Review: Living with Yourself Is a Lesser Version of What It Could Be

The series is decidedly unambitious and ends before it ever really gets off the ground.

Living with Yourself
Photo: Eric Liebowitz/Netflix

You could be a better version of yourself, posits Living with Yourself, if you weren’t so damn tired all the time. In the Netflix series, a strip-mall spa run by—who else?—Mysterious Asians refreshes its clientele by literally and secretly refreshing people’s bodies, copying memories into a freshly cloned body while killing the original with no one being the wiser. It’s not exactly legal or even foolproof, as the original Miles Elliott (Paul Rudd) discovers when he wakes up buried in the woods. Upon returning home to his wife, Kate (Aisling Bea), he finds that his newer self is already there. That’s about as psychologically fraught as Living with Yourself gets, because, despite how much time its eight episodes devote to the bizarre fear of being cuckolded by yourself, the series is decidedly unambitious.

There’s something truly bleak at the heart of Living with Yourself, with its idea that one’s difficulty in functioning in everyday life is simply a sign of wear. Although the cloned Miles (referred to as “New Miles”) remembers everything the Old Miles does, his body is technically experiencing everything for the first time; he hasn’t tired of feeling the wind on his face, and he’s yet to grow accustomed to certain foods. In this way, the series, created and written by Timothy Greenberg, argues that living is so hard precisely because you’ve already lived. Life, here, is a feedback loop you’re caught in all the way to oblivion, unless, that is, illicit Asian cloners and their laxer Eastern standards set your mind free (early episodes never shed this light Orientalism, fumbling a few self-aware jokes in the process). Everyone, including and especially Kate, seems to like New Miles better than the worn-out Old Miles. He even tells stories at parties the way he used to, Kate says, instead of dejectedly drinking booze.

But two variations on Miles hardly disguise how singularly boring the character is, as episodes devote an interminable amount of time to the inner-workings of his advertising job as dull shorthand for contrasting his old and new selves; the clone goes to work while the original goofs off at home. New Miles, naturally, isn’t yet bored out of his skull by pitch meetings and wins acclaim for an ad campaign that Old Miles decries as “sappy.” There’s some jealousy involved, but there’s also the sense that this perspective couldn’t have come from the Old Miles anymore, as his optimism drained out of his ears over the passing decades. He can’t look at life the same way because he’s taken on so much baggage his body will never be rid of.

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The show’s structure alternates between the viewpoints of one of the two Mileses on a per-episode basis, doubling back to show what the other one was doing during a prior episode’s events. Though initially intriguing to have these blanks filled in after the fact, this structure is the show’s only real trick; being informed of what each Miles is doing at any given moment feels more repetitive than insightful, particularly with how severely the series neglects the supporting cast. Kate finally gets a POV episode over halfway into the season, while characters like Miles’s sister, Maia (Alia Shawkat), and his work rival, Dan (Desmin Borges), all but vanish once they serve their purpose. Everyone, and Miles in particular, seems too self-absorbed to really ruminate on the existential angst that might otherwise be inherent to the premise. This doesn’t feel like an intentional character trait so much as a lack of imagination.

Netflix’s Russian Doll uses its structural gimmick to explore the philosophical questions of a charismatic protagonist’s existence and situation and how they effect her actions. Living with Yourself feels inert by comparison, raising some fascinating questions about the nature of the self yet failing to give Miles or anyone in his orbit any real dimension or genuinely thoughtful reflection; mostly it fixates on “this situation is weird” and “I don’t want myself to have sex with my wife.” The series doesn’t even go anywhere particularly weird or daring, jamming as it does its most promising ideas—an F.D.A. intervention, the desire of one Miles to kill the other—into the last two episodes. Living with Yourself ends before it ever really gets off the ground. Despite how much potential the series displays for psychological complexity, its approach is otherwise so uninspired that one wonders if it stumbled upon that potential by accident.

Score: 
 Cast: Paul Rudd, Aisling Bea, Desmin Borges, Zoe Chao, Karen Pittman, Alia Shawkat  Network: Netflix

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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