A new HBO series that follows whacky neighbours feuding over trivial disputes looks mighty familiar, writes Alex Casey.
New to Neon this week is Neighbors, a reality series following eccentric folks all over America feuding over matters like a gate in the way of a shared road, or who can sit where on a private beach. Made by HBO and A24 and executive produced by Josh Safdie (Marty Supreme), the promotional material promises to open “a verité portal into the lives of contemporary Americans” and “capture an unfiltered and intimate portrait of everyday people”.
You don’t have to be on Neighbourhood Watch to see the immediate similarities with New Zealand’s own cult favourite reality series Neighbours at War. Running for a decade from 2005-2015, Neighbours at War traversed the country exploring quarrels around stolen mini-fridges, crude gestures made over fences, and brown-eyes on security cameras. Episodes often culminated in a tense mediation, hosted by the likes of John Key and Mark Sainsbury.
Created and narrated with wry affection by docuseries stalwart Bill Kerton – “we love The Warehouse, sexual intercourse, rugby and going round to the neighbours for barbecue” – the series showcased a side of regular New Zealand seldom seen on screen. “This is the real New Zealand, and these the real New Zealanders,” wrote The Spinoff’s Duncan Greive when the show ended. “They’re prim and proper, lewd and crude, shocked and shocking.”
Kerton had only seen the trailer for HBO’s Neighbors when The Spinoff reached out for comment. “I watched the promo, and I was like, ‘crikey, that looks like the same show’,” he said. With similar dynamic shots, punchy editing and ludicrous overly-cheery soundtrack choices (‘Our House’ by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young), the parallels were not lost on Kerton. In fact, “I would bet my house on them having seen our show, it just looks too close.”
The creators of Neighbors, Harrison Fishman and Dylan Redford, haven’t referenced its New Zealand counterpart when promoting the show, instead crediting TikTok stoushes as a key source of inspiration. “We have been obsessed with videos of people in conflict online for a long time,” they said in this Q&A. “They were fascinating, gripping, unfiltered, and honest. The conflict, no matter how small, always felt so big.
“We went on this tour across America because it was the only way to capture something bigger and messier than what already existed on TikTok,” they added. “We wanted to see what happens after the video ends.”
While Neighbours at War has been syndicated everywhere from the UK to Eastern Europe, the format was never adapted internationally. “I often thought how much fun it would be to make it in the United States, because they would have no shortage of people that didn’t get on with their neighbours,” said Kerton. “And of course, Americans, you just need to put a camera in front of them, and they’ll tell you everything you want to know.”
The first episode of Neighbors proves his thesis, introducing outlandish characters including TikToking woodworker The Bearded Bard and a rubber-masked vigilante known as The Shoreline Defender. Although based around minor squabbles over a gate in rural Montana and an ambiguous shoreline boundary in Florida, the tension feels much higher than back home in Parakai (“I’ll get my gun and I’ll shoot you dead,” one happy Montana local says).
Although Neighbors eschews the voiceover of Neighbours at War and embraces a much more frenetic, Uncut Gems-style editing pace, the episode also ends with an absurd, fruitless mediation session. First-time mediator R J Dieken arrives to the Montana ranch on a motorbike in agonising slow-mo, soon to be about as useful as John Key caught up in a willow tree war as the sparring neighbours threaten to, once again, murder each other over a controversial gate.
After watching the first episode overnight, Kerton shared some additional thoughts over email. “The promotional trailer screams ‘I have watched the NZ version’ but having endured the first episode, I’m not so sure,” he said. “The format is quite different to New Zealand’s Neighbours at War in that, even though their researchers have delivered wonderful characters, in my opinion, the enormous production team has made an absolute pig’s ear of it.”
Kerton slammed the first episode as “utterly devoid of any type of craft, timing, direction, pathos or basic storytelling,” an opinion shared by Neighbours at War producers Rachel Antony and Tash Christie at Greenstone TV. “It’s a hot mess, without the humanity, heart or humour of Neighbours At War,” they said. “Even though we were leaning into the conflict and Kiwi-ness of the situations, it was always with the goal of genuinely making things better.”
And while this might feel like the early brewings of a Neighbours at War conflict in itself, Kerton said he’s not overly bothered by the existence of Neighbors. “It’s very, very hard to protect this sort of IP, because it’s just a neighbours being neighbours show,” he said. “I couldn’t really give a tinker’s cuss if someone steals it or not.” He added that when they started making Neighbours at War, he drew inspiration from the tongue in cheek style of a similar British series.
HBO is yet to respond to The Spinoff’s questions about the similarities between Neighbors and Neighbours at War. In the meantime, could this renewed interest in neighbourhood drama see the return of the New Zealand cult favourite in the future? Kerton isn’t too keen. “The things that made that show so entertaining are things you’re not really allowed to do on television now. I’ve also got all the same settings, so I would make the same show,” he said.
“I can tell you right now they would take one look at it and go: ‘we’re not airing that’.”
Watch Neighbors here on Neon and Neighbours at War here on NZ On Screen
