On the Transgressive Weirdness of HBO’s Neighbors
I’ve just finished my rewatch of Neighbors Season 1. I’m thrilled it was picked up for Season 2, but not surprised as it was HBO Max’s biggest unscripted debut ever?! It really is a very strange show (complimentary). I liked it more the more it went on, and I liked it even more after my second time through it. I have so many questions, such as:
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How did this completely insane television show, with its somehow equally funny and horrifying nature, come to exist?
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What about the show makes us / at least some people queasy? Is it just an exploitative freak show? How did they navigate these questions — ethically, practically, creatively — from casting through post?
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Is Neighbors reality TV, documentary, both, or neither? How is it different from other shows like Residential Rage (also on HBO Max)?
I’ll be talking about these topics in a Live Chat with series co-directors and tomorrow at 1pm ET.
The reason I am interested to speak with Dylan and Harrison about Neighbors is that the people, imagery and stories of Neighbors feel as if they belong more to reality TV than to respectable documentary, even while I don’t think the show is reality TV. (Maybe I’m overthinking this, but when I hear Dylan, off camera, saying, “We’re making a documentary,” I tend to agree with him. I’m interested in the gray areas here.)
Reality TV: the embarrassing cousin of documentary?
A few weeks back, two of my favorite reality TV shows — 90 Day Fiancé and Survivor — aired episodes, within days of one another, prominently featuring people pooping their pants.
For the uninitiated: these franchises are both hugely popular, but they could not be further apart in terms of their current cultural positioning. TLC’s 90 Day Fiancé squarely codes as “trash TV”: cheap, basic cable, lurid, guilty pleasure. Now in its 50th season on CBS, Survivor is about as mainstream, respectable, and prestigious as reality TV has ever been.1 Nobody would call either one “documentary.”
I watch both these shows religiously. But while I’ll happily confess my love for Survivor in polite society, I am embarrassed by my love for 90 Day. I am uncomfortable with it. I may even be ashamed. I’m not sure “love” is the right word, but how else can I describe my relationship to something I cannot stop watching?
Anyway, as different as they are, both shows happened to air pants-pooping episodes the very same week. I’m putting all the details in a footnote here2 to spare any of you whose delicate sensibilities I’ve already offended. Suffice it to say: in both cases it was played for comedy, but — surprising nobody in 2026! — Survivor probably handled it a little more humanely and tastefully.
But surely the most humane and tasteful thing to do would have been to leave out these unfortunate, embarrassing, disgusting events in the first place, right?
In neither case does the pants-pooping change the story in any significant way. You don’t “need” these scenes to better understand Christian’s strategy to win the game, or Lisa’s love story with Daniel.
Both incidents were immediately meme-ified, of course, as the producers surely predicted. These shows depend on people — like me! — making and sharing memes — the memes are essential marketing. Even the people making memes to criticize the show are doing marketing for the show.
Given this media world3 , even in the more humane and tasteful version of the pants-pooping episode (Survivor), the choice of the producers to include it at all is now a part of this person’s public story forever. Is that… good? Even if it was pretty funny?
This is a newsletter about the art and business of documentary filmmaking. I kind of can’t believe I am sitting here talking about people pooping their pants on reality TV.
If you haven’t already smashed the unsubscribe button faster than a Gen Z moviegoer confronted by a sex scene, I promise I’m going somewhere with this. It very well may be that reality TV is not the embarrassing cousin of documentary (as we like to think), but more like its monstrous twin, so enmeshed it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.