Be your best
Netflix’s Living With Yourself offers some serious life lessons
Living With Yourself Netflix
If Paul Rudd screams in the forest while wearing nothing but a diaper, and no one is around to hear it, does he make a sound?
The philosophical repercussions of that may be shady, but it’s how the trippy Netflix drama Living With Yourself starts out. Technically, Rudd is first wrapped in plastic and buried underground while wearing a diaper, but you know how it goes. We’ve all been there.
Really. Maybe we have. Later on, we discover that he’s not the only inhabitant of the forest. But first, as the plot unravels and large swaths of Rudd’s flesh streak across the screen, we learn that 24 hours earlier Rudd’s character Miles was just your average Joe beaten down by life and sporting a perennial five-o’clock shadow.
That is until a co-worker slipped him the business card for Top Happy Spa, a tiny Korean establishment tucked in a strip mall. Intrigued by the slogan — “the best you can be” — Miles makes a call, withdraws the $50,000 fee, and drives there.
“The path of life brings us many troubles: Sadness, fear, humiliation, pain, short telomeres, bad DNA. Old body, old chemical, bad life,” says a man at the front desk in choppy English.
“Our exclusive process rebuild your DNA better than ever,” he says. “A better you. The best you can be. OK?”
Miles says OK, and what happens next sets off a chain of events in which there are now two versions of Miles — the original downtrodden dude and a new and improved version. Rudd plays both, opposite himself, with considerable chemistry, alternating between stunned confusion and frantic scrambling to keep his marriage, job and concept of self intact.
Shifting between the perspectives of original Miles and Miles 2.0, Living With Yourself unfolds over eight episodes and co-stars Aisling Bea as Miles’ wife. It’s written and created by Timothy Greenberg (The Daily Show With Jon Stewart), who’s won two Emmys and two Peabody Awards.
It’s also the latest project to explicitly muse on our existential malaise. While previous TV characters have wrestled with the meaning of life and the consequences of their decisions (think of Don Draper in Mad Men or Walter White in Breaking Bad), many did so through traditional plot and storyline elements. In Living With Yourself, the familiar show structure is upended — from having two versions of the same character to changing storytelling perspectives, to flashbacks, to the freaky scientific logic that allows for the premise in the first place.
It’s similar to Netflix’s Russian Doll, which stars Natasha Lyonne as a woman who keeps reliving her 36th birthday party in a time loop, dying each time it ends. It’s only when she grows as a person that she starts getting answers.
Living With Yourself is also a cousin of NBC’S The Good Place, which follows a ragtag group in the afterlife as they navigate different realities and timelines, as well as treks between Earth and versions of heaven and hell. When they learn that they’ve been less than stellar in their first life, they lean on philosophy to better themselves and strive for redemption.
All three series pose the same questions: How can we — the tired, poor, huddled masses — rise to our moral potential when humanity is so flawed? Is that even a desirable state? The answer lies in the trying, in embracing the present.