‘Your Friends and Neighbors’: Jon Hamm Becomes an Empathetic Portrait of Upper Class Woes

Alci Rengifo

If you are beginning to feel the pangs of a midlife crisis, Apple TV+ is always here for comfort and understanding. “Your Friends & Neighbors” is the latest wonderfully-cast, gorgeously-shot series from the streamer that basks in the pure melancholia of living. Its first notable highlight is Jon Hamm returning to a leading role, looking born to wear business suits and prowl corporate office spaces. Creator Jonathan Tropper isn’t necessarily mining original territory. This plot is a familiar brand of American woe-is-me storytelling where a wealthy white male suddenly loses everything, spending most of the season confronting the shocking realization that wealth doesn’t buy happiness. 

We first meet Andrew “Coop” Cooper (Hamm) waking up next to a dead body, smeared with blood, on the floor of a lavish home. The narrative then rewinds to four months before this shocking turn of events. Coop is a middle-aged hedge fund suit left in emotional pain after catching his wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), sleeping with his friend and NBA champion Nick Brandes (Mark Tallman). One night he gets a drink at a bar when a younger woman approaches him. Their one night stand proves costly when it turns out she worked under a colleague at Coop’s office. He’s promptly fired. Angry, with little liquid cash and an expensive lifestyle, Coop goes on a reflective journey of the high class, superficial world that has defined him, while processing how to move on in terms of Mel and their kids, Tori (Isabel Gravitt) and Hunter (Donovan Colan).

If you are not part of the American privileged class, “Your Friends & Neighbors” threatens to pretty soon feel like sitting at a party where you don’t like anyone. The motions are very familiar for this kind of story. As soon as Coop is fired by the business partner he thought he could trust, nothing seems to go right. He is still paying for the big house where Mel now lives with Nick, who is written as the new boyfriend trying too hard to be nice to Coop. Nick is also aloof to Mel’s own emerging need to have true autonomy. Tori is 17 and starts seeing a 20-year-old guy Coop instantly detests, warning him to stop saying “sir” or receive a kick in the groin. The terrain unveils itself as what we all know to be true about the elite. At the local country club women gossip about new trophy wives who used to be waitresses. Samantha (Olivia Munn), a trophy wife now facing a vicious divorce, sleeps with Coop to feel wanted. His other friend, Barney (Hoon Lee), faces financial ruin. Parents boast about their kid’s preparedness for a tennis tournament. Coop narrates his observations with growing resentment, now despising the society that shaped him.

While familiar territory, it avoids languishing too much with the added twist of Cooper beginning to break into his neighbor’s homes at pricey Westmont Village, stealing items he might be able to pawn, all the while uncovering their secret corruptions, affairs and other skeletons, which we assume is how the dead body from the pilot will eventually reveal itself. This could have been a slog if not for the energy of the performances, editing and, of course, Jon Hamm. Cooper is the older version of his Don Draper character from “Mad Men,” the series that made Hamm’s career. This too is a series about the allure of money and status in America, mostly attained through the glorification of corporate culture. It doesn’t have the scope or richness of “Mad Men,” but it also doesn’t get overly shallow. It is one of those stories, like John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer,” where an affluent American looks back and wonders what all this success, rush of names and toys was really for. Hamm knows how to give the material pathos. He can be both mean and empathetic. “Your Friends & Neighbors” says nothing new, but sometimes its meditations are worth repeating.

“Your Friends & Neighbors” season one begins streaming April 11 with new episodes premiering Fridays on Apple TV+.