You can understand why it might take an actor a while to tackle another dramatic lead role on television when their first was a life-changing, career-defining part in a critically acclaimed landmark TV drama that ran for eight superlative seasons. But it is 10 years sinceMad Menended and only now is Jon Hamm re-entering the fray. He has mostly been busy with comedy roles in the intervening years. Now, he returns to the type of part that made his name: era-specific masculinity under siege from a prestige production bent on feeding us our own horrors back to us in chunks. This time it is about the fall from grace of a New York hedge fund manager, Andrew Cooper – think a modern, misogyny-lite Don Draper, but one who loves his kids and really is who he says he is.
The opening scene has Cooper coming to on a marble floor at the bottom of a Dynasty-esque staircase. He scrambles out of the pool of blood surrounding him, into the house’s swimming pool, and begins voiceovering to the audience. There isn’t actually a record-scratch and he doesn’t say: “I guess you’re wondering how I got here,” but that’s the gist.
We flash back to stop us wondering. Cooper is two years divorced, since discovering his wife having an affair with his close friend and NBA All-Star Nick (Mark Tallman). He lives in a rental and away from his kids, but he still has his job, his Maserati and lots and lots of money coming in. Then a (genuinely) slight indiscretion with a younger female employee gives Cooper’s boss the excuse he needs to sack him and nab his client and capital accounts for himself. At least Coop still has the Maserati.
What is a recently fired, heavily leveraged hedge fund manager with a two-year non-solicitation clause in his contract to do? Get a smaller job in an allied field for a while, perhaps, even though it’s a bit embarrassing amid all your fellow one-percenters in money-soaked Westmont Village, where visits are habitually interrupted by deliveries of “crushed oyster shell – for the petanque court”? Sell the Maserati as a first step? Or turn to stealing the rolls of cash, Patek Philippe watches, diamond necklaces and other fripperies lying semi-forgotten in drawers all over your peers’ McMansions? That’s right. Your Friends & Neighbours is Breaking Bad with rich folks. It is also, as Cooper uncovers juicy secrets in every apparently perfect home, Desperate Housewives with husbands. And, as it immerses us in the absurdities of rich people in New York,The White Lotusback from holiday.
But as Cooper’s need to meet expenses grows, so must his ambition and his risk, until we loop back to our man waking up on the marbled floor in a pool of blood and take things again from there.
Your Friends & Neighbours is fun and funny. Hamm is brilliant as a man frustrated by his own greed, furious to find himself a divorcee and altogether ripe for the picking by any passing midlife-crisis-seller. He makes you wish he had done much more in this vein over the past decade – but also glad to have him back in his intelligent, nuanced groove. And the surrounding cast – includingAmanda Peetas Cooper’s ex-wife, Mel, and an outstanding Olivia Munn as Mel’s friend and Coop’s secret booty call, Samantha – are just as strong.
But you long for this show to catch fire, to burn through its fears and choose just one of the many brilliant things it could be. If it moved faster, rather than leaving so long between jobs and secrets, and if those secrets became part of a mesh of webs to be unpicked over time, it could have been a great soap in the fine tradition of Desperate Housewives, variousLiane Moriarty, Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman productions andlots of Shondaland.
If it really engaged with the power and privilege at play when Cooper and his former maid start working together, as it seems fleetingly to do, and interrogated the workings of capitalism instead of seeming half in love with the rich and their trappings, it could be a fine satire. There is a pulse of anger beating away underneath, but no one had the courage to let rip. Or it could have stripped things down to the bare bones and been a very serviceable cat-and-mouse thriller, with Cooper and the police – or whoever else – trying to outwit each other.
Instead you find yourself wishing Hamm had waited just a little longer and returned in greater triumph.
Your Friends & Neighbours is on Apple TV+