For as long as we’ve had homes, we’ve had neighbors—which is to say, we’ve had neighbor problems. Hammurabi’s Code, written in circa 1750 B.C., best known for its helpful guidelines regarding taking out eyes and cutting off hands, also includes some rules for how to deal with agriculture-related neighbor disputes, conjuring images of ancient Babylonians accidentally flooding one another’s fields and bickering over crop losses. As the years go on, the fights get pettier, and the laws become more precise: a digest of Roman law, compiled around 533 A.D., contains a remarkably specific provision about what to do if fruit from your neighbor’s tree falls onto your property. (Your neighbor has three days to retrieve the fruit, and, no, you may not use force to prevent him from gathering it.)

This kind of conflict—heightened, in modern times, by the advent of the doorbell camera and the erosion of the social contract—is the stuff of “Neighbors,” a new documentary series on HBO created by Dylan Redford (grandson of Robert) and Harrison Fishman (ancestry unknown). The show focusses on disputes between homeowners that, in many cases, have evolved into debilitating, years-long feuds. In Kokomo, Indiana, a man named Darrell rages at his neighbor Trever, who has started a makeshift farm, livestock and all, in his grandmother’s yard. Out on the Florida Panhandle, oceanfront-property owners squabble with the public over beach access. In West Palm Beach, Melissa and Victoria battle over a comically small patch of grass that each claims is on their property. The women used to be friends; now, they are rivals, united only by their joint willingness to be filmed for HBO.

Getting people to participate was perhaps an easier task than one might expect. As Redford explained to the Times, “Consistently, all of their friends and family are like: ‘Shut up about your neighbor. We don’t care anymore. You need to let this go.’ ” Then, Redford and Fishman came along.

Much like “How To with John Wilson,” another docuseries on HBO, “Neighbors” has a deep, methodical interest in the mundane, recognizing that such a focus is often the best way to stumble into genuinely revealing portraits of people. But “How To” is a quiet, somewhat hopeful ode to the surrealism of the everyday, whereas “Neighbors” is consciously more of a freak show à la “Hoarders.” As the characters take a break from bitching about their neighbors to explain their various conspiracies—“My entire planet is run by a satanic cult,” a man says in the first episode, his face filmed through a fish-eye lens—one desperately hopes, as an American, that there are no Europeans watching.

Sometimes, in a “Jerry Springer Show”-like twist, a character’s true nature doesn’t emerge until later on, forcing the viewer to swap allegiances. The third episode involves a story line in Palm Bay, Florida: Johnny, a former male dancer, has been feuding with Andy, a grizzled Vietnam vet, over lawn maintenance. (It seems that there’s potential for an entire spinoff series about Florida, or perhaps about grass.) Eventually, it becomes clear that Johnny is fully paranoid, having convinced himself that he is in a “Truman Show” situation where his neighbors are watching his every move. “I haven’t seen any of my family since 2012,” Johnny says, insisting that he’s unable to leave his house during the day. He adds that he has a step-aunt who lives in the neighborhood. “I don’t even know if she’s still alive.” We also discover that Johnny is obsessed with Ellen DeGeneres; he has attended several of her live tapings, deliberately placing himself next to a child in the audience under the assumption that it would increase his chances of getting photographed. (The gambit worked.) As the series continues—there are six episodes, four of which have already aired—it becomes more structurally ambitious, introducing conflicts within conflicts. I howled when a woman, in the middle of a rant about her next-door neighbor, got interrupted by a sound coming from her hallway: “There are two other individuals in my house that are what I call squatters,” she explains.

The most shocking aspect of “Neighbors” is probably how quickly the discord escalates to threats of violence. Not since “The Act of Killing” have I seen documentary subjects so eager to advertise their bloodthirst on camera. Andy, the Vietnam vet, threatens to throw acid in Johnny’s face. (“You’re going to be walking around like the Elephant Man.”) Johnny somehow manages to one-up him, suggesting that, if the show were to get him into trouble, he might kill the children of the documentary crew. Numerous characters show off their firearms; “I hope it’s unloaded,” one woman says, before pulling a gun out of her closet. Fishman told the Times, “In the beginning, we were like, ‘Hey, do you have a gun?’ They’re like, ‘Yeah, I do.’ As the season went on, we’re like, Everyone has a gun.”

