Series Complete- Living With Yourself
I blitzed through the Netflix show “Living With Yourself” recently. It’s a sci-fi concept show with Paul Rudd so I felt it was a pretty safe bet. TL;DR Overall, it was enjoyable but kind of just fell flat at the end.
The show played with a lot of different ideas. Paul Rudd’s character* is feeling depressed and lost in life. When he’s presented with a potential cure all he leaps at it. This is a common enough trope and occurrence. Desperate people often can’t think straight. The show never really makes an effort to explain why he felt this way. For the most part, I think that was a good choice. Sometimes, there is no ‘why’, at least not one that you can explain in a tv show.
The procedure he has done is supposed to tweak his DNA and make him a better version of himself. What actually happens is that he’s killed and cloned. His clone wakes up and goes back to his life but with a different perspective. It’s never explicitly said but I like that it’s implied there’s no actual genetic manipulation.
The clone is a new person, who doesn’t know it’s a new person. Everything is a new experience for them. They have memories of things but they have never actually done anything. Therefore it’s exhilarating. They relish all the little things the old version had forgotten about. As the clone learns that he’s a clone things start to unravel for him.
Unlike everyone else whose gone through this process, the clone knows he’s a new person. Everyone else’s clones thought they were the same old person and everything in life just suddenly felt different. Paul Rudd’s clone knows he’s a clone. As the show progresses he doesn’t know who he is anymore.
This part I liked. The clone is always treated as a unique individual. It’s not the old clone story where clones are identical copies and everyone just treats the same. The twin correlation is made explicit. Genetically they’re the same. They even have the same memories (which, also good, they hand wave as being a special technique for copying the brain rather than just being built into the cloning process).
The pattern of the show was to follow one version of Paul Rudd and then shift in the next episode to follow the other. Because this was a short eight episode series worked okay. For an extended series this would have become tiresome. They also leaned heavily into the false foreshadowing and misdirection. At the end of one episode, we see Original getting kidnapped with a back thrown over his head. At the start of the next, we see Clone testing out bags and then see his story develop to where he’s planning a kidnapping. But then someone else does the kidnapping. Again, this works okay for the short series but would grow tiresome if it were longer.
The biggest disappointment of the series is that it doesn’t really go anywhere. Lots of stuff happens but isn’t really resolved. The trio of Original Paul Rudd, Clone and his wife some to some sort of understanding. It appears they are ready to move on with life together. But there were so many plot events that were just left hanging. I was left feeling unsatisfied with the ending but not eager for another season. It touched on some ideas about mental health, and what makes us us, and other things. But doesn’t quite know what it wanted to say about any of that.
Overall, not a bad experience. It was fun to watch. But not a strong recommend either.
*sure, the character has a name, but it’s really just Paul Rudd
