HBO’s nonfiction hit Neighbors presents a seemingly simple premise: What if you brought cameras into a local community where two (or more) individuals were in the midst of the dispute, and followed both sides to some kind of endpoint? That’s what friends and creators Harrison Fishman and Dylan Redford brought to their show initially, going on to direct all of the six episodes, but as they got deeper into finding stories to tell with casting director Harleigh Shaw, larger themes started emerging: About how society has changed since Covid. About what home ownership means today. About America.
Perhaps that’s why the riveting nonfiction series, which launched as HBO Max’s biggest unscripted debut ever with 1.6 million viewers tuning in, seems to have struck such a nerve. With an executive-producer team that includes Marty Supreme Oscar nominees Josh Safdie, Eli Bush and Ronald Bronstein, the series upends expectations of reality TV by combining that scope with immersive, surprisingly empathetic filmmaking — and some wild twists that can only be attributed to the uniqueness of human behavior.
At the halfway point of the show, Fishman, Redford and Shaw joined The Hollywood Reporter to break down how the show came to be — and how it revealed itself to them only as they embedded themselves in communities across the country.
HARRISON FISHMAN: My brother Sam started showing Dylan and I these neighbor dispute videos online, and this was right before COVID. He started editing compilations with them, and then we got excited about them and started making fake neighbor-dispute videos to try to convince people that they were real, because we come from the world of making internet videos and comedy videos and all that stuff. We hired actors and we pretended to be neighbors ourselves.
DYLAN REDFORD: We were making those fake neighbor videos in the pre COVID era. Once Harrison and I weren’t living in the same place anymore, and everyone was isolated and we were all on our phones all the time, the stakes of internet conflict suddenly felt much bigger and much more real — like something that a lot of Americans were consuming because it was one of the few things you could do on your phone during 2020 and 2021, just watch people argue with each other in real life. Suddenly the idea of people getting into viral confrontations and talking about Karens and all that was part of the zeitgeist. That also kind of got us thinking about, well, “What if we just followed these neighbors’ conflicts for real?”
FISHMAN: When we were actually making the show, more and more we started to realize, “Wow, COVID really inflamed this thing.” It inflamed so much in our country, but specifically just the way that people interact and with people’s space. All the things that you learn about the country and people just through this one window — that endpoint of a neighbor dispute seems so innocuous, but it really opened the doors to learning about so many other things in our country.
HARLEIGH SHAW: The pilot is actually episode three, the one that’s all in Florida. That was four years ago now that we first approached those people and with those stories that both required Harrison and I showing up and knocking on doors to get the second sides of both of those stories. There were many doors that we knocked on and spent time with that didn’t end up making it on the show. In terms of all the other stories, they come from a wide net of places, and I had an amazing team working with me that was putting lines out everywhere. We were searching through small claims [court], we were searching through local Facebook groups, Craigslist, social media. TikTok is where we found one.
FISHMAN: It’s not a light thing going into these conflicts, and it’s not a small thing to these people. It’s like the biggest thing in their life, and it’s really contentious and it does take a lot of listening. It feels like the cast and team were just on phone calls — it was a neighbor’s hotline, from 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM every day, just talking to people about their problems.
SHAW: All of them required very long phone calls and just listening about the neighbor dispute and learning a lot about each individual that we spoke to. If we weren’t able to be there in person for budget reasons, to spend time with them and knock on their door, there were hours and hours of phone calls and Zooms that had to be done before they were okay with the guys going out there to document their disputes.
REDFORD: The story producers had to be these Swiss Army Knife collaborators because they had to be both journalists and, basically, therapists. They had to listen to people on the phone and be able to hear them out. They also had to be really intense researchers. They had to have a really good sense of humor. My sister Lena, who is a story producer on the show — as she was going through Facebook groups, she was also going through small claims filings and talking to HOA presidents off of a Facebook group. The skillset to find these stories and the team that Harley managed was crazy. You had to understand the tone of the show, which is very distinct and kind of complicated, and then you had to have all these very basic practical skills.
FISHMAN: One of our favorite ways of finding these neighbor dispute stories was through the local newspapers, because it had clearly gotten to the point where it was a big thing in the town at least, but not big enough obviously to go where it’s gone viral or something.
REDFORD: The stakes feel incredibly high, because in many cases they are really high. Most of our neighbors in the show own their homes, and right now it’s incredibly difficult to buy a home, to pay off your home — just being a homeowner in the US right now is a very precarious situation for most people. What most people will say to a neighbor in the dispute is like, “Okay, well, why don’t you just move?” That’s just not an option for most people. It’s where all of their life savings are tied up, and sometimes it’s generational. They’re battling to keep their home that their grandparents own.
