Like so many Americans, the people on Neighbors don't even want to get along

Many of the characters we meet over the course of Neighbors‘ first season (it was renewed earlier this month for a second) are just as paranoid as Victoria is. Occasionally, it’s for good reason, like when one party sets up dozens of cameras to surveil the house next door, eventually uploading them to YouTube for a profit of tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes, one side will issue another barely-concealed threat. But often they’re just someone who lives in the United States in the 2020s, undersocialized and too online and overly reliant on the police to solve interpersonal conflicts with the people they’ve lived beside for years. Neighbors reflects incredibly specific, petty grievances between people we’ve never heard of. That alone is funny. But what’s resonant about the show is how it portrays frayed or nearly destroyed social connections. Hardly anyone on this show is even trying to be in a community with one another. 

Instead, they just seem to love fighting. A situation in the first episode centers on a small piece of public beach surrounded by a private one. One homeowner nearby dubs the people who want to use the public space “hysterical liberals” and hires a private security guard to harass people off of it, largely by putting cameras in their faces. On the pro-public beach side are app developers to inform people where they’re allowed to be on the beach, along with a “First Amendment Auditor,” an ex-Mormon who now shoves a camera in front of anyone who has the displeasure to encounter him and involves himself with the cause unasked. Both he and the private security guard profess to love their jobs. They are two mercenaries without personal stakes but a plain love of the game. 

Neighbors, directed by Harrison Fishman and Dylan Redford, is edited to convey maximum chaos. Ramblings are clipped together to make them seem as disorienting as possible, with 360-degree cameras taking you down their rabbit holes. There are moments where you start to wonder if some of these edits are unfair, and, indeed, they’re certainly designed to make these people seem as antisocial as possible. But there are leaps in logic everywhere, and as unkind as any editor might be, there is no doubt that the behavior on display is pure, irrational humanity. 

Victoria and Melissa eventually try mediation. (The Florida Supreme Court-certified mediator is also a gun salesman, conveniently.) Again, Victoria does much of the talking, but she cannot articulate what it is that she wants out of the process, even when asked directly. She eventually relents, taking down the “no trespassing” signs that divide the lot. Melissa creates a new boundary with a few shrubs, still in their pots. The peace lasts for less than five minutes of the episode, as the site of the shrubs enrages Victoria, who starts throwing them onto Melissa’s driveway. Both women, again, want the other arrested. “I just don’t trust her. It’s very difficult to trust somebody who does this to you after you’ve been such a good friend to them forever,” Melissa says later. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to her. It would be nice if I no longer had a neighbor.” 

Drew Gillis is The A.V. Club‘s news editor.