Dan Fogelman is a household name now because he made everyone cry for six years straight with This Is Us. But before he was the king of the "sad-dad" drama, he gave us something much weirder. Something involving golf carts, matching tracksuits, and green skin. Honestly, it’s still kinda wild to think that ABC gave two full seasons to The Neighbors, a high-concept sitcom about a family of humans living in a gated community full of aliens from the planet Zabvron.
You remember the premise. The Weaver family—Marty, Debbie, and their three kids—move to New Jersey to find their slice of the American dream. Instead, they find Hidden Hills, where every neighbor is named after a famous athlete and everyone cries out of their ears. It was goofy. It was frequently ridiculous. But if you actually sit down and rewatch it today, you’ll realize it was doing something much smarter than the marketing ever let on.
The Neighbors and the Art of the Fish-Out-of-Water Trope
The show lived or died on its ensemble, and honestly, the casting was lightning in a bottle. You had Lenny Venito and Jami Gertz as the grounded Weavers, but the real stars were Simon Templeman and Toks Olagundoye as Larry Bird and Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Yes, those were their names. The aliens arrived on Earth ten years prior and just took the names of the first famous people they saw on TV.
It sounds like a one-note joke. It wasn't.
What made The Neighbors work was how it flipped the script on who was actually "normal." Most sitcoms of that era were trying to be the next Modern Family, but Fogelman used the alien lens to poke fun at how bizarre human rituals actually are. Why do we obsess over youth? Why is marriage so hard? Why are we so passive-aggressive about lawn care? Through the Zabvronians, the show dismantled the suburbs with a surgical precision that felt way more like 3rd Rock from the Sun than anything else on the air in 2012.
The comedy was fast. It was chaotic. Sometimes it was just plain weird, like the episode where the aliens try to understand the concept of a "mall" or why humans celebrate Halloween by dressing up as things that terrify them.
Why Critics Hated It (And Why They Were Wrong)
When the pilot aired, the reviews were brutal. I mean, truly scorched-earth stuff. Critics saw the prosthetic makeup and the broad physical comedy and dismissed it as a relic of a bygone era of "dumb" TV. They thought it was a show for kids that accidentally ended up in primetime.
But they missed the heart.
By the time Season 2 rolled around, The Neighbors had evolved into a genuinely touching exploration of friendship. The relationship between Debbie Weaver and Jackie Joyner-Kersee is one of the most underrated female friendships in TV history. They weren't just neighbors; they were two women from literally different worlds trying to figure out how to raise kids in a society that never felt quite right.
There’s a specific nuance in the writing that you don't see in many sitcoms today. It balanced the high-concept sci-fi stuff—like the fact that the aliens turned into green pods when they got sick—with deeply relatable domestic struggles. It was a show about "the other" that didn't feel like it was preaching. It was just funny.
The Great Golf Cart Obsession
One of the most distinct visual markers of the show was the golf carts. In Hidden Hills, nobody drives cars. They all zip around in these little carts, wearing identical outfits. It was a visual gag about the monotony of suburban life, sure, but it also gave the show a specific aesthetic energy.
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It felt contained. Like a stage play with a massive budget.
And the guest stars! Remember when Mark Hamill showed up? Or George Takei? The show leaned into its nerd credentials without being exclusionary. It knew it was a cult hit. It knew it wasn't pulling Big Bang Theory numbers, so it leaned into the absurdity. It embraced being the underdog.
The Cancellation That Still Stings
ABC pulled the plug in 2014 after 44 episodes. Looking back, it was a victim of a changing TV landscape. The "broadcast sitcom" was starting to feel a bit stale, and viewers were migrating to streaming services where they wanted "prestige" comedy. The Neighbors didn't look like prestige. It looked like a Saturday morning cartoon come to life.
But if you look at Dan Fogelman’s career trajectory, you can see the DNA of his later success right here. The emotional beats in the Season 2 finale are surprisingly heavy. He was learning how to manipulate our heartstrings even then. He was figuring out how to make us care about characters that, on paper, should have been impossible to relate to.
It’s a shame, really. We don’t get many shows like this anymore. Everything is either a dark dramedy about trauma or a cynical take on the world. The Neighbors was aggressively optimistic. It believed that even if your neighbor has four arms and eats through their eyes (okay, they didn't do that, but you get the point), you could still find common ground over a beer and a shared complaint about the HOA.
The Legacy of Zabvron
So, where does The Neighbors sit in the pantheon of TV history? It’s a cult classic in the truest sense. It’s the show you bring up at a party to see who else was watching "weird" TV in the early 2010s. It’s a reminder that sometimes, the most "human" stories are told by people who aren't human at all.
If you’re looking to revisit it, or maybe watch it for the first time because you’re a This Is Us completist, keep an eye out for the subtle stuff. The way Simon Templeman delivers lines with a Shakespearean gravity that makes even the dumbest jokes feel like high art. The way the kids—who usually ruin sitcoms—actually felt like real, annoyed siblings.
How to Appreciate The Neighbors Today
If you're going to dive back in, don't expect a gritty sci-fi epic. That's not what this is. This is a show that thrives on the "comfort watch" vibe. It’s bright, it’s loud, and it’s unapologetically sincere.
- Watch the "Halloween" and "Christmas" specials first. Sitcoms always peak during the holidays, and this show used those tropes to highlight the absurdity of human traditions perfectly.
- Pay attention to the names. The running gag of naming aliens after athletes never gets old. Look for the background characters; the writers hid some great deep-cut references in there.
- Focus on the Weaver/Bird dynamic. The chemistry between Marty and Larry is the show's secret weapon. It’s a "bromance" that transcends species.
- Don't skip Season 2. A lot of people dropped off after the first few episodes, but the second season is where the show really found its voice and started taking bigger creative risks, including some surprisingly experimental episodes.
The reality is that The Neighbors was probably just a few years ahead of its time. If it had landed on a platform like Hulu or Netflix today, it likely would have been a massive hit with the "niche-weird" crowd. Instead, it remains a bright, odd, and deeply funny blip on the radar of broadcast history. It reminds us that being "normal" is overrated, and being a good neighbor is about more than just keeping your hedges trimmed. It's about showing up, even when you don't understand the rules of the game.
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Take a Saturday afternoon and hunt down a few episodes. You might find that the residents of Hidden Hills have a lot more to say about your life than you ever expected. It’s a show that dared to be silly in a world that was becoming increasingly serious, and honestly, we could use a bit more of that energy right now. Just watch out for the golf carts. Those Zabvronians don't always look where they're going.