Making Time for Yourself

I feel like I'm getting a new recommendation for a streaming show I absolutely have to watch every week. The queue gets ever longer. And it seems like by the time I'm ready to talk about something, everyone has moved on to the next new hot thing. It's especially hard to keep up when I finish watching a show that none of my friends seemed to be watching in the first place. Well, then... time for me to lob one recommendation too many at you!

Living With Yourself was a show that arrived on Netflix in late 2019 to much fanfare, only to promptly be swallowed up in Baby Yoda and Witcher memes. It was so unbuzzed-about that I honestly expect to hear any day now that Netflix has cancelled it after its single season. Even if that happens, I think it's 8 half-hour episodes are worth the ride.

Paul Rudd stars as Miles Elliot. (And Miles Elliot!) Dissatisfied with his life, he takes a co-worker's advice to try an expensive but sketchy spa treatment from a strange strip mall location. Next thing he knows, he's waking up buried alive. The spa treatment is really a cloning procedure, where a better version of him was created to take over his life, and he was supposed to have been killed and discarded. Having survived, though, he and his clone must now figure out how they're going to share one life. They must also navigate their own unique crises of identity: Miles Prime must wrestle with someone capable of "being him" better than he can be, while the Miles Clone struggles with the knowledge that all his memories and experiences aren't truly his -- they happened to someone else.

What I found most satisfying about Living With Yourself is how many different things it offered in just 8 short episodes. It starts out as fairly broad comedy, and early episodes are heavily dependent on sophisticated visual effects to allow Paul Rudd to convincingly act opposite himself. But as more episodes unspool, the narrative shifts into deeper emotional territory, and often focuses on one Miles or the other to a degree that some episodes use few (if any) effects.

The performances are great. Paul Rudd is clearly working in the sort of space that Tatiana Maslany ruled in Orphan Black, creating two distinctly different performances as the two Miles. But equally impressive is Aisling Bea as Kate, Miles' wife. In the back half of the episodes, her character is brought increasingly to the fore, working through her own insecurities and desires just like her "two husbands."

I'd give the run of Living With Yourself a B+. In a super-crowded slate of top-notch shows, I could see where perhaps even that's not good enough to make the cut. But at less than four hours to watch the entire thing, I think it's well worth the time. If you're a fan of Paul Rudd, you're going to enjoy it. And is anybody not a fan of Paul Rudd?