Docuseries 'Neighbors' explores escalating disputes fueled by social media and societal shifts

A new docuseries, "Neighbors," explores escalating disputes between individuals, often fueled by social media and a rejection of communal living, highlighting a societal shift where sharing space has become a point of contention. The series, created by Harrison Fishman and Dylan Redford, presents six episodes, each focusing on neighborly conflicts that reveal a broader portrait of a country struggling with interpersonal relations.

The docuseries, which debuted new episodes on Friday nights, builds each installment around a pair of neighborly disputes. These conflicts are often connected by a tenuous thematic thread. The first episode, for instance, centers on feuds over access to public lands in rural Montana and the Florida panhandle. The second episode addresses disputes arising from animal odors.

By the time the subjects are featured in the A24 show, they have often been driven past the point of reason. These individuals are frequently egged on by a crowd of raucous social-media rubberneckers. This dynamic makes it easy to dismiss them as "freaks and loons." The series, like Josh Safdie's movies, features eccentrics and outsiders. This includes psychic healers, former strippers, and a nudist college student with aspirations in the music business.
Beneath the surface of the show lies a portrait of a country whose residents have forgotten how to share space with other human beings. Alternatively, they simply reject the obligation to do so altogether. While the pandemic is only mentioned in passing a handful of times, it is clear that COVID-19 was an accelerant for many of "Neighbors'" subjects. It amplified an ascendant strain of radically anti-communal ideology.

In the first episode, Seth, a landowner in Shawmut, Montana, recalls moving there with his wife in 2016. He stated he was fleeing "the plague" that he said he saw coming. He believed this plague occurs in the 20th year of every century. Escaping all the "crazy that was going on in Portland" was an additional benefit.

Josh, a more recent arrival, is a self-proclaimed homesteader. He assumed relocating to the middle of nowhere would insulate him from interpersonal conflicts. However, he immediately drew the ire of his new neighbors. He accomplished this by surrounding his newly acquired land with a fence and a locked gate. This blocked a formerly public road and prevented his neighbors' horses from grazing where they had for years.

It is never clear just how public that public road was. Seth and Josh are heard shouting their sides of the argument at one another. This includes the occasional threat to life and limb. There is no voice of reason to settle the matter. Even when a court-appointed mediator gets involved, he essentially ends up throwing up his hands. The police have been involved in the past, but they never show up on camera. Considering that their combined families make up a double-digit percentage of Shawmut's population, there are precious few uninvolved parties to act as referee. Being out on your own seems like a great idea until you realize there's no one to watch your back.

In Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, the problem is not too few witnesses, but too many. The fight between oceanfront property owners and other residents over who has the right to sun themselves on the fine white sand draws tourists and troublemakers. This includes a self-proclaimed "First Amendment auditor." His modus operandi is to stick his iPhone in people's faces, claim he's exercising his rights, and pepper-spray them if they push back.

Even before the show's camera crew shows up, the combatants seem to be performing for an unseen audience. They are goading their opponents into making an on-camera mistake they can one day turn to their advantage. Sara, who claims the law gives anyone access to any portion of the beach below the high-water line, taunts the security guard hired to chase off undesirables as a "sunburnt scarecrow." Eric, whose sprawling porch looks out on the wide stretch of sand he claims as his own, declares his exhaustion with "screaming tirades by hysterical liberals." While he claims to mourn the lack of "productive debate" and facts-based conversation in contemporary society, it's pretty clear he believes he has all the facts. His version of a productive debate is one that ends with the other side admitting he was right all along.

In "Neighbors'" second episode, Darrell from Kokomo, Indiana, holds up a copy of the local newspaper. It features a front-page headline about his fight with his neighbor, Trever, who has set up a makeshift farm in the yard of his grandmother's house. Right below that story, another headline reads "Divide in American Politics." The series rarely makes its subjects' political leanings explicit. However, one New Jersey man engaged in a Christmas Vacation-style bid to outdo his neighbor's Halloween display dons a MAGA hat for an on-camera interview. They are more likely to brandish firearms than they are to threaten a lawsuit. The collective portrait that emerges from the series is of a people who have come to believe that looking out for anyone but themselves is a form of weakness, if not delusion. Perhaps liberal NIMBYs don't make for such colorful on-camera subjects.

Some of the episodes' subjects are longtime friends whose relationship has turned vicious for reasons the show is either powerless to explain or simply not interested in. There's the white divorcé who claims the elderly woman next door took him in as his "Black mama," before a misjudged joke led to both calling the other racist. What caused the rift between two women in West Palm Beach whose kids once played in each other's backyards and who are now ready to shoot each other dead over a small stretch of lawn between one driveway and the next? The show is more invested in the conflict than its origins. There's an overriding sense of a vacuum in public life, a common agreement that abruptly vanished and left a dangerous void in its place.

Social media emerges as a major culprit and also the show's primary means of scouting its subjects. Josh's 2 million TikTok followers allowed him to move his metalworking business to what he approvingly calls the middle of nowhere. A later episode's complainant openly yearns for one of his videos to go viral, believing that a mass outcry is the only way to tip the odds in his favor. The injustice in question involves his front lawn. Making their case to an invisible jury turns them away from the people with whom they're supposedly trying to coexist. They're not trying to make peace; they want submission.

"Neighbors" frames its territorial battles as a sideshow entertainment. It's hardly a surprise when one skirmish, between a Philadelphia cat lady and the owner of a nearby row house who wants to rid their street of the stench of urine, ends up being referred to Judge Judy. As each episode ended, viewers wondered what happened next. They questioned whether any of its borderline unhinged protagonists went as far as they threatened to. Two lifelong friends involved in a vicious fight over a few inches of lawn makes for juicy TV. However, when they start brushing up on their marksmanship and quoting the same portions of Florida's "stand your ground" laws as The Perfect Neighbor's deadly Karen, the joke stops being quite so funny.