Your Friends and Neighbors (Apple TV+)
Jon Hamm starring comic-noir, though entertaining, pulls its punches
What’s it about? A hedge fund manager resorts to burglary after losing his job, targeting wealthy neighbors to maintain his family's lifestyle, but makes a fateful error breaking into the wrong home.
Who it’s for? Fans of Jon Hamm, fans of breezy crime-lite fare, if you like early 2000s-style TV, if you appreciate a morally grey lead, luxury porn lovers
Who should avoid? Hardcore “Difficult Man” show (Breaking Bad, Mad Men) enthusiasts, if you dislike voiceover exposition, those looking for bold or daring storytelling, if you dislike tonal indecisiveness
Watch if you like: Confess, Fletch, The Joneses, Shrinking, American Beauty, Dead to Me
News and Notes:
Two episodes released on Thursday
9 Episode season
Renewed for S2
Schmear’s Verdict: A watchable but frustratingly tame comic-noir that's elevated by Jon Hamm’s effortless charm but limited by its unwillingness to embrace darker complexity.
As the biggest Mad Men fan I know, of course I was excited for Jon Hamm’s first leading-man role since then in Your Friends and Neighbors—and no, I don’t count all those Mercedes commercials. Yet two episodes into this Apple TV series from Jonathan Tropper, the show, while very watchable, plays like a squishier Breaking Bad—a sanding off of the rough edges of the "Difficult Man" series (think Sopranos or Ozark) for the Shrinking crowd.
The show follows recently divorced Andy Cooper ("Coop"), who loses his high-powered corporate job due to a sex scandal imbroglio. Realizing how mindlessly privileged his cohort is—and to maintain his high-flying lifestyle and elite suburban status (country club membership, fancy cars)—he begins some petty larceny and low-intensity B&Es.
Your Friends and Neighbors has an easy snappiness to its dialogue, sucking you in early with a twinkly Out of Sight-inspired scene. Coop is far more loquacious than Don Draper, speaking his mind openly via VO (perhaps unreliably) as this steamrolls through exposition.
I waited for Your Friends and Neighbors to get a little nasty. As many shows do to hook you early, we meet Coop beside a dead body in a groan-worthy “You must be wondering how I got here” moment. Its tone is frustratingly unplaceable, best described as soft-edged comic noir. Tropper, who made the underrated and badass Banshee, is pulling his punches—like giving Coop a sister with a mental health issue, a contrived, built-in empathy button to push, lest we find his actions too despicable.
But it’s not hard to empathize…because it’s Jon Hamm. We fell in love with him playing one of the most reprehensible characters ever put on screen because of brilliant characterization and performance. There's no one more capable of wading through moral murk, though he was a hoot in the underseen 2022 Fletch remake—definitely a closer comparison point than Mad Men.
I think there’s a unique point here, and pathos too. Already picked up for a second season, there's no doubt the show wants to twist and turn into more interesting and complex places. But so far, this jaunty series has the shape of a potentially great show but the execution of something much more mediocre.
