It has long been understood that there is nothing Paul Rudd cannot do. Except age – but scientists are surely studying that phenomenon. He has effortless warmth, charm and comedy chops all melded into one handsome but somehow still relatable package. He is our Everyman figure in the Hollywood firmament; the best bits of our inner selves heightened and put into one lucky body.
Which gives the premise of his latest venture, the Netflix series Living With Yourself, an even more discombobulating feel. Rudd plays disaffected ad exec Miles Elliot and, after a trip to a DNA-tweaking spa to rejuvenate his tired body and spirit goes wrong, also a newer, better cloned version whom we’ll call, for convenience, Miles II. Suddenly there are two men fighting over one life.
It’s a fun idea, if not exactly new; there are shades of every splitting/doubling-up story here, from Dostoevsky to Multiplicity. And if you are warned that – despite Rudd, and comedian Aisling Bea as Miles’s wife Kate – it skews more to the dramatic than the comedic, perhaps you won’t be visited by the gentle sense of disappointment that might otherwise intrude on proceedings.
It is not without humour – especially where the spa managers, and Miles’ bohemian half-sister (Alia Shawkat), who takes to the situation with airy nonchalance, are concerned. But rather than play it for laughs, creator Timothy Greenberg prefers to ask questions about identity, the qualities that make up an individual and make us distinguishable and worth distinguishing from each other. As Miles II goes around outdoing original Miles in every area of his life, we see a reflection of our own inertia and our own ridiculous capacity for self-sabotage. Miles II actually writes the play Miles has been noodling about with for years. He makes the evening meal and treats Kate well, because the unfamiliarity has cleared away the contempt we never bother to protect against.
As the series goes on, Miles and Kate’s underlying frustration with and creeping estrangement because of their fertility issues becomes clear, while Miles II, who is first hidden in his progenitor’s study and then set up in a flat of his own, wrestles with loneliness, even as his material successes and one night stands accrue. The pivotal point, halfway through the series, is a natural inevitability. It also has the advantage of giving Bea, so underused in a standard wife part (even to those who hadn’t seen her sterling work in This Way Up), far more to work with, and ends up enlivening the whole show.
Events are shown, and re-shown, from different perspectives and often reach far enough back to cause some confusion if you’re not bingewatching several episodes or the whole thing at once. The technology makes Rudd’s appearances with himself seamless – no dodgy shooting over a stand-in’s shoulder here – and it chunters along nicely, musing philosophically as it goes and delivering enough laughs at least to make sense of the casting. I can live with it.
