The Neighbors "Pilot" Review

Dan Fogelman studied at Penn and Oxford. Fogelman wrote last year's Crazy, Stupid, Love. The Neighbors is his first series on television. No show has earned more contempt from critics than The Neighbors. Some critics seem mortally offended by the premise of the show, its jokes and punch lines. They feel contempt for someone who's trying to get people to laugh for 21 minutes every week, for entertaining families across the United States of America. The Neighbors doesn't deserve contempt. The sitcom is okay, occasionally funny, and even endearing.

The series reminds me of Dude, Where's My Car, the 2000 picture starring Ashton Kutcher and Sean William Scott. The aliens of The Neighbors could've been in the film. They're strange. None of them know how to use a hose, not even after spending ten years on planet earth, in the same neighborhood and in the same houses. Golf carts are used by every alien family in the community. Females fertilize male eggs; males carry a child and give birth. The aliens wound up in New Jersey after crash-landing ten years ago. They patiently awaited a message from their home planet. The message didn't come. The receiver, with a silly name, ran out of batteries.

A family from Queens moved into a vacant house after an alien couple leaves the neighborhood. The family from Queens is the typical nuclear family. Max and Debbie Weaver are the traditional network couple. Max is a man's man. He lives by New York Mets baseball and, presumably, football. He tries to raise his kids right, be a good husband, and find success in the workplace. Debbie's a supportive wife who loves her husband and her children. Max and Debbie have domestic squabbles, but the issues are resolved by dinner or bed-time.

The Weavers move into a New Jersey community is motivated by Max's desire to succeed and provide the life his father wanted him to have. The neighbors are weird. Max assumes they're European. Max's first prayer to the Almighty is for the neighbors to be normal, which is a common prayer of anyone moving into a new neighborhood or apartment or a box on a city street. The Weavers react to the Zabvronian's abnormal behavior, but they're open-minded and agree to dine with the Bird family. Dinner doesn't end until someone in the Weaver family knows their neighbors are aliens. Cue the freak-out by the humans, as well as the various reactions when they learn a new fact about Zabvronian life.

Peel away the differences of culture, physical appearance, and ideology, and the Weavers discover a commonality between themselves and the Zabvronians. The neighbors share a universe in common. Max admires the patriarchal construct of Larry Bird's home. Debbie encourages Jackie to stand up to her husband. Max feels Larry may teach him how to take back the household. Jackie stands up to her husband in deciding to recharge the silly name device, which unfortunately involves sacrificing her son to a jump in time where he'll be raised by his grandchildren in a very happy place. Human and alien connect despite their differences.
Max's total acceptance of the Bird family is endearing, especially in contemporary America where people of different races or sexual orientation or religious belief are hurting, fighting, and even killing one another. I theorized in the Fall TV Preview for new shows on ABC about the possibility of Fogelman purposefully telling a story about two different species coming together to form a community. I thought of The Neighbors as a sitcom that'd stress the importance of tolerance, understanding and acceptance. The friendships developed between the adult humans and aliens are sweet. Max and Debbie openly communicate about their insecurities, and Jackie succeeds in creating a slightly less patriarchal home.

Fogelman's Crazy, Stupid, Love wit is rarely heard during the "Pilot." My favorite joke was about seeing strange things all the time in public school. I knew the famous sporting figures' names would be used for the alien family, but I still chuckled when I heard the names. The silly name device did not delight me, though; the silly-name device feels lifted from Dude, Where's My Car. People probably laughed when they heard the name because humor is subjective. While I may find John Cleese torturing Graham Chapman during a job interview sketch that involves bells and strange noises and an insistence that Chapman do something silly, followed by Chapman making a silly noise to which Cleese seriously responds, "Very good, very good indeed" and then marks the silliness down in a notebook, only to inform Chapman the position he interviewed for was filled months ago, funny, others will not. Others will find a man being hit in the groin by a football funny whereas I will not.

So, yeah, I liked The Neighbors. I'm going to watch and write about the show next week and maybe write about it until Arrow premieres.

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