Watching The Watcher, Netflix's latest excretion of low-level addiction, is greatly enhanced if done so through an allegorical lens.
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Otherwise, we're just stuck with an insufferable rabble of middle-class whingers banging on about real estate, and we already have The Block for that.
Knowing paranoia is a great American pastime to rival baseball, the creators of this seven-part homage to B-grade shlock dressed up as a sophisticated thriller have tapped into the nation's reliable ability to turn on itself whenever there is a fallow moment.
Since its troops cleared out of Kabul and its nut jobs left the Capitol, the States is fairly humming with side-eye intensity and, whether by design or good fortune, The Watcher has captured the zeitgeist nicely, coming across as a morality tale of property ownership and class privilege as interrogated by the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities with fun dollops of Amityville Horror creeps.
The action takes place - where else? - in the white-picket antebellum of the quiet suburbs. We follow an upwardly mobile family as they move into their dream home; one they can barely afford, so there's a lot here to which Aussie audiences can relate.
As we've come to expect in such familiar surrounds, things are going great for the Brannock clan right up until the point they go south in a big way.
In this case, the catalyst for disintegration is in the form of a series of letters from someone calling themselves "The Watcher", who seems to have taken issue with the Brannocks taking ownership of the New Jersey show pile. As the threatening nature of the letters intensifies, so too does the mortgagees' desperation.
The picture-perfect four-part family is led by a husband and wife played expertly by Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts. Both pros elicit exactly what's required from their audience - equal doses of sympathy and loathing - again pretty much the twin pillars of The Block.
As one of many neighbourhood kooks, Mia Farrow seems to be sending herself up with glee and, as always, national treasure Jennifer Coolidge plays a woman either on the verge of a nervous breakdown, or about to single-handedly take over the world, you can never quite tell.
Apart from the great casting, the reason to see The Watcher through is its delight in making everyone a suspect. No one is securely hinged, everyone has a sidehustle, potentially something to gain.
The Christie-esque jumping at shadows is where the addictive properties of this based-on-a-true story reside, yet the true horror for most highly leveraged watchers at home on their heavily financed couches will be the precarious financial position of a modern, consumerist family in the throes of renos who, instead of buying their forever home, have found themselves lumped with a negative-equity lemon.
Reading the 2018 New York magazine article upon which this series is based sends shivers up the spine, and not just because back in 2014 a (still unknown) psycho with a purple prose poison pen and too much time on their hands really did target a family, making specific references to their "youngblood" children.
Eek.
As word about the letters spread, the real-life Broaddus family found themselves in the worst kind of financial bind - a tainted house in a tony part of town plummeting in value and a property pool of piranhas looking to exploit their misfortune.
The Broadduses began living their own private Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac nightmare, a perverse reimagining of 1986 Tom Hanks comedy The Money Pit.
Eventually, the only way out was via a joyless, fruitless litigious labyrinth and the heartbreaking decision to lease the six-bedroom "657 Boulevarde" and move away.
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The family was forced to get on with life; a life less glowing, a life interrupted by a stranger who might have been a genuinely dangerous criminal or just a deplorable teenager getting their kicks.
What happened to the Broadduses is now the stuff of urban legend and, as Hollywood picks over its carcass, the story will fade into the background, yet join all those others which continue to inform a star-spangled narrative where your neighbour can never really be trusted.
One thing, however, is for certain. After The Watcher, dumbwaiters won't be making an architectural comeback any time soon.
Unless you can pick one up at The Block shop.
