The Neighbors

Director: Tommy Wiseau

This week we are heading back to the wonderful world of Wiseau! This time it is not a feature film though – instead it’s Tommy’s stab at making a sitcom. “The Neighbors” seems to have had a slightly checkered history before it finally made it onto the small (computer) screen with Wiseau making a pilot back in 2007 only to then make another pilot in 2014 before the show was finally picked up by video on demand service “Hulu”. It’s safe to say this 7 year gestation period did nothing for the quality of the show.

The basic premise of the “sitcom” centres around an apartment block and its various tenants, with most of the “action” taking place in the managers office. Tommy Wiseau plays a dual role including the aforementioned manager, Charlie (who seems hell bent on making “what a day” a catchphrase) and Ricky Rick, which is just Tommy in a blonde wig behaving like a bit of an arse. That being said, ALL of the characters are utterly insufferable with Wiseau’s apartment manager being the least annoying… but even that’s like comparing different piles of poo; ultimately they all stink.

The rest of the cast is filled with a variety of unrealistic and oddball personalities including: a horny maintenance man that ends up pimping out a woman who likes to have sex in the laundry room, a woman who always wears bikinis and who keeps getting hit on by her lesbian friend, a homophobic woman who has a pet chicken, a man which is always bouncing a basketball, a drug dealing stoner and an English princess (with an awful accent) that comes to stay for some reason. All the women seem to have been hired for the size of their (largely silicone based) cleavage rather than their acting ability and the wardrobe department (if there even was one) has made sure there is plenty of skin on show for the male characters to ogle at. In fact, at times the show plays out like a porno but without the redeeming feature of any penetration.

Not much happens over the 6 episodes. There are a few moments that look like they might go somewhere, such as the lesbian non-affair, the arrival of the princess (although Tommy says “princes”), which is played up as a happy occasion and everyone is really excited, but then for no apparent reason, everyone seems to hate her in the proceeding episodes but these things go nowhere. Tommy has made sure the show is “on brand” by including a scene where a character is watching “The Room”, various scenes of male characters flashing their Tommy Wiseau underwear and the character of Ricky Rick even wears a jacket with “The Neighbors” emblazoned on the back.

A large chunk of the series seems to revolve around people “having a go” at the managers job, with seemingly no training, especially when Charlie leaves the show three quarters of the way through. These attempts tend to end in characters pretending to type, playing with stationary and dealing with the constant stream of tenants wanting to complain (not about the apartment block but about each other). The final episode, entitled “Triple Vanilla Sex”, sounds like it’s going to be either deeply problematic or hilariously outrageous but when it is revealed what TVS actually is, it just turns out to be incredibly lame.

Scenes are punctuated with a strange 20 sec clip showing the apartment block with its various inhabitants at the windows as a CGI T-Rex walks into shot, eats a chicken and then laughs with Tommy Wiseau’s famous chuckle, all the while the rather cheap sounding electronic theme tune plays over the top (which is probably the best thing about the show). This interlude is shown an obscene amount of times and becomes very grating. Some episodes only last around 20 mins (thankfully) and the run time would be trimmed down considerably with these removed, which I guess is probably why they were added in the first place. At least they give some respite to the horrific nonsense of the show itself I guess.

“The Room” definitely isn’t the worst film ever made, but “The Neighbors” probably is the worst sitcom ever made. It feels like Wiseau is testing the boundaries to see how much bad he can get away with but the difference between this and “The Room” is that at least with that movie he was really trying to make something good, and it failed but was still enjoyable. With “The Neighbors” it feels like he wanted to make something bad, and he did it successfully but it is not enjoyable in the slightest.

In the first series of “Red Dwarf”, there is a scene where Lister is listening to his favourite music, the awesomely named “Rastabilly Skank” when his feuding cabin mate Rimmer enters the room and questions what is the awful racket to which he is listening. Upon reading the case for “Rastabilly Skank”, Rimmer points out that there is a health warning noting that listeners may become “irritable and irrational and has been linked to disorders of the nervous system and bowels.” Such a warning should be given to “The Neighbors” because as I watched it, my body gradually succumbed to the flu virus. This series made me ill.

There is no comedy in this sitcom, so I guess it should just be described as a “situation” and even then, the situation is uninspiring. I found myself trying to find anything remotely resembling a storyline but eventually just gave up and let the tidal wave of diarrhetic sewage wash over me. Tommy Wiseau’s idea of comedy seems to be gobbing water, food fights and shouting. The dialogue is delivered in such a poor manner it seems like it is being made up on the spot, but after viewing the 2007 pilot alongside the 2014 pilot it is clear that Tommy did in fact script the bloody thing, although I doubt it is actually based on a novel as the credits suggest.

When the editor was given the footage I’m surprised he didn’t just walk out of the room. Then again, the editing is poor and the constant cutting to the 20 second interlude is baffling. The audio quality is appalling, fluctuating between very quiet to so loud it is distorted, not that I really wanted to hear what was being said. The acting is awful, but Tommy is by no means the worst of the bunch. The script also seems to highlight some of Wiseau’s slightly questionable views on race and paints him out to be a bit of a misogynistic. In one scene a supposedly pregnant character (a white blonde girl with a ball under her top, who had previously been in a relationship with a black character who turns out to be gay) is asked if she is having a “dark chocolate baby”, while in another scene Tommy’s Charlie character believes a rumour that one of the tenants might be having sex with a chicken because he is Chinese. The old lady who owns said chicken is also often seen starting fights with the lesbian character, telling her she needs to go to church to be baptised. Forward thinking this ain’t.

Everybody shouts, often over the top of each other then followed by an awkward silence as the actors decide what to do next. I would be surprised if any of the scenes made it past the first take. The direction and technical proficiency of “The Room” looks Oscar winning compared to “The Neighbors”, which just shows how much having a team of professional people surrounding him helped the making of that movie. I would say this has probably proven to Wiseau that you can’t just put out any old shit and it become a cult classic, but he has mentioned there being a second series in the works so what do I know.

I can’t recommend “The Neighbors”, even to fans of “The Room”. If you are curious, then watch the first episode on YouTube but I doubt you’ll be inclined to dig any deeper. “Victims!” Still remains the worst film I have seen so far, and I will review that this year for context, but fuck me, if you think the output of the BBC is poor, be comforted in the fact they didn’t commission this shit. Let’s hope the forthcoming “Big Shark” sees Tommy at least trying to make something decent again. “What a day!” indeed.