'Living With Yourself' is at odds with itself with mix of sci-fi, drama, comedy

Living With Yourself (2019) - Netflix

Living With Yourself was an odd Netflix show that nearly pull off a neat trick despite clashing with itself in a number of bizarre ways, but the ending was a cop-out and a letdown that undermined the heights the story could've reached.

First of all, the show stars Paul Rudd. I have a hard time buying into Rudd. Sure, he's known for being funny in light-hearted situations like the Marvel movies or romantic comedies, but those roles rarely, if ever, challenged him to convince audiences that he can bring depth to a character when it matters. From the gripping opening scene of the show, it's obvious that Living With Yourself is not going to be an easy road, so to me, Rudd is a little out of an element. I once heard him say in an interview that acting is really easy, which says all I need to know about his efforts to, you know, actually act.

What further exacerbates this odd casting choice and clash of ideas is the story of the show itself. Rudd plays a boring office worker named Miles, a guy who doesn't have that special quality among his staff that makes him stand out or interesting. Couple that with his home life struggles, and it's easy to see why a down-on-your-luck guy like him would do something out of the norm like go for a special type of spa recommended by a co-worker he doesn't care for. A co-worker who seemed to have the kind of turnaround he's hoping to spark in his own life.

Instead, he wakes up buried in the ground and crawling out of the dirt six feet under. Literally. He discovers he was buried alive in the middle of nowhere. He eventually finds his way back home and discovers a shocking truth.

He has been cloned.

The spa he got? Yeah, not a regular spa. They scientifically engineer a clone of all the best qualities of a person. That's why his co-worker suddenly is the hot shot in his office. Miles looks straight into the face of...himself.

But don't get it twisted, this isn't a "Multiplicity" situation. The writing presents itself with a unique dramatic situation with heavy implications (at least, the implications should have been heavy. More on that later). The original Miles was supposed to be dead. But what happens with two of them? I applaud the decision not to go too ham with the original Miles taking advantage of this goody-two-shoes version of himself. Sure, he takes some time off work to let the clone get his career back on track, and he mostly is lazy at home finishing some screenplay he's always wished he had time to finish, but the real Miles realizes he doesn't like getting shown up by...himself.

And here's when the show should get more interesting, almost at an existential level. But instead of getting into the obvious "philosophics" of the situation, the show mostly sidesteps all that; instead, we get the Vantage Point-like writing mechanic of showing different characters' mindsets as we re-approach a handful of situations more than once. It's yet another odd decision that mostly got in the way of the show's true progress. What's worse is the execution of the payoffs. Multiple times when we arrive at the same ending we've seen once, but from a different perspective, it really doesn't give any particularly substantial insight or paradigm shifts to the situations at hand.

The show gains some life back when Miles' wife, Kate, finds out about Miles' situation. There's some drama about how she might actually cheat on Miles....with Miles, and all the moral quandaries that come with that. But in the finale of the eight-episode season, instead of reaching any sort of substantial conclusion with any weight or payoff to it, we get a lousy tease for a possible Season 2. The two Miles characters get into a scrum that serves as a culmination of the decision to send clone Miles away to live his own live despite his love for Kate (which makes sense, of course). Kate walks into the room to break up their fight and deliver the shocking announcement that she's pregnant. And, of course, she isn't even sure which Miles is the father. Sure, it changes the narrative completely, but that's not what I want in the final scene of the show; it merely serves as a tease for Season 2 (I'm sure this style is mostly forced by Netflix, who probably wants every one of their original shows to continue for multiple seasons). Nothing got resolved.

The show tried to generate drama in a couple of other spots, but those turned out to be wild goose chases. One story involved somebody following the real Miles in secret, but it turns out it was just the FDA, which wanted to shut down the cloning operation. No one cares about that.

The attempts for comedy in the show were hit or miss; even in the lighter situations, I wasn't all that impressed with Rudd. The best gag involved a completely unexpected cameo from one Tom Brady. He strolls out of the spa and jokes about going through the cloning process for a sixth time (this show released in 2019), implying Brady's secret to winning that many Super Bowl rings is simply cloning the best version of the great quarterback. So hilarious, and, as it turns out, fortuitous, because Brady has won another Super Bowl since shooting that scene. Between this cameo and Brady's current round of commercials, dude could be a serious force of comedy.

The Wife's two cents:

-It was an okay show, but she really hated the ending. There was little to no closure, and it felt really rushed. The two guys hated each other, and they still had the problem of both loving the same woman, but suddenly her getting pregnant is supposed to solve those issues and lead to a happy ending? What, is the baby going to have two identical dads now? It made it seem like the season's storylines were solved, but in the end, we're only left with more questions.

#LivingWithYourself #Netflix