Subdivided
HBO’s Neighbors attempts to capture our mutual loathing and derangement at the neighborhood level. What hope is there for the paranoid suburbs?
It’s not often that the Pope finds himself embroiled in debates over theology with the vice president of the United States. In January 2025, J.D. Vance, an adult Catholic convert, outlined the medieval concept of ordo amoris—the order of loves—to justify the Trump administration’s immigration policy. For Vance, scripture dictates that we must prioritize love for our families before turning to our neighbors, community, fellow citizens, and the rest of the world. The “far left,” he said, has “completely inverted that.” Later, during a visit to Cameroon in April, the Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV offered another perspective. “To govern means to love one’s own country as well as neighboring countries; the commandment ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ is equally applicable to international relations!”
The exchange revealed a fundamental disagreement about what we owe our neighbors, coworkers, co-citizens, and co-inhabitants of the world. Still, both Vance and Leo implicitly agreed that our literal neighbors deserve at least some of our compassion. Yet in the United States today, the COVID-19 pandemic and the crises in its wake have done untold damage to our national sense of neighborliness.
As the decay of public institutions and the rule of social media algorithms deepen our collective alienation, disagreement and discord seems to be the commanding rites of the day. Following the American tendency toward partisan sorting by geography, the prospect of our politics transcending red and blue states, a rousing call made by Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, now feels more like a fable than an actual possibility (especially after the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which scaled back Voting Rights Act protections for majority-minority districts). These political divides are often starkly on display in the most vexed region of American life: the suburbs.
Enter Neighbors, a new documentary series on HBO Max from co-directors Dylan Redford and Harrison Fishman, that attempts to capture our mutual loathing and derangement at the neighborhood level. The project, which includes Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein as executive producers, began in 2019 when Redford and Fishman lived in Miami, Florida and became fascinated by online clips of neighborly disputes. They started stitching together their own compilations of what Christian Brache calls “raw, tiny operas of ego and grievance.” As the pandemic exacerbated our collective dysfunction, the duo began to treat these videos as “windows into the American psyche.” With a small production team, Redford and Fishman went out and filmed the neighborhood brawls of their dreams. Neighbors purports to uncover the underlying source of our unwillingness to compromise, even over things as petty as the length of grass, Halloween decorations, and scantily clad exercise routines. But does the show have a point? What are we to make of all this suburban madness?
The origin of the modern suburb is straightforward: generous mortgage subsidies at the end of the Second World War—coupled with a healthy dose of racial favoritism—led to the mass creation of communities that were neither purely rural nor urban. From the outset, the suburbs were associated with an eerie homogeneity: the home of countless bored housewives and the “man in the gray flannel suit.” Since as early as the mid-century, a host of critics, films, and television shows have described the suburbs as non-places consumed by latent violence (David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Marc Cherry’s Desperate Housewives among them). “The suburbs dream of violence,” wrote British science fiction author J.G. Ballard in 2006, “sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.”
Despite such cultural anxieties, most Americans could agree that the suburbs were the necessary corollary to mass homeownership, the basis of wealth for the growing middle class. In 2008, however, the global economy ground to a halt following widespread predatory practices in the home-loan market. In the ensuing decades, homeownership became increasingly unaffordable for many Americans, especially the young. Last year, the median age of first-time homebuyers reached a record high of forty years old. Suburban demographics have shifted as a result, with renters and professionals heading for the hills as urban areas become less affordable.
But even in the suburbs, rising costs have invited further density and development, fueling inevitable conflict. Whereas historian Thomas Frank observed in 1990 that postwar suburban flight was once about “a fleeing from the complexity and responsibility of community existence” to flatlands “with quaint English names but no organic unity at all,” today’s exodus is driven by an attempt to escape the crushing cost of living. Roiled by demographic flux, the suburbs have increasingly taken on a partisan edge. Whether in Marblehead, Scottsdale, Berkeley, or the Villages, these struggles over performative lawn signs, city councils, school boards, and land use show no signs of stopping.
Without attempting to make a comprehensive map of this contemporary terrain, the first five episodes of the HBO show follow two sets of neighbors engaged in existential brinkmanship over a variety of grievances. Although some critics see the show as a tale of “the extremely American obsession with property,” as Sarah Buder writes for Dwell, it is really the community antics and the means of addressing these grievances that are at its core. As Fishman remarked, “we were just interested in… who both people were, but also what led up to that moment where they started fighting and filming each other. Because you’re really seeing these people at … maybe one of their worst moments.”
