Jon Hamm’s ‘Your Friends and Neighbors’ Is the Wrong Show at the Absolute Wrongest Time

As you may have recently read, the U.S. economy is probably on the verge of falling into a chasm the likes of which no one has seen since the Great Depression, possibly on the advice of ChatGPT. Prices of all kinds of consumer goods are about to go up. So might mortgage rates. This will mean less discretionary spending for those who even have an income, which may not be all of us, since manufacturing layoffs started almost immediately. I’m not trying to spike the anxiety and depression you’re probably already feeling; I’m just providing context for why Your Friends and Neighbors is the wrong show at what may be the wrongest possible time.

Your Friends and Neighbors stars Jon Hamm as Andy Cooper, known to all as Coop. Within the first 15 minutes of the series premiere (which drops, along with the season’s second episode, on AppleTV+ April 11th), we get a voice-over from Coop speed-running us through his backstory: straight out of college, he gets a job at a hedge fund, and gets married. Just when the couple is starting to feel like they’re on stable financial footing, they have a child and buy a house in the New York City suburbs, which wipes them out. The cycle repeats with their second child and an even bigger house. Their upgrade to their third house, in chichi Westmont Village, leaves them “a different kind of broke”: they’re leveraged, meaning they have something to show for all their sacrifices. 

Just as Coop is starting to wonder if the work it takes to maintain this life is worth it, he walks in on his wife sleeping with one of his best friends, so as we meet him she’s in the big house with their two now-high school-aged children and Coop himself is in a rental: “It’s small,” his voice-over tells us, “but don’t worry: it’s also depressing.” Fortunately for Coop, it’s not too depressing for friendly but very secret sex with Sam (Olivia Munn), who’s mid-divorce and the only other single person in his social group — very important, since Coop’s having been cuckolded by his now-ex-wife Mel (Amanda Peet) is a facet of his victimhood he still keeps reminding everyone about, years later.

When Coop ends up unemployed, and with restrictions on his seeking other work in finance, desperation sets in for him to restore his lost income — at a level where he can easily absorb a neighbor hitting him up for a couple of $30,000 tables at a fundraiser. Wandering inside the hosts’ house at a neighborhood barbecue, Coop ends up in their walk-in closet and notices, maybe for the first time, how many expensive status objects they own, and how carelessly they treat them. If the Millers aren’t going to bother arming their security system or even locking their doors when they go on vacation to Belize, could they really blame Coop for sneaking in to relieve them of a Patek Philippe watch that costs as much as a house (if not a house in Westmont Village), plus a casual roll of hundreds? Once Coop finds a pawn broker willing to pay him for items without boxes or certificates of authenticity, he’s found an easy way to fill all his free time. Oh — and there’s also a murder mystery, because apparently now you can’t get a show made without one.

The show was created by Jonathan Tropper, a novelist turned TV producer who co-created Banshee and is credited as the sole creator on Warrior, both for Cinemax (though for its third season, Warrior moved to what we now know as Max). Antiheroes are Tropper’s specialty on TV: Banshee is about an ex-con (Antony Starr) who poses as a sheriff in a small Pennsylvania town, meting out true justice to those who deserve it. Warrior, based on the writings of Bruce Lee, is set in late 19th-century San Francisco and revolves around the Tong Wars in which rival Chinese gangs battled for control. Both shows are known for fight scenes as impressively inventive as they are shockingly violent. 

Though some skin does get broken in memorably gruesome ways, Your Friends and Neighbors traffics primarily in emotional violence. While Coop, as portrayed by Hamm, wouldn’t be much of a physical threat against Banshee’s “Lucas Hood” (Starr) or Warrior’s Ah Sam (Andrew Koji), the three have the same kind of taciturn sarcasm. If they all ended up sitting next to each other at the same bar, they would probably leave the night as friends — and not only because they could all compare notes on characters played by Tropper vet Hoon Lee, here playing Westmont Village business manager Barney Choi.

When I first heard the show’s premise, I was intrigued: an ex-finance bro who starts breaking into the homes of all his asshole frenemies and stealing the handsomely insured symbols of their obscene wealth? Truly, this would be a victimless crime, and the show a fitting entertainment for our “eat the rich” moment. Then I watched the show and found out that while Coop is the least objectionable of the Westmont Village adults we meet, that’s not saying much. 

Even as Coop’s voice-over bitches about the expectations on people of his social class — spending $100,000 a year on a country club membership to eat overpriced food, to name just one example — said voice-over is often playing over shots of Coop driving through town in his Maserati; the house he tells us is “small” and “depressing” has a kitchen island approximately half a city block long, and while he doesn’t have a full-time housekeeper like everyone else in Westmont Village, he does have a cleaning service come in twice a week. I understand that people get accustomed to a certain standard of living so that luxuries start to seem essential, but it’s hard to get emotionally involved with a protagonist whose financial worries include paying $1,000 a week for his daughter’s private tennis coach. Not since Fleischman Is in Trouble — all about another guy feeling economic insecurity after a divorce, struggling to live on his paltry salary (as a liver specialist on New York’s Upper East Side, in Fleischman’s case), and having lots of no-strings-attached sex with stunningly beautiful women — has a story about the alleged problems of empirically wealthy people been so tone-deaf.

