Jon Hamm: not the best name for an actor, even if it’s less of a hostage to fortune in America, a land that lacks our wild comic traditions. Lucky, then, that he’s so good at what he does, even if every performance is more or less a variation on Don Draper in Mad Men (the best part he’ll ever play). At a stretch, his new series, Your Friends and Neighbours, could be seen as a kind of cut-price update on John Updike’s Rabbit novels, and when he narrates the story in voiceover, his tone, if nothing else, is pitch perfect, an olive or a twist in every sentence. Audible should book him this minute to read not only Updike, but John Cheever and Richard Yates as well.
I wanted to love Your Friends and Neighbours. I’m fond of gentlemen burglars (eg Raffles), and in it, Hamm plays a hedge-fund manager called Coop who, having fallen on hard times after decades of striving, begins visiting the homes of his disgustingly rich neighbours in search of their watch collections. If you loathe Patek Philippe’s intolerably smug ad campaigns as much as I do, you’ll find it impossible not to cheer him on at first (shoving a Nautilus worth $200,000 in his pocket, Coop absolves himself by noting that, as the ad says, a man doesn’t own such a timepiece; he’s merely taking care of it for the next generation). In the end, though, I fear that this series, like so many others before it, may be doomed to languish unloved and unwatched on Apple (amazing to hear that season two is already commissioned). Its writer, Jonathan Tropper, keeps wimping out. Its producers can’t help themselves. The problem is that, collectively, they’re quite obviously deeply in love with the very things their hero is supposedly coming to despise.
“This is what happens,” intones Coop, as he describes how his downward spiral began. It’s almost as if everyone in the world is living highly leveraged lives in places like Westmont Village, a commuter suburb where the houses are as a big as Hearst Castle, and swimming pools are as common as coffee cups. First, he found his wife in bed with his friend: cue an expensive divorce. Then he was sacked from his New York investment job in ignominious circumstances, which means no one else will employ him. Hmm, let’s see. Is a little light domestic burglary really “what happens” in the aftermath of such events? His rental looks quite nice to me. Couldn’t he just downsize a bit?
If his motivation is revenge as much as ready cash, well, I’m obviously down with that. All the people he knows are ghastly, up to and including Sam (Olivia Munn), the endlessly pert neighbour with whom he’s sleeping (we read that America’s rich, who want to live forever, are ascetic to a fault, but the frantic sex and drinking in Your Friends and Neighbours is straight out of a Bond film). Brad Sperling, whose house Coop breaks in to while he and his wife are holidaying in Belize, has so many luxury watches, he likely won’t even miss his Richard Mille rose gold Felipe Massa, a bauble so vulgar-looking you can imagine Trump exempting it from all tariffs on grounds of appearance alone.
About notions of redemption, however, I’m less sure. Is he really any less of an “asshole” post-crash than he was before? An overdraft is not a halo. He’s stealing to maintain both his lifestyle, and that of his family (his bouncy ex-wife and petulant teenage children live high on the hog). He’s hardly Robin Hood.
But then again, this is Jon Hamm we’re watching. I have to confess that I endured two seasons of the unfathomably dreary The Morning Show (also on Apple) just for the pleasure – admittedly arguable, when I finally got there – of watching Hamm in season three. His old-fashioned looks, his baritone voice, his sticky-up-just-out-of-bed hair… If I can take or leave all of these things (though I’d prefer to take them, ideally), I find myself addicted to his bemused, ironical manner – a mode that seems designed to suggest he has no idea what on Earth he’s doing in these shows. It’s a great act. Like Coop, he takes the cash, and still he gets away with it.
Your Friends and Neighbours
Apple TV+
[See also: Inside the ugly world of Facebook]
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025