Living With Yourself: Review

I finally finished Paul Rudd’s Living With Yourself on Netflix. It’s only 10 or so episodes that I started right when it came out, I’m not much of a binge watcher though. I got hung up a month or so ago and sort of forgot about it. The Crown came out for season 3 so my TV priorities shifted. Since I'm caught up on the House of Windsor it's back to business. 

Living With Yourself makes assumptions about humans that ring true, we want shortcuts to happiness and our humanity is tied to our unique experiences, good and bad. 

Here is the story in a nutshell. It’s a spoiler alert because I can’t explain the show without giving some of it away. Stop reading here if you plan to watch it. Miles is an ad executive who is in a creative rut. His relationship with his wife Kate (Aisling Bea) is shaky at best; they’re trying to get pregnant but Miles can’t be bothered to show up at the fertility clinic. He is selfish and bored with life until a coworker recommends a spa treatment to revitalize his situation. The spa turns out to be a cloning racket where the ‘scientists’ create the improved clone with less fat and better habits. The host is killed, or supposed to be. It doesn’t take with Miles because of a screw up. He wakes up in a plastic sack buried under ground and scrambles to tear out.

That opening sets the tone for the eerie story that follows. Some of the scene music is creepy and foreboding with some lighter moments sprinkled here and there. It feels a bit horror movie-ish at times. Not because of violence but because of the unknown quality. Having a clone around and trying to keep it a secret presents some frightening scenarios.   

The rest of the series tries to answer the question of ‘how will this arrangement work?’ Can the two men coexist? Will clone Miles murder Miles? Will Miles murder his clone? Will the clone ruin everything by not playing his part?

 Another trick the writers have introduced is to show the same scene from both Miles point of view and the clone’s.  This prevents us from favoring one over the other and works to show distinctions when they’re important. This isn’t an evil twin story despite their predicament. We see one side and then the other.

Are the writers telling us that we behave differently when motivations are different? I don’t want to give too much away, but their approaches to life, as well as attitudes toward Kate are rooted in their histories. The Miles clone has the same memories as Miles but only as images or files that were transferred from another source. Miles carries the pain and emotional attachment to his wife the human way, through his experience. Their connection is physical and emotional and not easily replaced despite their current marital problems.

Miles is not a great guy. He is selfish, he lies to his wife and coworkers and scams local farmers. He is mopey and miserable at home and despite his wife’s request that he go to the fertility clinic, he ignores her. The Miles clone is a better version of himself, friendlier to guests and more attentive to Kate. Miles gets jealous and tries to reclaim some energy and initiative after a while. 

  

I like the simple plot so far. Guy gets mixed up in a cloning accident and has to figure out how to manage him, his clone and his relationship with his wife, which is rocky. Rudd doesn’t oversell any of the parts, he plays both characters straight. There is a running gag about Tom Brady at the cloning clinic that's pretty funny. 

I think there are two lessons from this show. First, no amount of shortcuts will ever lead to happiness and fulfillment. Second, humans are more than just bone structure and DNA with memories. Clones might be copies, but like a copy they are more of a picture than an exact replica. Cloning is really just a fun story telling device. Michael Keaton’s Multiplicity used it as well but played the object lesson (that shortcuts don’t exist) for laughs. ‘Living’ and Multiplicity both begin from the same point, stressed out people do dumb things.  Only Living With Yourself investigates the second lesson, that humans are flawed creatures but completely unique in experience.