Won’t You Be My ‘Neighbors’

I just watched HBO Max’s new show Neighbors and I need an emotional shower. As my girlfriend gasped, yelled, laughed, and paused it to make popcorn because she was so locked into the voyeuristic drama, I kept wondering: have we hit rock bottom? The Camus-reading dickhead in me says yes, but I’ve felt that way before — watching Jersey Shore, Love Is Blind, and the rest of the endless content machine dedicated to watching people make bad decisions in real time.

Neighbors takes everyday neighborhood drama and stretches it into something that feels part documentary, part slow-motion psychological thriller. Each episode drops you into real-life disputes — property lines, noise complaints, horses, beach access, ideology — and lets it play out with almost no hand-holding. What starts as petty mutates into something darker and weirder, where surveillance cameras, paranoia, and personal grudges spiral into full-blown obsession. It’s funny in a bleak way, but also mortifying. The guy with fangs building a bunker and the guy trying to run a farm in suburban Indiana seem like outliers until you realize the show isn’t really about them — it’s about the dynamic. The specific flavor of crazy changes, but the pattern is universal: someone draws a line, someone crosses it, and suddenly two people who used to wave at each other are in a cold war over six inches of property. These aren’t outliers. They’re the most honest version of what’s already happening within these small neighborhood nuclear sites. here.

For me, the show is hell. I had to endure an old woman arguing with the father of a young family over her nine outdoor cats pissing and shitting everywhere while this guy is just trying to raise his daughter. My girlfriend cackled with joy as the woman talked about her obsession with the Shroud of Turin, which the cat lady wants to turn into a movie. My girlfriend loves this stuff. I cringe at the drama of people who can’t agree on what’s private versus public when it comes to beach access. A beach activist in Florida made an app to show where locals can go, against the wishes of the rich people who bought houses on the beach and view it as their yard. The antagonist in that story is a cigar-chomping far dude with a big Rolex and those douchey beach guy shirts with the flaps in the back, making the viewer instinctively hate him. (I’m pro public beach. Don’t move to the ocean if you can’t deal with people swimming.)

There are a lot of telling narratives buried in these episodes: is property identity? Have we fractured so completely that I have to watch a guy with fangs explain why he’s building a cave bunker for the end of civilization like it’s a reasonable home improvement project? He veers into some predictable political nonsense, which I mostly tune out, but the show lets him talk, then quietly undercuts it with visuals that turn the whole thing into something closer to an acid-trip fever dream than a manifesto with blurred one moment, inverted visuals of the guy, with the producers clearly aware that this guy is insane, so they leaned into the editing, doing their best to showcase that homie is not playing with a full deck, once he leapt into the deep end of the conspiracy black hole.

And still — I kept watching. That’s the part I can’t shake. I’m rolling my eyes, muttering to myself, wondering what the hell we’ve become, and I don’t turn it off. Maybe that’s the real point. Maybe this isn’t rock bottom. Maybe this is just what we look like now — staring through our blinds, arguing over inches of land, convinced we’re right, and secretly hoping someone’s watching.