In the hills of Montana, Josh and his wife build a metal gate around their section of road to keep out a plague of unruly horses owned by their neighbors, Seth and Starla. In San Antonio, Alexa erects an eight-foot wall to seal off her ivory-colored mansion, drawing the ire of a former Texas State Senator who compares it to Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. In Nashville, ex-friends Joanne and Steven fall out over a gag gift—a $7.99 “White Privilege Card” from Amazon—leading to a battle over a highly profitable YouTube empire. In the Philadelphia suburbs, a Black family is terrorized by Jean, a cat lady desperate to enter the orbit of the disgraced filmmaker Mel Gibson. And so on and so on. Each episode follows a set pattern: a conflict is introduced, and hijinks ensue, often including violent threats. Unlike in reality, the neighbors usually reach an uneasy resolution, whether handed down by a city council, a planning board, or—as in one episode—Judge Judy.
The exception to this pattern is the finale, which follows Danny, a man in San Diego who wears a yellow Speedo while exercising in his driveway. After encountering almost unanimous prejudice against the habit from his neighbors, he embarks on a hero’s journey to a nudist trailer park in Florida. Danny quickly becomes obsessed with an educated young baddie named Amanda, but experiences a mental breakdown as he realizes that she only sees him as an ATM for her luxurious habits and her burgeoning rap career, rather than as a lifelong nudist lover. At the episode’s end, Danny decides to return home to build his own nudist community in the comfort of his backyard. His arc is perhaps the most redemptive, although the sentimentalism of the entire episode provokes a great deal of whiplash to the viewer who, at this point, has spent hours subjected to one neighborhood nightmare after another.
Whether the filmmaking is exploitative, as the Hollywood Reporter asks in one review, is another matter. The weirdness of our protagonists is clearly played for laughs. If anything, our suburban anti-heroes are at best beautiful losers whom we pity for their deranged condition. Yet Neighbors excels at uncovering uncomfortable truths about suburban America, chief among them the habit of neighbors actively surveilling one another, justified as a means of defending property values and “community character.” While neighborhood watch groups emerged amid desegregation, increasing crime rates, and the rise of the New Right in the late 1960s, the ready-made consumer-policing products of the 2010s—such as Amazon’s Ring cameras or apps like Nextdoor and Citizen—have supercharged an already well-documented culture of suspicion and gatekeeping. Researchers from the MIT Media Lab have argued that doorbell security cameras have been used as a means of ethnic gatekeeping in the white suburbs of Southern California, a historic home to such reactionary movements as the John Birch Society and the 1970s property tax revolt. As historian Mike Davis observed in City of Quartz, “The most powerful ‘social movement’ in contemporary Southern California is that of affluent homeowners… engaged in the defense of home values and neighborhood exclusivity.”
Such exclusionary dynamics are evident throughout the series, especially when it comes to one of the few opportunities for community action in Neighbors: the defense of property values. In episode two, Darrell and his husband Bruce mount a successful crusade against their neighbor Trevor’s makeshift animal farm after seeing a massive decline in their home’s value, leading to a shutdown of the farm by a local planning board.
When community and public institutions are absent, meanwhile, surveillance might be a useful tool for documenting grievances, but not for mediating them. In the battle over the gates and horses in episode one, Josh and Brittany’s neighbor, Randall, threatens to shoot the couple. He denies it seconds later, but there is evidence on a Ring recording. Surveillance at this level negates the very possibility of a shared sense of community; neighbors slowly build walls, fences, and other barriers to preserve their privacy, reducing the likelihood that they invite one another to barbecues and picnics or host playdates for their children. All actions, uncharitable or not, are viewed with a degree of passive suspicion. When Josh and Brittany’s neighbor, Starla, returns a lost rope, the couple agrees that the act was “all for camera” and accuses them of trespassing on their property. No wonder that the show has prompted discussion among baffled foreigners about the extent of surveillance culture in the United States.
Just as worrying as the immediate destruction of social trust is the role private surveillance has played in local politics. In San Francisco, ground zero for the right-wing panic over shoplifting and the site of several prominent recall campaigns against progressive reformers, crypto billionaire Chris Larsen has built his own surveillance empire—amounting to some 2,700 cameras and ninety-three drones for the San Francisco Police Department—in a clear maneuver to sidestep progressives on the city’s board of supervisors.
The surveillance footage arising from private disputes becomes fodder for public consumption, which further erodes the basis of social trust. In episode four, the relationship between Steven and Joanne in Nashville becomes irreparable as Steven uploads clips of Joanne’s antics, under the title “My Neighbor Karen,” to YouTube. When Joanne begs him to remove these embarrassing videos from the internet, from which he makes a substantial income, Steven refuses. “I’m like a specimen to him,” Joanne confides to the camera.