Yet despite all the characters brandishing weapons, the only person in the entire series who seems capable of getting away with murder is Jeff Wentworth, a former Texas state senator who objects to an imposing wall that his neighbor Alexa has constructed around her property, in San Antonio. Jeff defeats Alexa and her wall, which he likens to “the compound where Osama bin Laden hid out,” without his pulse rising above sixty b.p.m.; he determines that Alexa ignored a city ordinance limiting walls to three feet, and he whittles her down with stop-work orders, before getting a final decision from the city that the wall must come down. One gets the sense that, for Alexa, the decision may be the defining trauma of her life; for Jeff, it’s just another item that he can check off his to-do list. By episode’s end, the wall is gone, and Alexa has put her house on the market.

Many of the characters seek the help of some kind of outside authority to adjudicate their neighbor disputes. We watch them make their cases to police officers, county commissioners, and zoning boards. Occasionally, they end up in court, with one demanding a restraining order against the other; one pair end up in front of Judge Judy. The most hilarious attempts at resolution involve the use of a mediator. In the first episode, the peacemaking mission between Josh and Seth, in rural Montana, completely falls apart, and the mediator—who explains that this is his first official mediation—mostly just stands there as the neighbors trade insults and issue threats. In the third episode, Melissa and Victoria meet with Stanley Zamor—a man we saw, earlier in the episode, selling Melissa a gun. “Besides doing this as a hobby,” he says, standing in front of a cabinet of Glocks, “I also am a Florida Supreme Court-certified mediator and qualified arbitrator.”

One watches “Neighbors” and can’t help but wonder, How did they find these people? I had a similar question while watching “How To with John Wilson,” and therefore wasn’t surprised to learn that the two shows share a casting executive, Harleigh Shaw. (“Neighbors,” which has the distinction of being the first unscripted series from A24, also counts Josh Safdie, and others from the “Marty Supreme” creative team, among its executive producers, which might have something to do with the series’ dynamic casting, as well as the generally chaotic, brash, and fast-paced nature of each episode.)

About ten minutes into the first episode, it becomes clear how one of the characters likely got on the production team’s radar. Josh, one of the angry neighbors in Montana, reveals that he’s famous on TikTok, where he’s known as the Bearded Bard. On his account, which has more than two million followers, he advertises for his woodworking and blacksmithing business, and sometimes role-plays as Dungeons & Dragons characters. He also complains about his neighbors. “The neighbor-drama videos were reaching into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views,” he explains.

Many of the characters in the show are active on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, where they have accounts almost entirely devoted to their neighbor drama. (One character switches between posting neighbor videos and sultry bikini footage, and it’s unclear which one the woman next door is more upset by.) The series offers the best depiction of social media—and the experience of being on it—that I’ve seen on television. Of all the arguments captured in “Neighbors,” the most compelling is the one made by the show itself, about the way in which social media forces users—creators, if you will—to commit to a certain line of action. “People like those videos because they like drama,” the Bearded Bard says, about his neighbor-focussed TikToks. “And, I’ll be real, I probably fed into that a little.” The characters in the show are constantly surveilling one another, if not for fame, then for their own protection, or under the guise of accumulating evidence—but they seem completely oblivious to the way in which recording a conflict can radically escalate it.

The starkest—and saddest—example is in the fourth episode. Steven, who lives in Nashville, used to be best friends with his neighbor Joanne, who took him in, almost like a son, after his divorce. Steven is white and Joanne is Black; he explains that she once asked him, jokingly, if she could “borrow that white-privilege card you’ve got.” As a gag, Steven purchased a fake white-privilege card on Amazon for $7.99 and gifted it to Joanne—who was gravely offended by the gesture. It seems like there might be more to the story; Steven also claims that Joanne and her husband once gave him permission to say the N-word, and badgered him until he finally complied, which is partly why he’s confused when Joanne ultimately decides that he’s a virulent racist, and builds a fence to create some separation between their two yards. The problem is that the fence is built in the wrong place; it encroaches on Steven’s property by three feet. When Joanne initially refuses to take it down, he creates a Discord channel called “My Neighbor Karen,” and begins posting videos of Joanne online, raking in millions of views on YouTube.

Looking at the comments, there’s no mystery why Joanne might think that her neighbor is racist. She begins experiencing heart troubles, and she blames Steven for causing her stress. You can tell that he doesn’t want her to die because of their feud, but he’s reluctant to remove the videos, which he’s been earning revenue from. He uses A.I. to craft a note to Joanne, prodding it to embellish on the emotion “just a little bit,” after reading the first draft. Later, the two meet at a bar, and he tells Joanne that he’ll take the videos down—if she’s willing to compensate him. She tells him to kiss her ass. ♦