But the thing is, Hamm almost gets you there. If you know him primarily from his comedy roles — tertiarily, like in 30 Rock or Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; vocally, in animation voice-over or on comedy podcasts; or randomly, like in his cameos in Barry or The Last Man on Earth — you’re primed to like Coop and want to hang out with him. It’s easy to imagine him, in happier days, hanging out with the Westmont Village husbands on the golf course or over cigars and scotch. If you know him primarily from his seven seasons on Mad Men, you buy him as a cool motherfucker who can convince people he’s confident and smooth, even though he’s a total fraud. A running gag is that the underworld figures he meets in his thieving career, who are primarily non-white (just as the Westmont Village homeowners are primarily non-non-white), refer to him as George Clooney, and the joke works because the comparison is so apt. Hamm is so likable that even as the show’s political issues are flashing like caution lights, he still keeps it watchable.

Speaking of stunningly beautiful women: the actors cast to play the ones in Coop’s life deserve much better than this. Peet has always had a winningly natural acting style, and while Mel isn’t written to the typical “wronged guy’s bitch ex-wife” trope, she still seems to be finding more for the character than is on the page, holding her gaze on Coop a little too long in some scenes so we feel her assessing what’s actually under his moods. We eventually learn that she and Coop have known each other since they were at Princeton together, and the actors’ chemistry sells their mutual fondness as longtime partners even when they’re fighting. 

Munn is probably best known these days as John Mulaney’s wife, so it’s nice to see her comic talent on display in the charmingly flinty role of Sam. When she goes through a crisis later in the season, from which she has to take a break to do some shopping, an excessively pushy store clerk ignores her several polite attempts to decline help and forces her into a darkly funny monologue about the extremely grim issues she’s dealing with. The Newsroom was one of Aaron Sorkin’s worst shows, but Munn was the best thing about it, and I haven’t seen her shine so much since then; if this reminds producers how good she is, it will have been worth it. That goes double for Peet, absolutely robbed of an Emmy for HBO’s Togetherness back in the mid-10s.

Then there’s Broadway veteran Lena Hall as Ali, Coop’s mentally ill sister. Their best scenes in the episodes released to critics are with their needling mother Marley (Lizabeth Mackay) and gentle father Ron (Michael O’Keefe, not QUITE old enough to play the father of a Jon Hamm character); a lifetime of insufficient parenting is elegantly conveyed by all four. If the show seems to forget for long stretches of time not only that Ali exists but that the whole time Coop’s robbing his neighbors, she’s living with him, at least it lets Hall show off her singing voice on lots of classic-rock covers. 

There is a way this show could have worked in actuality, and not just on paper: if it were told from the perspective of Elena (Aimee Carrero). She’s the housekeeper to Nick (Mark Tallman), the ex-NBA player with whom Mel cheated on Coop, and whom Mel is still dating. A chance encounter brings Coop and Elena to a new level of platonic intimacy, after which she lets him in on exactly how much housekeepers, nannies and security guards observe, and how they share the information among themselves. Maybe it’s just because I’m coming off watching the first season of A Thousand Blows and yearning to recapture the magic of a ring of female pickpockets, but if this had been a show about a network of housekeepers taking advantage of their employers treating them as if they were invisible by robbing them, it would have been so much more fun than watching it, as we do, from behind Coop’s shoulder; Elena and her peers would definitely be easier to root for. 

As it is, working-class characters only rarely get the chance to speak to Coop’s willfully limited perspective. In the second episode, Coop’s pawn broker Lu (Randy Danson) gets suspicious and declines to buy his latest acquisition. “Look, I’m in a bind, here,” Coop implores her. “No, you’re not,” she tells him. “You only think you are.” A few episodes later, when a deal with another fence goes awry, an associate Coop has picked up from outside his social circle tells him he doesn’t understand what it means to struggle for real: “You’ve never gone hungry. Your kids will never go hungry. You just want what they took from you because all you know how to be is rich. The shit that you complain about, most people would— They would kill for.” 

Knowing that anyone at the show has enough sense to recognize the blind spots in Coop’s POV but mostly ignores them is almost worse than if they hadn’t acknowledged them at all. Evidently Apple doesn’t feel the same way, since the show is already renewed for a second season; but unless your biggest financial worry at the moment is getting your daughter a new saddle for dressage, this one might not be for you.