02-04-2025
Your Friends & Neighbours, review: Jon Hamm emulates his Mad Men glory days in this uber-rich satire
Early on in Your Friends & Neighbours (Apple TV+) Jon Hamm 's character falls into a swimming pool. At that point things freeze and Hamm's voiceover asks the viewer direct, 'You think that's a metaphor, right?' Funnily enough, I had just thought, 'Please no, not the slow-motion swimming pool drowning-in-my-own-troubles metaphor again.' Your Friends & Neighbours is that kind of show – clever, very well put together and, if not entirely original, more than sharp enough to get away with it.
We'll get the lack of originality out of the way first: this is East Coast Big Little Lies with a dash of Trading Places and all the familiar accoutrements of the modern prestige thriller. It tells the story of Andrew 'Coop' Cooper (Hamm) a hedge fund manager whose charmed life quickly unravels when he's fired from his job for misbehaviour.
With his wife also having left him for another man he suddenly finds himself on the outside looking in at the manicured lawns and ludicrous wealth of his former friends and neighbours. With alimony, school fees, flash cars and child support all pressing down, Coop needs money fast. So he starts robbing from his peers.
It is a satire on conspicuous expenditure that itself must have cost a fortune – the title sequence alone looks pricier than most of the BBC's annual drama budget. Nonetheless, it relies on familiar tropes: there's plenty of posh house porn as seen in Disclaimer, The Perfect Couple, and Big Little Lies 1 and 2. The satire on the empty lives of the uber-rich is biting and potent but is still the same satire that underpinned Succession and The White Lotus. Your Friends & Neighbours is not breaking new ground.
But it landscapes that old ground with real relish. Jon Hamm is superb, those weary eyes lingering on the madness of the world around him and barely able to believe that yes, this is happening. There are echoes of his career-defining turn as Don Draper in Mad Men as he plays another man who's got everything but is left with nothing.
And harking back to Mad Men, there is some first-rate writing here, not just in the bravura set pieces (look out for the basketball game gone wrong, or the women's self-defence class plus cannabis brownies) but in a love of words and language for their own sake. This (for once) fully justifies Hamm's voiceover and the soliloquising that comes with it. It is viciously witty, at times wincingly bleak. Put 'It was at moments like these where I realised how far you could drift away from your own life without actually going anywhere,' straight into the Midlife Crisis Quotations book.
Above all, Your Friends & Neighbours is very more-ish. Apple TV+ has some gems on its roster, but Ted Lasso and Slow Horses apart it has struggled to find returning hits. No wonder it has already renewed this for a second series before an episode has aired – it looks and feels like a show with legs.
