‘Neighbors’ Review: The Thin Wall Between Petty and Dangerous

I don’t usually cover the endless stream of reality shows and docuseries that crowd every platform. Some are fine, sure, but most of the time they’re streaming’s version of fast food—cheap, efficient filler designed to keep subscribers from canceling. Judging by how the format keeps expanding and routinely tops the charts, it clearly works. And because they’re relatively inexpensive to produce, there’s no end in sight.

What caught my attention about Neighbors was the involvement of Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein as producers. Safdie—along with his brother Benny—has made a career out of exploring deeply eccentric personalities, both in his films and in interviews, so this seemed like it might turn into something genuinely off-kilter. Maybe even something in the vein of Nathan Fielder’s shows or the extraordinary How To with John Wilson.

That’s not quite what this is.

For all its inherent weirdness—the outsized characters and the often surreal situations they find themselves in—this series, which follows two separate neighborhood disputes per episode, leaves a sour aftertaste. Not just because of the people caught up in these conflicts and their increasingly obsessive grievances, but because of the smirking tone with which those stories are told. These are deeply invested homeowners locked in petty, sometimes absurd battles over a few feet of property line or persistent household odors—people who are not only willing to be filmed, but who sometimes lean into even more troubling ideas. And the filmmakers amplify that pettiness to the point where what initially plays as funny eventually starts to feel uncomfortable.

Inadvertently, Neighbors ends up functioning as a portrait of a country where everyday life has become steadily more volatile and performative. Sure, neighbor disputes happen everywhere—anyone who’s lived in an apartment building knows that—but here they escalate into something closer to a greatest hits reel of American suburban conflict: boundary disputes, surveillance accusations, backyard farming operations that push zoning laws to their limits, fights over access to public beaches, the neighbor with dozens of cats. If you’ve seen the documentary The Perfect Neighbor—which starts with a similarly mundane dispute and ends in a fatal shooting—you know how quickly these so-called minor issues can spiral.

Across the three episodes released so far, we’ve seen legal battles over slivers of land, claims of spying, disputes tied to unconventional home-based livestock setups, arguments about public right-of-way, and more. Everything feels dialed up—if not in reality, then certainly in the edit. The filmmakers themselves occasionally become part of the story, but do little to defuse tensions, even when a firearm enters the scene and no one seems entirely sure whether it’s loaded.

Maybe that’s part of the show’s appeal: the way the neighbors perform their own conflicts once the cameras arrive. Maybe this is simply what long-term proximity looks like when property, identity, and grievance all intersect. Either way, it’s not an especially inviting space to spend time in—particularly now, when social relationships feel as strained offline as they do online.

Neighbors doesn’t push beyond what it presents. It packages the chaos with a knowing, ironic wink and leaves it there for viewers to enjoy from a safe remove—secure in the belief that they’d never behave this way themselves. But translate that same dynamic into the political sphere, and it becomes clear pretty quickly that nobody gets to claim the moral high ground.