LIVING WITH YOURSELF REVIEW: Paul Rudd meets Paul Rudd in Netflix’s hilarious clone comedy&#82

You heard the joke about wanting to be a better person? Having a better life, work balance?

Right!

That’s exactly what we get with the new Netflix comedy, ‘Living With Yourself’ a comedy starring Ant-Man’s Paul Rudd stars as Miles Eliot, a man whose marriage and career are floundering as he faces the general malaise of approaching middle age.

The catch is that he attempts to get out of his familiar rut by cloning himself.

To be fair, that wasn’t actually his goal.

Miles gets a tip from zero-turned-office-hero co-worker Dan (Desmin Borges of You’re the Worst) about a highly exclusive spa that gives its clients’ DNA a detox and lets them live up to their full potential.

Desperate enough to pay Top Happy Spa’s $50,000 fee, Miles lies down in a treatment chair and wakes up as a new man, filled with a zest for life that has him sticking his head out car windows to breathe in the fresh air like a dog, cooking elaborate meals for his wife Kate (Aisling Bea), and outshining Dan at the office.

The spa’s process turns out to be a form of cloning that replicates both the subject’s body and mind, right down to the most elusive memory, but with minor improvements along the way. New Miles can’t bend steel or walk through walls; he just dresses a little better, holds his head a little higher, tells the old Miles’ stories with a little more panache.

The problem is that Original Miles wakes up in a body bag in a local forest preserve, and isn’t particularly happy to have a new and improved version of himself taking over his life.

The show’s eight, roughly 30-minute episodes largely alternate between the perspectives of Original Miles and his clone, demonstrating Rudd’s remarkable ability to play both a charming maniac and a worn-out schlub, and with the later episodes, his wife Kate Irish comedian (Aisling Bea), too.

Almost every episode ends on a cliffhanger, and much of the series’ drama involves rewinding a sequence involving one Miles to show what the other version was up to at the time, and how it led to events playing out the way they did.

And it works to the point that the show becomes a drak comedy. It’s a fun idea, if not exactly new; played out in numerous films to date. But you won’t be visited by the gentle sense of disappointment that might otherwise intrude on proceedings as the end of the eight-episode drama-comedy.

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 count to nothing. The pivotal point, halfway through the series, is a natural inevitability as the show tussles with different problems.

There’s a real rapport between old and new Miles, who interrupt and redirect each other as if they’ve co-existed forever. That puts pressure on Miles’ relationship with his (their?) wife (Aisling Bea), since old Miles feels outclassed by his trimmer, more thoughtful self and new Miles feels like he’s in a long-term relationship with someone he’s never met.

The scenes where the two Miles converse are wonders, not for their technical wizardry (the show deploys a few digital effects, but for the most part the techniques involved have been around since the original 1961 The Parent Trap), but for the way Rudd interacts with his literal self.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Living With Yourself, which was created and written by longtime Daily Show producer Timothy Greenberg (all eight episodes are directed by Little Miss Sunshine’s Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris), wasn’t written for Rudd, but it’s hard to think of an actor better suited for the role.

And while creator Timothy Greenberg prefers to ask questions about identity through the series rather than the qualities that make up an individual and make us distinguishable and worth distinguishing from each other.

By the end of the series, we have ourselves a cliff-hanger (we won’t divulge no info!), but hopefully, season two will hit our screens next year.

Well done, Netflix’s for a truly enjoyable comedy show laden with drama and humor, and Paul Rudd, and, err… Paul Rudd.

5/5 STARS