A neighborly world turns 100

In the past – or maybe it was in fiction, or in Canada – neighbors’ interlocked.
Lives were spent on the front porch and the front lawn, Everyone knew everyone.
That’s the world that exists in “The Neighborhood”(shown here), which has its 100th episode at 8 p.m. Monday (April 10) on CBS. Some of the stars recall it from their childhoods.
For Max Greenfield, 43, that was in Dobbs Ferry, population 11,000, in New York’s upscale Westchester County. “We definitely knew our neighbors,” told the Television Critics Association. “You were able to walk around town. It felt like I had a lot more freedom back then.”
And for Cedric the Entertainer, 58, it was St. Louis, population plenty. It was “the kind of neighborhood where you knew everybody up and down the block, the different families,” he said. “You knew the parents. You knew the house not to go to.”
And nowadays? “I’m extremely rich,” he said. “I have to live behind 13 gates, if I’m counting. There’s, like, several security guards to even get to my own bedroom, I believe.”
He’s joking about that, but there’s been a general trend: People move further from work, then spend more time driving there. They get bigger houses, filling them with distractions.
In some ways, he said, the pandemic brought a temporary cure. “Everybody had to get outside. We were walking …. I had an opportunity to kind of find out people who lived near me and see their faces and who they are. We didn’t live in a car.”
That’s what “The Neighborhood” imagines. It started with an overly affable white guy (Greenfield), moving into a Black neighborhood with his wife (Beth Behrs) and son. It offered, Cedric said, “the kind of contentious nature of what happens when people just assume somebody is different.”
It soon evolved. The 100th episode centers on the neighbors helping Calvin (Cedric) land the perfect birthday present for his wife (Tichina Artnold).
The show has been renewed for its sixth season and has become a key part of the actors’ lives.
“’Two Broke Girls’ was my whole 20s,” said Behrs, 37 “And this has been almost my whole 30s. It’s like you are growing up with your characters.”
That’s especially true of Hank Greenspan, who plays her son. “We started when I was 7 …. A lot of the jokes, I just simply don’t get,” he said. “Everybody will be dying laughing. And I’m, ‘What’s the punch line? Did you say it already?’”
He’s grown up on the show. Cedric has merely grown richer and, as he tells it, further from his neighbors.