Paul Rudd's Living with Yourself succeeds by avoiding becoming a shenanigan-filled sitcom

Vulture

The Netflix comedy starring Rudd in dual roles "goes deeper than its surface might suggest," says Jen Chaney. "Given Rudd’s gift for comedy and the show’s premise, this series, which starts streaming October 18, could have easily been a shenanigan-filled sitcom filled with misunderstandings and mistaken identities. But as created by Timothy Greenberg....it’s something odder, darker, and more genre-fluid. The best way to describe the tone of Living With Yourself is to say that it possesses the existential concerns of series like Forever or The Good Place, the designed-for-binging narrative style of Dead to Me, and the cockeyed tone of a Charlie Kaufman script. It’s Eternal Sunshine of the Cloned Mind." Chaney adds: "Living With Yourself is a fast and easy binge, which doesn’t sound like a compliment but is meant as one. With the exception of the finale, which runs for 35 minutes, each of the eight episodes clocks in at under 30 minutes, which keeps the twists coming at a welcome pace. Within that framework, the show feels breezy but also smart, entertaining but thought-provoking at the same time. Given our society’s forever obsession with self-improvement, it’s not so hard to imagine a spa like the one in the show actually existing; for all I know, one exists in some strip mall right now."

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• Living with Yourself never lives up to its binge-worthy premise: Creator Timothy Greenberg "teases depth and ingenuity that he never quite delivers," says Judy Berman. "Like the authors of so many other surreal-male-midlife-crisis narratives, he overestimates how compelling its protagonist’s predicament is, then resolves it into a lesson in appreciating what one has. (He also oversimplifies the needs and desires of the woman in his life, even after devoting a full episode to her perspective.) And, as in so many other high-profile Netflix projects—Dead to Me, Maniac, The Politician—just about every episode ends on a cliffhanger. Sadly, in the case of Living With Yourself, a show designed for binge viewing never proves binge-worthy."
• Living with Yourself is like a clone of a Charlie Kaufman show: "Today, we have Living With Yourself, the new Netflix cloning comedy that throws the high concepts, themes, and novelty of the Kaufman filmography into a salad spinner to produce a weekend binge with the shelf-life of a potluck caprese," says Erik Adams. "There’s a charismatic leading man pulling onscreen double duty (like Adaptation), science-fiction technology hiding behind a nondescript storefront (like Eternal Sunshine), and all the midlife, upper-middle-class-white alienation and ennui you can stomach (like… every Kaufman movie.) A lot of the jokes land, and the volume of Paul Rudd charm truly increases with the volume of onscreen Rudd, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is all just Netflix tiding its subscribers over until a genuine Kaufman—his take on I’m Thinking Of Ending Things—arrives in their feeds."
• Only Paul Rudd could pull off Living with Yourself: The Netflix series "wasn’t written for Rudd, but it’s hard to think of an actor better suited for the role," says Sam Adams. "Rudd turned 50 earlier this year, but his agelessness has become a running joke. (The online quiz requiring you to pick the older of two Rudds remains devilishly hard, even when the photos were taken more than a decade apart.) The two versions of Miles aren’t different ages, exactly, although one’s time on earth is measured in years and the other’s in hours. But it’s important that neither new nor old Miles looks like the deck has been stacked against him. Old Miles isn’t a miserabilist caricature, and new Miles isn’t a self-hating parody. If new Miles turned up at work, you might wonder if he’d lost a few pounds, or maybe gotten a new haircut—the kinds of explanations you jump to when you know something’s different but you can’t figure out what it is. Rudd is physically capable of embodying both, but he’s also a supple enough actor to differentiate without turning them into different people."
• Doubling the number of Rudds in your television program is a can’t-lose proposition!: Paul Rudd's charm is a "key ingredient in Living with Yourself, which gives us twice the Rudd: He plays a fellow who accidentally clones himself after undergoing a mysterious and very expensive rejuvenating process. This is a good idea for a show! Paul Rudd is funny and fun to watch! Doubling the number of Rudds in your television program is a can’t-lose proposition!" says Ned Lannamann. "Seeing Rudd play with himself—sorry for the dirty joke, but one of the Rudds does do a bit of that—is what makes Living with Yourself worth watching, to the extent that it is worth watching."
• For such an inventive premise, Living With Yourself doesn’t get as fully wacky as one might hope: "It’s not as interested in exploring all the implications of its alternate world as, say, The Good Place is," says Dave Nemetz." It also feels a bit stretched thin at times: It doubles back a lot to tell the same events from a different perspective, which starts to get monotonous. (File this along with the many other streaming shows that would probably work better as a movie.) The comedic elements are consistently sharp and clever, but when it tries to get serious, it wobbles noticeably, and the supporting cast is too sparse."
• It's like Black Mirror meets Big, with a bit of rom-com tossed in: "It's about the voices in our heads telling us we're not good enough or smart enough or attractive enough or lovable enough, and an exploration of what enough really is anyway," says Leslie Katz. "It's also a timely bit of futurism, as Miles' procedure seems strangely plausible in an era of gene-editing tools like CRISPR. Thing is, while the schlocky scientists who perform the treatment usually kill off the person who's been cloned, they don't succeed this time. Original Miles escapes his grave to discover that the cheerful New Miles has swooped in to his house and marriage to live his life."
• Living with Yourself starts off great, but it becomes less funny and trips over its flash-forward and backward conceptual tricks by Episodes 3 and 4
• Living with Yourself isn’t particularly original, but it’s a well-executed fusion of sitcom standards and technological anxiety, anchored by a versatile star
• How Creator Timothy Greenberg got his Living with Yourself idea: "I used to have this nightmare as a kid about running into another version of myself," the former Daily Show executive producer tells The Hollywood Reporter. "But where it all gelled together was once I was married and had kids and was living with my loved ones and saw the way I was behaving, sometimes as a better version of myself and sometimes worse. It became a real question for me: Why is it so hard for me to be my better self? And, more generally, why is it so hard for us to be our better selves?"
• Greenberg breaks down Living with Yourself's surprise ending
• How Paul Rudd filmed his dual roles: Rudd first sought advice from Sam Rockwell, who played his clone in the 2009 film Moon. " thought he did such a great job, so I asked him how he did it," Rudd told Cosmopolitan. "The thing I've come away with is, there is no one way to do it. I didn't wind up doing it the same way Sam did it—he had a stand-in and would flip it around. So I would record both parts then someone off-camera would play my line on an iPad and I'd flip around." He added in an intervwiew with Radio Times: "We kind of figured out the best way to make this work for us and for me to do the scenes was to not do the scenes with another actor, as a stand-in, but instead just record the scenes as both characters, and listen in to an earpiece."