In breezy satire Your Friends & Neighbors, Jon Hamm channels Don Draper
'Things fall apart,' the Irish poet WB Yeats wrote in his 1919 poem 'The Second Coming'. 'Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.' All epochs move, inexorably, towards decline, and so too, apparently, all happy lives. That's the premise of half the television put out into the world – a good life, ruined – not least the new Apple TV+ crime saga Your Friends & Neighbors, which shows the American Dream going up in smoke.
Andrew 'Coop' Cooper (Jon Hamm) has the perfect life: a beautiful family, a palace in the suburbs, a job at a hedge fund that pays handsomely. Almost overnight, he loses everything. His wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), runs off with one of his best friends, athletics mogul Nick (Mark Tallman), and Coop finds himself living in a rental with his bipolar sister, Ali (Lena Hall). To add to his struggles, he loses his job – and a big pot of money – after a one-night stand with a colleague. But the alimony cheques still have to be written and the Maserati's not going to refuel itself. 'I just want to know how long I could float on what I've got,' he asks his friend, and business manager, Barney (Hoon Lee). The answer is 'not long' – that is until Coop realises that he has access to all the luxury items stored, oh so carelessly, in the houses of his country club peers.
Regular men pushed into a life of crime is a subgenre of its own. Accountant turned money launderer (Ozark), chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin (Breaking Bad), judge turned vigilante (Your Honour); now we have hedge-fund manager turned cat burglar. It's a role that gives Hamm another chance to flex his smoothie skills. Coop's narration purrs through a social critique of the life he's living ('the age-old economics of social extortion') even while he struggles, frantically, to keep up appearances (a concept reinforced by a truly dreadful theme song). The key to Coop's success as a thief lies in the conformity of his milieu. They all wear the same clothes, drive the same cars, value the same bottles of wine. 'Nobody, even the cops apparently, would suspect a guy like me,' Coop confesses.
Hamm is an actor of quite limited range – or, more charitably, is frequently typecast – but he is a master of a type of depressive confidence. He specialises in portraying men who exude charm but clearly have something missing. It's not too reductive to compare Coop to Don Draper, his fabled role on Mad Men: both men behave amorally while also exhibiting a strict moral code. Men, that is, of contradictions. Your Friends & Neighbors is clearly a vehicle for Hamm's talents (and popularity), but there is still space for the 'friends and neighbours' too. Peet manages to bring some sympathy to the faintly monstrous ex-wife, while there are fun roles for Olivia Munn, as a recent divorcee whose life is disintegrating in parallel, and Aimee Carrero as Elena, Coop's old maid who becomes his accomplice.
It's all very easy on the eye. Showrunner Jonathan Tropper has written a solid, if uninspiring story, and Apple have brought it to the screen with the sort of colour palette you'd expect from a DFS advert. And yet there's something a bit insipid about Your Friends & Neighbors. Coop selects his victims based on the ease of sneaking into their mansions, the likelihood that they won't notice a missing watch or handbag. It's all a bit easy. He's not quite a Robin Hood ('I'm in a bind here,' he tells his fence, Lu (Randy Danson); 'No, you only think you are,' she replies) but, equally, the ethical stakes of his crimes are not quite the same as, say, drug running. And when he's not robbing a bunch of worthless ingrates, Coop is at home caring for his sister. The audience is invited to like and exonerate the character (even the sexual misconduct, for which he loses his job, is a conspiracy against him) with a readiness that was never afforded to Don Draper. This lack of ambiguity, combined with the diffuse lighting, obscured nudity and a blank cheque for the costume department, makes the whole thing feel a bit toothless.
Your Friends & Neighbors is a luxury product. Like the company that makes it, it's well crafted and easy on the eye. But, beneath that glossy veneer, does it justify the investment? For every Severance, it seems, Apple puts out a lot of frustratingly mediocre fare. A breezy enough caper, Your Friends & Neighbors prefers to retread old ground rather than forge new paths. Or, as Coop puts it when he begins his petty larceny spree, 'What's the worst that could happen?'
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