document their grievances, and clash not only over the backyard fence but also in the comment sections. In ‘Neighbors,’ almost everyone inhabits two distinct worlds: their physical homes, where they endure suffocating disputes with those closest to them, and their digital platforms, where an endless chorus of voices is always ready to egg them on.
Without resorting to a narrative voice-over, ‘Neighbors’ subtly paints a picture of post-pandemic isolation, the dangers of online self-radicalization, and the insidious nature of festering polarization. The participants often seem to begin their confrontations at an emotional ’10,’ then somehow manage to crank the intensity even higher.
The outcomes in these stories, thankfully, tend to be more comically absurd than outright tragic. Yet, the palpable potential for heartbreak, or worse, always lurks beneath the surface. Watching ‘Neighbors’ brings to mind not only recent fictional series about difficult neighbors—from ‘The Burbs’ to ‘The Beast in Me’—but also contemporary films like ‘Civil War’ and ‘Eddington,’ which explore the chilling idea that Americans are losing their capacity for coexistence, and perhaps even their collective sanity.
I was particularly struck by last year’s harrowing Netflix documentary ‘The Perfect Neighbor,’ which used police bodycam footage to recount the story of a white Florida woman. After months of belligerent behavior toward families and children on her block over perceived wrongdoings, she ultimately shot a Black neighbor to death, claiming self-defense under the state’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ law. She was later convicted of manslaughter.
The recurring theme across all these programs and films is of a populace teetering on the edge, phones and guns at the ready. It’s a narrative that echoes the disturbing images we increasingly see in the news, from various cities, suggesting that the societal fracturing previewed on screen is indeed unfolding in reality.
The conflicts between residents and federal forces are, of course, far grander in scope than a dispute between suburbanites (and often involve neighbors uniting in protest), with vastly different power dynamics. Yet, the underlying emotions and visual motifs are unsettlingly similar, especially the pervasive presence of phones live-streaming every angle of a standoff.
‘Neighbors’ ultimately serves as a powerful symbol for a larger social dynamic: one where self-selected groups of Americans increasingly view other Americans—whether separated by political affiliation or state lines rather than just property boundaries—as enemies to be defeated.
The show doesn’t claim to offer grand solutions to this monumental problem. However, it concludes on a hopeful, albeit small-scale, note. The poignant final episode centers on Danny, an elderly San Diegan whose neighbors are aghast at his outdoor exercise routine in yellow bikini briefs. His story evolves into a bittersweet quest for belonging as he seeks out a nudist colony where he can truly be himself.
Danny’s journey isn’t flawless, nor does he achieve a perfect peace with his ‘skin-averse’ neighbors (his conclusion: ‘Eff ’em’). But he does make significant changes in his life and confronts profound truths about himself. Episode after episode reinforces the old adage: you can’t choose your neighbors. Yet, as this insightful series suggests, sometimes the most cantankerous ‘neighbor’ you need to reconcile with first is the one living inside your own head.