NOTE: Contains spoilers.
Netflix has recently been expanding its offerings of original content, with one of the most recent being the dramedy (…or black comedy? I really can’t tell, but more on that later) Living With Yourself. The first season of this show, which dropped on October 18, contains eight episodes whose run-time ranges from 20 to 30 minutes.
Living With Yourself details the life of Miles Elliot (Paul Rudd), a grumpy, burnt-out man who finds little fulfillment in his job and marriage. He and his wife, Kate, are trying to conceive, though a point of conflict throughout the show is that Miles does not seem to care about it as much, continuously missing his appointments at the fertility clinic.
To reinvigorate his zest for life, he undergoes a very expensive spa treatment, which he later finds out is an illegal cloning procedure that rebuilds — and improves — the subject’s DNA. The original subject is then killed, except in Miles’s case, he survives.
Facebook commenters have drawn parallels between the trailer of Living With Yourself and the movies The Double and Multiplicity, as well as the Rick and Morty episode entitled “Rest and Ricklaxation.” Clearly, the cloning trope has been done before, so one would hope that Living With Yourself takes some sort of drastically different approach. Instead, we’re left with lukewarm, half-assed commentary on “identity” and “self-perception”. I’m using air quotes here because the show doesn’t really get into what these terms even mean. The two Mileses feel jealous of one another, but in different ways, and that’s really about it.
The clone doesn’t explore identity in any socially-conscious or compelling way, and the clone is mostly used to demonstrate the wife’s dissatisfaction with the marriage. But, save for one episode of flashbacks from her perspective, she never feels like a main character, so even this theme falls flat. Kate, played by Aisling Bea, falls prey to many of the common and regressive tropes of female characters, as a stifled wife who struggles to advocate for what she deserves, and compromises her career for her marriage and for the prospect of having children. The dynamics between Kate and both Mileses feel bland and dated.
Once cloned, Old Miles and New Miles, of course, feel pitted against each other and jealous of one another as they are forced to share the same life. After much deliberation over who is the “real” Miles, and if the “fake” Miles should just leave and let the other resume his life as normal, they decide that New Miles will do Old Miles’s job at work, while Old Miles will do his husbandly duties — while working on his play during the workday. Old Miles has his relationship with Kate, for which New Miles is resentful. New Miles is beloved by his coworkers and is excelling at his job at his advertising firm, and Old Miles is envious of New Miles’s charisma and intelligence. This arrangement of sharing one life initially works — until New Miles increasingly oversteps, Kate finds out about the clone, and even begins dating New Miles behind Old Miles’s back after she becomes fed up with Old Miles’s general listlessness. And white, suburban havoc is wreaked.
A bearable, low time-commitment binge, the premise of Living With Yourself is flawed in arguably every way. Living With Yourself seems like it’s trying to replace Santa Clarita Diet in that they both star two Hollywood sweethearts (who are probably too famous to be on a Netflix originals) living quiet, suburban lives with a fantasy twist. But while Santa Clarita Diet digs into deeper sub-plots and attempts to untangle the compex mythological mystery behind Sheila turning into a zombie, Living With Yourself never really does anything more interesting than exploring the immediate interpersonal consequences of Miles’s cloning. Oh, yeah, and Santa Clarita Diet actually has heart and humor.
The entire show seems to hinge on the fact that Paul Rudd, famous for his likeability and charisma, plays not one, but two main characters. While there’s twice the Paul Rudd, both of his characters completely lack his trademark charm that viewers love him for. It’s not that Paul Rudd only plays likeable characters; some of his most notable roles (think: Anchorman) are assholes. But he doesn’t play either Miles with any heart or relatability that this type of flawed, anti-hero character calls for. It’s such a letdown it’s honestly impressive.
Like Miles, Living With Yourself seems to suffer from an identity crisis of its own as well, failing to fully commit to one genre. While marketed as a comedy, the only qualities that might make it such is that Paul Rudd is a historically comedic actor. While there are a sparse smattering of dry and witty one-liners, they feel uncomfortable and out of place within the dark lighting and ominous background music that sets a more dramatic tone for the show. But, it doesn’t fully seem to lean into the technological anxiety component nor commit to its sci-fi premise, either.
I also need to say this: Living With Yourself is yet another example of straight, white men pretending to be the victim despite being privileged by society in literally every way. Especially in 2019, we don’t need any sort of exploration of identity of a cis, straight, white man; it’s far more interesting, and necessary, to explore identities that are systematically marginalized and threatened in American society. In a world where people of color, women, and gay people are forced to compromise their self-expression in order to approximate hegemonic whiteness and gender roles in our white supremacist, heteronormative, and patriarchal society, cloning could be a really effective vehicle for exploring respectability politics, code switching, and identity policing, a la Sorry To Bother You (which does not feature cloning, but certainly has elements of science fiction and technological innovation). Living With Yourself was a missed opportunity to illuminate a systemic struggle, rather than the struggle of a random guy that no one, other than middle-aged, straight white male viewers can really relate to.
I think Living With Yourself could have been reinvisioned in two ways. Keeping the premise and storylines as they were, the show could have been condensed into an episode of Black Mirror. Or, in order for Living With Yourself to really thrive as a riveting, engrossing TV show, it would need to feature more complex storylines — the show as it is felt empty, with plotlines that were not quite meaty or twisty enough to really justify spreading it out over eight episodes.
All in all, the only real appeal to the show is Paul Rudd — a likeable, non-problematic actor who plays everyman type of characters. But they never truly capitalize on his acting chops. Rudd’s name can only propel the story so far when the source material is lacking.