Summary
Your Friends & Neighbors establishes a fun premise in Episodes 1 & 2, with a solid Jon Hamm performance providing a reassuring presence.
The White Lotus has only just wrapped up its third season, and yet it’s back in all but name on Apple TV+ in the form of Your Friends & Neighbors, Episode 1 & 2 of which debuted together to give a good sense of all the key ingredients. A coterie of uber-privileged characters? Check! A descent into madness to preserve a flamboyant luxury lifestyle? Check! A death – possibly even a murder – at the very beginning that we probably won’t know the context of until the end? We’ve got a full house, folks.
Also of note is the fact that Jon Hamm (Beirut) is starring in this, his first major dramatic television lead since he played Don Draper in Mad Men (he also appeared inFargo), so you can only imagine the kind of script necessary to get him out of bed. You can see glimmers of that script’s brilliance in the first two episodes, which run an hour each and immediately put Hamm’s character, Andrew Cooper, through the wringer. It’s very funny, if nothing else. But there’s a wee bit of depth and pizazz missing just yet, not that we’re prone to judge a book by its cover around here.
“Coop”, as he’s known by everyone, is a success. He’s a wealthy hedge fund manager who drives a Maserati. But we meet him waking up on a marble floor covered in blood before plunging into the swimming pool, kick-starting some rather loaded narration, so that’s the image we have in our minds while flashbacks reveal how it all went recently wrong. His wife left him for his close friend, and he’s still paying for the house. That’s less than ideal, but would be tolerable if he could hold onto his job. In Your Friends & Neighbors Episode 1, he can’t. A consensual but ill-advised liaison with a younger colleague gives his boss an opportunity to fire him and take his capital account. Within the span of a single episode, he’s broke, single, embarrassed, and wondering how he’s going to keep up appearances around the lavish neighborhood and country club he still frequents.
The answer turns out to be stealing from his neighbours. It’s a victimless crime, or at least that’s how he rationalizes it, since they’re all so wealthy that they’ll never notice rolls of errant cash and swanky watches going missing. But every house seems to hide more than jewellery, and pretty soon Coop is in over his head, trying to balance newfound criminal impulses with the secrets he’s discovering about his nearest and dearest.
Lena Hall and Jon Hamm in Your Friends & Neighbors | Image via Apple TV+
The key to the drama in this premiere is establishing just how close-knit a community New York’s elites belong to. Coop still has to spend an unfeasibly large amount of time around his ex-wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), and her new partner Nick (Mark Tallman), and he’s also having a secretive relationship with Mel’s recently single best friend, Samantha (Olivia Munn, America: The Motion Picture). Coop and Mel’s teenage daughter – who’s dating a slightly older guy – has to compete against the daughter of another couple in a bitchy tennis final. And there’s clearly a lot left on the table between Coop and Mel, which will probably prove problematic since Samantha is inching away from being a booty call and is looking for something more – perhaps a man who’ll tuck her young son in at night, which Coop ends up doing in Episode 2 of Your Friends & Neighbors, quite by accident.
There’s much more drama to come, I feel sure, but there isn’t a great deal of it in the table-setting premiere, since that’s more about establishing the framework for how it will all go wrong. Once he manages to get his hands on some saleable goods, Coop realizes he has to find a fence, and he thinks he has found one in the form of a backroom hatchet named Lu (Randy Danson). But even her hackles are raised when Coop returns with another suspiciously paperless watch so soon after the first one, and she refuses to buy it. The premiere ends with her calling persons unknown with Coop’s Maserati plate, asking her mysterious interlocutor to turn up everything there is to know about him. What’s she up to?
These questions, and more, can be addressed later. For now, though, it’s just great fun to see Jon Hamm back on TV in a leading role and having so much fun being here. Your Friends & Neighbors Episode 1 & 2 have the cast and satirical slant of the best prestige TV shows, like the aforementioned The White Lotus, but also less pretension. This is more approachable and accessible fare, with the arch sensibilities of a network soap. It’ll need to do more, drama-wise, to really establish itself, but the premiere welcomes us in with open arms.
