Popbox – Living With Yourself

On Tuesday, a member of the Blind Ferret staff steps on an old wooden soda crate and yells to anyone who will listen about how awesome some media they enjoy is.

Ant-Man vs Disney+

Netflix stands before the unstoppable juggernaut that is Disney+, the Disney/Star Wars/Marvel streaming service coming for its top spot. Netflix has three choices: submit, survive, or stand its ground. If the original content they scheduled to release in the months before the launch of Disney+ is any indication, Netflix is standing its ground.

Either Netflix original series aren’t getting the mainstream attention they used to or they are employing a stealth deployment strategy, but a lot of the streaming service’s new content is catching me off-guard. For example, Living With Yourself, an 8 episode series staring Paul Rudd in the two lead roles?

Paul Rudd is a movie star. Ant-Man movies keep getting green lit in one of the rare examples of an MCU actor more popular than the character they play. The technical demands alone of Living With Yourself requires more of the actor than the sum of time it would take two individual actors to play the same part. And yet it feels like little to no bells were chimed and or whistles were blown to announce this show’s release.

Existential Viewing

Surprise over no one telling me an actor I enjoy would be in a TV show that interests me aside, this show evoked a rare reaction from me: fascination. Many shows amuse me, excite me, endear me, and I can’t remember the last show I watched that fascinated me.

Spoiler-free examples: I went into this show expecting it to be funny. It stars a comedic actor, the title is a pun, and the concept (based on the poster) is some kind of Odd Couple if the roommates were twins or clones or something. Maybe a shapeshifter. So when the first episode began and ended with a traumatic visual, and everything in between was Paul Rudd’s character Miles having a sad day. On top of that being an unexpected direction for the plot to go, it had an… unexpectedly expected result? Let me explain.

I went into Living With Yourself expecting it to be funny. It was. I just didn’t expect watching Paul Rudd live out one day of his sad life to be funny. I hope Paul Rudd is some kind of comedy wizard who can intentionally make even reading the obituaries hilarious, because if he has no control over this power I feel really, really bad for finding sad Paul Rudd as funny as I do.

Slow, Enjoyable Digestion

One of my favourite things about watch Living With Yourself is how satisfying watching a single episode is. When streaming services debuted, I spent days binging five or six 45-minute episodes without forging a single fond memory. I’ve watched as much as half of Orange Is The New Black, and I barely remember it. Similarly, I’ve watched some 22-minute episode series within a few days of their release that I’ve enjoyed, but then felt this emptiness that it would be months before more content was available. New episodes of Brooklyn 99 feels more like a holiday than a TV season.

One episode of Living With Yourself is as entertaining as it is satisfying. There are only 8 episodes of the first season and I’ve yet to watch two episodes in a row. I’m watching them more like one every other day than once a week like the dark ages of my TV youth. One every other day is still a wider gap than any other show I could actively be watching, like, right now, and it’s deliberate. It’s because I need that time to be ready to move on to the next one.

To Be Concluded

I haven’t actually finished Living With Yourself, so hopefully the season has a satisfying conclusion for my sake and the sakes of anyone who checks the show out based on this recommendation. I am someone who can resent a journey if the destination disappoints, so it is rare that I recommend a series based on a small sample. And yet, Living With Yourself has left that much of an impression.

Now you know,
Costello