In “Your Friends and Neighbors,” premiering Friday on Apple TV+, Jon Hamm performs Andrew Cooper, referred to as Coop, a well-paid, well-placed hedge fund dealer who’s fired from his job, ostensibly for violating an organization coverage about fraternization within the ranks. He has already misplaced his spouse, Mel (Amanda Peet), whom he found in mattress along with his greatest pal, Nick (Mark Tallman), a three-time NBA champ. And he’s not doing so effectively along with his youngsters — Princeton-bound Tori (Isabel Gravitt), who performs tennis, and highschool sophomore Hunter (Donovan Colan), who performs the drums. What they’ve in frequent is a failure to speak.
Coop and Mel and all their rich pals and neighbors reside in an unique group someplace within the commutable neighborhood of New York Metropolis. To maintain this entangled universe in stability, Coop is sleeping with Sam (Olivia Munn), whose husband has left her for a a lot youthful mannequin. One imagines that comparable enterprise goes on simply past the bounds of this sequence.
Although faraway from the household — he’s moved out of his large fancy home into an unfancy rental (“It’s small, but don’t worry, it’s also depressing”) — Coop continues to be supporting them within the fashion to which he labored for years to accustom them. (“When is it enough?” he wonders of their materials benefits.) It doesn’t assist that he’s protecting his firing a secret, that he can’t discover different work in his area and that his outdated boss Jack (Corbin Bernson) is sitting on cash Coop regards as his (one would say rightly). However mendacity, its problems and penalties, is, in spite of everything, central to drama and comedy, which couldn’t get alongside with out characters who’re reluctant to inform the reality.
There’s something old school about these of us and their energy relations, together with Coop’s choice that he’d fairly steal than admit he’s out of labor — poisonous male insecurity. Mel will get a scene or two to point out that she has a job, as a teen therapist, and one minor character is described as the perfect protection lawyer in New York, however the feminine characters — wives and ex-wives — come throughout for essentially the most half as subordinate to and dependent upon males. Nonetheless, all people, female and male, largely simply hangs out, on the horribly costly nation membership, by the pool, on the hyperlinks, on the tennis courtroom, on the gymnasium (Nick owns one), at yoga, at self-defense class and at quite a few events — which isn’t to say they’re having any enjoyable.
At one in every of these events, with the visitors outdoors, Coop goes rooting round his host’s home. He comes upon a cache of pricey watches and pockets a particularly useful one, a observe he’ll repeat in different homes, with their “piles of forgotten wealth lying around in drawers doing no one any good.” (He’s growing a jaundiced view of luxurious gadgets.) At this level the sequence feels as if it is perhaps heading into John Cheever territory — one thing like his quick story “The Swimmer,” a few man crossing Westchester County by the use of his neighbors’ swimming pools, however with theft.
Jon Hamm, Amanda Peet and Mark Tallman play rich, nation club-going characters in “Your Friends & Neighbors.”
(Apple)
A behavior turns into a type of livelihood, as Coop turns his loot into money. This brings him into contact with some harmful characters, at which level “Breaking Bad” appears the related comparability. There’s a way through which the state of affairs is out of his management, however, he admits to the viewer, “Maybe I was just liking it.”
Making certain that you just gained’t should work out any of the sequence’ themes for your self, narrator Coop sounds slightly like Joan Didion. “Out here, scotch was like a f—ing religion; every time someone poured you a drink they’d have to give a f—ing Ted Talk about the scotch, and then someone would inevitably chime in about some bottle they once had you couldn’t get anymore and blah blah. I think at some point it just started to dawn on everyone that this was it; these houses, these wives, these jobs, this would be the sum total of their lives. Their futures were already written, and so the quest to stave off the emptiness began; scotch, cigars, smoked meats, custom golf clubs, high-end escorts, entire industries built to cash in on the quiet desperation of rich middle-aged men.”
As has grow to be too frequent observe, “Your Friends and Neighbors” opens with an thrilling scene of disaster earlier than shifting again in time to point out how we get there. Like slightly present referred to as “The White Lotus,” there’s an unidentified lifeless physique, promising violence to return, and fairly presumably the police. Properly, you would possibly count on them anyway in a present about stealing issues.
There isn’t a actually fascinating end result, from a sympathetic viewer’s standpoint, apart from Coop and Mel reuniting, as a result of every little thing that factors towards that finish is satisfying and most every little thing that factors away from it’s … annoying. (On the similar time, I by no means felt emotionally invested within the end result, simply, you understand, intellectually.) The sequence’ a number of threads — together with one centered on Barney (Hoon Lee), Coop’s monetary advisor, who’s coping with his spouse’s renovation plans and his disapproving old-world Korean in-laws (Barney is Korean however doesn’t converse the language) — take vitality away from the plotline we’re meant to care most about. However they do replenish area in a narrative stretched to 9 hours.
As a supposedly profitable man present process a religious disaster, Hamm is again in Don Draper territory. (“I realized how far you could drift away from your own life without actually going anywhere.”) However Don was by no means essentially the most attention-grabbing individual in “Mad Men,” and Coop is much less compelling than Mel, and his sister, Ali (Tony winner Lena Corridor), who has psychological well being points, and whom we meet on the garden of her former fiancé, strumming a guitar and singing Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees.” (Hunter’s band performs Matthew Candy’s “Sick of Myself” — “In a world that’s ugly and a lie / It’s hard to even want to try” — to additional underscore the suburban anomie in track.) As Elena, a younger Dominican housekeeper who falls in with Coop in his misadventures, Aimee Carrero offers wanted class and cultural variation.
Solely seven episodes have been made accessible for overview, so I actually don’t know what destiny creator Jonathan Tropper (“Banshee”) has in retailer for his of us. I suppose the characters could also be thrown right into a gap they should crawl out of, or left hanging from a cliff on the season’s finish, however to the extent that it is a story, with a form, fairly than merely a sequence of occasions, it isn’t screaming for one more 9 (or a number of of 9) episodes to conclude its enterprise, to make its factors. I might actually stand to see extra of Ali/Corridor, it’s true. Nonetheless, I’d like these individuals to get it collectively prior to later.
