Living With Yourself is a 2019 comedy/drama about a man who undergoes an experimental treatment to improve his life, only to be replaced by a new and improved version of himself.
Miles Elliott (Paul Rudd) is in a rut professionally and personally. Disheveled and worn thin, he is uninspired by his work in advertising and going nowhere in his marriage to Kate (Aisling Bea), she a successful architect waiting for him to get her pregnant (he just won’t get to the fertility clinic). One day, a co-worker gives him a unique tip, about a nearby spa that can totally revitalize your life. Feeling like a boost will do him good, he pays a huge fee for the Korean-led service and sure enough, wakes up a whole new man. Literally. Turns out, he’s been cloned, but since the methods for disposing the ‘originals’ are on the fritz, he was buried in a plastic bag in the woods, left for dead. Escape his grave, he returns home to find new Miles doing very well in the job and with Kate. What’s he gonna do?
The answer to that question isn’t quite as deep as series creator Timothy Greenberg has potential for making, Season One’s 8-part entry a mix of weird, wild, wondrous, and just plain wacky. The idea is not a new one, something the filmmakers surely understand, and so try to give some punch with a narrative device that has us watching the same events from the two perspectives, which admittedly is a clever twist and offers a few fun moments where gaps get filled in smart ways. It also allows for us to find some humanity in both Miles and well, Miles, one with a headful of memories that are lived in and therefore burdensome and one with a headful of memories that are implanted, leaving him gleeful yet sort of empty. In his mind he knows he eaten a fruit cup before but in fact he really hasn’t ever eaten a fruit cup. Let that spin around your brainpan.
That’s a very cool place to stick the plot, but the series doesn’t really explore that, trying to walk a line between dark comedy and drama, it of course boils down to who gets to sleep with Kate. Now, there is a genuinely interesting turn that takes place halfway through this, one that would seem ready to spin it into all new territory, but it only flirts with the idea, focusing more on the three in relationships rather than the larger morality of it all. A late episode involving the FDA then careens the whole thing into a kind of absurdist comedy, which is jarring at first before you sense that this is where it should have been from the start – something that was probably intended but never done quite right.
Rudd is well cast and while the two Miles’ are made identifiable by two distinct hairstyles that no one seems to notice being different, he makes it entertaining playing a pair of people cut from the same cloth but not with the same motivations. Bea is effortlessly endearing in a part that would seem hapless at first before getting a significant chunk of the story on her own, thank goodness. To be sure, there is no fault on the actors for any of this slipping off the tracks.
The problem is that is feels toothless, never funny enough to be a comedy, never daring enough to be a thinker, and never dark enough to be weighty, even when it has all the pieces in place to make all of them fit. Some fun quandaries are put on the table for exploration but never really pan out, not to mention a few gaps in logic that sort feel like we have to accept in giving this go. A final frame sets up a second season, but with a kind of television romcom cliffhanger. Maybe season two will find its footing.