FISHMAN: The paranoia generally across our show is a lot, too, because when you’re in conflict with anybody, it’s consuming — but especially when you’re in conflict with someone who lives right next door to you. It brings it up a notch.
REDFORD: It’s something small that starts, but it carries this avalanche of emotion and intensity even though it’s over a recycling bin. Both of those things can be true. That’s why the language around it gets very big and gets very hyperbolic — the most dramatic that you can be is saying, “I will die for this.” There is some drama that is infused in the way that people talk about their disputes, because I think it’s a way also to garner sympathy and to communicate to people just how important it is. We never felt like any of our subjects were going to do anything violent or hurt themselves or hurt anyone else, but that language is very common.
SHAW: It was an interesting thing to filter through and decipher in the casting process for all of us as well. We wanted to completely avoid things that would actually get violent or get to that level of violence, but not many of the stories of people that we spoke to implied that. We had to ask: What is hearsay? What is actually going to get to that level? What feels too bleak and raw?
REDFORD: That [violent] language is a way for people to take something seriously that most people won’t take seriously. It’s a very effective way for their friends and families and the public to take something seriously that for most on paper would think, “Why do you care about this fence?”
REDFORD: Oftentimes we were watching things snowballed. In episode three with Melissa and Victoria, you get to watch things escalate in a way that feels unique within the broader season. When we first got there, we just knew that they’d had a confrontation because we saw a cell phone video of them getting frustrated at each other. But while we were there, the intensity and the amount that they were constantly getting arguments in their front driveway and then into the mediation and other things — that was not expected.
FISHMAN: [Victoria angrily throwing Melissa’s potted plants out of her driveway] is the most surprising and shocking thing that we filmed: Truly, it was such an active scene. Our whole show is people saying bad things about each other the entire time, but to see someone actually physically do something like that was totally wild and really showed how far that Victoria was willing to go.
REDFORD: The way that we thought about it oftentimes is there’s someone who’s maybe emotionally but factually wrong, and then someone that’s totally factually right, but maybe just the way they’re going about it is off-putting and feels wrong. With Jean and Marice [in episode two], Jean having all those cats and the way it’s affecting Marice on paper, and according to her county ordinances and stuff like that — she might be in the wrong. But emotionally, she really loves cats and she really cares about them, and she really wants to take care of them and has a really big heart and has taken care of them for a really long time. That metric of who’s in the right is balanced out around facts and emotion. That alchemy is the sweet spot of our show. It was something that we really wanted to challenge in the way that we structured and organized our episodes.
SHAW: Those conversations were integral to the casting. There were so many stories that came through that were obviously, “This side is the instigator and doing bad stuff and is kind of irredeemable,” and we just would not go with stories like that.
REDFORD: It was a conversation around, “Well, could you understand where they’re both coming from?” Usually we would go with the story where we all agreed. I mean, it is tough.
FISHMAN: We genuinely begin to love everyone that we film with. The dispute itself a lot of the time falls in the background. When you’re casting, we’re obviously trying to look for different disputes, but also they as people have to be interesting and compelling, and I mean exciting to actually film with. When we’re filming, we don’t think, “One of these people is clearly crazier than the other.” Because as Dylan was saying, emotionally they’re all right. And beyond that, it’s just awesome to hang out with them. They’re so interesting.
REDFORD: Because we always had the framework of a neighbor dispute, it allowed us to really deeply come to understand people in the process of them trying to solve a problem, or in the process of them trying to work through a conflict, which made them feel more real and not just our little play things. They have a ton of agency. They’re making all these decisions themselves, and we’re there to just be there and document it. That allows us to enjoy who these people are.
FISHMAN: The people being interesting and compelling and having such incredible lives outside of the dispute ended up being more important. I don’t think anyone will watch our show and be like, “I want to learn about this patch of grass, or I want to learn about this gate.” It’s really about the people.
REDFORD: We have a Halloween episode and that was something that we thought would be a really interesting fun world to dig into. Harley and Lena worked together to try to find a story like that. There were some really targeted casting decisions. And then just across the series itself, we were trying to make the season and the way the episodes are structured go from more familiar in terms of maybe how a reality TV episode is structured, to then put pressure and challenge some of those things — so we could start having a more cosmic relationship to neighbor disputes, but still within the theme. We could expand that definition of what a neighbor is and what it means. That was a big part of how we thought about what stories got paired together.
FISHMAN: From the very beginning we’re like, “Neighbors has to be a mosaic of our country.” There were a lot of parameters of, “I don’t know if we can actually make this show about America — we have to do it only on the East Coast because of our parameters.” But it was very important to us to have a hand in every region and place and person.
Neighbors airs new episodes Friday nights on HBO and HBO Max.
