• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, 4 hours ago

A third reality-TV series about unsettling confrontations between neighbors means that TV shows of this type are now a trend.

That’s the rule -- three of something constitutes a trend, and that is what TV has accomplished in the bad-neighbor space with a new one from Netflix that premiered this week.

The Netflix show is called “Worst Neighbor Ever,” and its lineage can be traced to two other “Worst Ever” series already on Netflix -- “Worst Ex Ever” and “Worst Roommate Ever.”

Like those two shows, the reenactment scenes in “Worst Neighbor Ever” are animated -- such as the scene depicted in the photo above.

Netflix is positioning the show as anything but lighthearted or humorous. The streamer describes its stories of neighbor against neighbor as potentially lethal.

“This new series features firsthand accounts of violence, intimidation and harassment that are more shocking than ever,” Netflix says. “Through compelling testimonials, startling body cam footage and animated reenactments, ‘Worst Neighbor Ever’ proves the people next door aren’t just a nuisance -- they’re lethal.”

Meanwhile, A&E has been showcasing disputes between neighbors since August 2021 with the always reliable “Neighborhood Wars.”

A&E has had a number of “Wars” reality shows. Current shows with “Wars” in their titles listed on the network’s press site include “Customer Wars,” “Road Wars” and the long-running “Storage Wars.”

A past “Wars” show on A&E was one of my favorite shows -- “Parking Wars,” which depicted run-ins between amiable parking-meter monitors in Philadelphia who were confronted by angry car owners while they wrote parking tickets.

To my knowledge, that was the only docuseries ever made about the men and women who write tickets for illegal parking.

But the world of warring neighbors is another story. The third such show now available to see is titled “Neighbors.”

When it premiered last February on HBO and HBO Max, the TV Blog described it as “a full-blown documentary series.”

It took two years of cross-country travel undertaken by its two producer-directors for a series that told in-depth stories about bitter battles between neighbors in locations ranging from western rangelands to coastal beaches.

One theme that runs through all the bad-neighbor shows is the stress that comes with these adjacent-property disputes, some of which amount to straight-up bullying.

In a poem titled “Mending Wall,” the poet Robert Frost wrote, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Judging from TV’s neighbor-vs.-neighbor shows, it is advice worth taking.