Your Friends & Neighbors: Jon Hamm's Financier-Turned-Thief is his Post-Mad Men Best
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
You really couldn’t ask for a better or more obvious casting choice than Jon Hamm as the star in the new Apple TV+ series, Your Friends & Neighbors.
Writer-director Jonathan Tropper’s nine-episode absurdist serio-comedy stars Hamm as Andrew “Coop” Cooper, a hedge fund manager who, after losing his job, takes to stealing things from his wealthy neighbour’s multi-million-dollar suburban homes.
One reason Hamm feels so right for the part is pure familiarity. That’s not just because it’s another series (Breaking Bad, Ozark) about a rich white guy who takes a mid-life career turn into crime. Rather,“Coop” can be seen as an updated version of Hamm’s defining role, that of Don Draper, morally tarnished alpha-male advertising executive in Matthew Weiner’s 1960s-set series Mad Men (2007-2015.)
Behind Don Draper, there’s also a long line of these fictional, ambitious but morally weak men who stand for the American dream turned a purgatorial trap. Specifically, Your Friends & Neighbors owes a clear debt to The Swimmer, a 1968 movie starring Burt Lancaster, based on a John Cheever short story, about another advertising executive, Neddy Merrill, who decides to swim homeward through various wealthy neighbour’s pools, before arriving at his own locked and deserted house.
Cheever’s story is also rife with allusions to the classic novel of American materialism and corruption, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which happened to be published a century ago this week. (You may recall the hero, Jay Gatsby, ended up face down in a swimming pool.)
To close the circle, Fitzgerald’s James Gatz, the Midwestern kid from humble beginnings who changed his name and moved to New York, was the prototype for Mad Men’s, Don Draper. To this literary legacy, you could include all those sad husbands in John Updike’s suburban divorce stories.
In keeping with this literary legacy, most of the characters in Your Friends & Neighbors are treated with a qualified sympathy which feels refreshing. (Cheever wrote of his flawed characters that “they were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are.”) That could also be considered a weak point, given the public’s current hostile fascination with the crimes of the obscenely wealthy: The satire here nibbles gently when it would be more satisfying to watch it bite and rip.
In any case, we have a murder mystery to provide forward momentum. In the opening episode, Coop comes to consciousness in a pool of blood, some of which is his own, while lying next to a man’s corpse. After attempting to clean the floor, he stumbles outside the house onto the patio, where he trips and falls into the swimming pool.
Coop tells us in voice-over: “I know what you’re thinking. The pool is a metaphor. But it was also very fucking real and very fucking cold.” As he sinks into the turquoise water, the voice-over takes us back over the previous four months, contemplating his chain of bad decisions.
The triggering moment was Coop’s divorce from his wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), after he came home from work early to find her in bed with his friend, former basketball star and fitness guru, Nick (Mark Tallman).
Post-divorce, Coop has left the family mansion for a small rental house with his empathetic but mentally unstable musician sister, Ali (Lena Hall). He visits his teen-aged son and daughter on afternoons when they have time for him and vents his anger toward his daughter’s obsequious boyfriend.
During the early days of his single life, Coop made his first unfortunate decision to sleep with a younger woman who hit on him at a bar. It turns out she works at his firm in a different department. His boss, weaponizing the HR rules on relations between managers and employees, seizes the opportunity to sack Coop to nab his financial holdings in the company. After that, a non-compete clause makes it impossible for Coop to land a job at a similar company. Suddenly, he’s gone from being a public kingpin to a secret pauper.
Unable to give up his elite social circle, even if it is now centered on Nick, the guy sleeping with his ex, Coop leads a double life, pretending he’s still employed, making the rounds of the weekend pool parties.
At one of these events, someone hits him up for a pair of $30,000 tables for a charity event, and a drunken guest praises Coop and his wife for their civilized handling of the divorce. Angrily, Coop heads inside the house to use the washroom and, on the spur of the moment, grabs an expensive watch from the owner’s collection. Soon, the impulse turns into a habit, he carefully steals the kind of expensive items the owners rarely notice.
Through the voice-over, Coop positions himself is a rueful, sardonic observer of his rarefied world and his male friends with their golf, the collections, the $200,000 cars, part of "entire industries built to cash in on the quiet desperation of rich middle-aged men.” It’s amusingly written, and our hearts almost go out to rich middle-aged men.
Clearly, though, it’s a point in Coop’s favour that his only meaningful relations, apart from his financial advisor, Barney (Hoon Lee), are with women. They include his sympathetic ex-wife, Mel, a neighbour, Sam (Olivia Munn), with whom he occasionally canoodles, his loving sister, a Dominican cleaning lady (Aimee Carrero), and a street-wise pawn shop owner, Lu (Randy Danson) whose negotiating skills put Coop’s Ivy League education to shame.
Apple TV+ has provided seven of the nine episodes of the series for review, along with the news that Your Friends & Neighbors has been renewed for a second season. So far, it’s highly watchable, with production values suited to its wealthy folk’s milieu.
At this point, though, I have no idea of how they’ll solve the murder, what will become of Coop or frankly, how the story can credibly extend to another season. Perhaps the producers could change locations to Hawaii, Sicily or Thailand, like The White Lotus. But then, there goes the neighbourhood.
Your Friends & Neighbors. Directed and written by Jonathan Tropper. Starring Jon Hamm, Amanda Peet, Olivia Munn, Mark Tallman, Hoon Lee, Lena Hall, Aimee Carrero. The first two episodes are available on April 11 on AppleTV+ with one new episode each subsequent week.