Despite the impressive camerawork and its spontaneous, unwritten humor, Neighbors has an entirely conventional argument about the state of the American psyche. We are politically polarized, perhaps to a point of no return, it seems to suggest. In interviews, Fishman and Redford have reasserted this polarization thesis. Although it comes in different flavors, the idea typically holds that increasing partisanship is the be-all and end-all of our politics. “The central facilitating factor,” as CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria summarized it in 2022, is “the way that American politics, over the last few decades, has increasingly empowered the extremes of political parties at the expense of the mainstream.” Experts like New York Times columnist Ezra Klein have cited everything from political science to evolutionary biology to explain our disunity. Ironically, the polarization thesis is itself a bipartisan idea, articulated by Obama and Vance alike.
The “polaristas,” while sometimes overstating their case, point toward a real phenomenon, and Neighbors appears to confirm aspects of their thesis. Each neighbor seems completely unwilling to see the other’s point of view, often front-loading their partisanship to justify righteous indignation. Take the first episode, which depicts a conflict between beachgoers and owners at Lake Causeway in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida. Sara Day, a community resident, organizes against beach management, who forbid the masses from sitting within shoreline property boundaries. Day is especially outraged by the leading enforcer of the beach regime, property manager Brent Fuller, paid by the beachfront owners, including one Eric Wilhelm. Day meets Wilhelm over lunch to reach a compromise. Yet it quickly becomes quite clear who is best able to render terms to their liking: the property owners. Day attempts to argue for public access, while Wilhelm sees the public as inherently menacing. “The private beach that is private today was never public,” says Wilhelm, doing his best impression of the Victorian-era moralist Matthew Arnold. “It was controlled by the private beach owners, who take care of the beach. . . . That squelched the rowdiness and the anarchy.”
When Day points out that Wilhelm is unwilling to share the beach, he calls her a member of the “liberal mob” which, earlier in the episode, he says has threatened to burn his house down and lynch him and his family. Wilhelm cites his “thousands and thousands and thousands of employees” as evidence of his good character. “If you talk over me, I’m done,” says Day; any discussion is effectively over: no agreement is reached and compromise appears impossible. So far, so polarized—yet on fundamentally unequal terms.
Florida is an interesting place to highlight in discussions of polarization. As the center of the “anti-woke” politics trumpeted by Governor Ron DeSantis, the state is a clear case of how right-wing kulturkampf ultimately serves elites and isn’t nearly as ubiquitous as polaristas claim. The Sunshine State—controlled by large landowners, rentier capitalists, and conservative ideologues—is highly unequal. As Aida Hozić observed in Phenomenal World, in the last half-century, the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) industries have displaced the state’s traditional agricultural economy; according to the Economic Policy Institute, the top 1 percent captured 77.5 percent of the state’s income growth between 2009 and 2015. Yet alongside Florida’s newly minted deep-red status, there have still been internal calls for progressive reform. In 2020, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved a $15 minimum wage, much to the chagrin of the FIRE overlords who dominate state politics. Even more illustrative of this contradiction was a 2018 referendum in which nearly two-thirds of Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment to automatically restore voting rights to felons who had completed their sentences, parole, and probation. In other words, what appears as the vagaries of partisan polarization is often intertwined with a much more familiar class politics and resentment. Though it attracts and produces some of the weirdest people in the country, Florida is not so strange a land.
What hope is there for the anguished, paranoid suburbs? Progressives and socialists have not yet developed a successful politics tailored to the alienated suburbanite, but alternatives in cities and semi-urban communities can serve as inspiration. Zohran Mamdani’s popular mayoralty in New York and the broad coalition that comprises the anti-ICE resistance in places such as Minneapolis and Los Angeles have shown that Americans in such dense, multiracial communities still agree on a great deal and will show up to support their neighbors in danger. Across the country, moreover, most Americans now at least agree that Donald Trump is a terrible leader, that the economy is stuttering, and that our politics-as-usual approach must end.
There are other experiments worth considering. Since the late 2010s, a new wave of tenant union militancy has shown that neighbors—often from different political, ethnic, and national backgrounds—can trust one another enough to fight years-long battles with their landlords. As rents continue to balloon nationally, tenant unions offer a way forward, socializing neighbors of all kinds toward solidarity that doesn’t rely on paranoid technologies to render resentments right.
Unfortunately, Neighbors trains its eyes on a much smaller target. Just as polarization fails to fully explain our contemporary condition, the stylized quarrels in Neighbors don’t really inform us about the deep-seated problems that have brought the suburbs to such insanity. The show provides entertainment, building on our sense that fact is often stranger than fiction. But using it as a genuine assessment of the American psyche is about as productive as debating the Pope on matters of theology.
Matthew Vickers is a writer who lives in New York City.