The first episode of the new Apple TV+ drama “Your Friends and Neighbors” takes pains to explain how one can rake in master-of-the-universe money yet never feel financially secure. Jon Hamm stars as Andrew Cooper, known as Coop, a hedge-fund guy who finds that alimony, child support, a mortgage, an apartment rental, and private-school tuition are draining his bank accounts faster than he can replenish them. And that’s before he loses his job. After he’s unceremoniously ousted by his firm and contractually barred from similar employment for two years, each new expense feels like a punch to the gut. Dropping off his teen-age son at the home of his ex-wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), Coop learns that he’s on the hook for a new drum set (nearly eighteen hundred dollars) for the boy and three sessions of a skin treatment (forty-five hundred) for their daughter. A neighbor signs Coop up for two tables at a cancer benefit (thirty grand apiece). Coop could say no. Instead, he decides to maintain his life style by stealing from his social circle, figuring everyone has too much to miss what he refers to as “piles of forgotten wealth just lying around in drawers where they were doing no one any good.”
In “Mad Men,” Hamm played a maestro of bullshit, a silver-tongued Madison Avenue copywriter who turns slide-projector trays into carrousels and soda into an elixir for world peace. Coop is Don Draper’s inverse: he’s the only one among his Connecticut country-club set who sees through the hype. Once determined to keep up with the Joneses, Coop now delights in pulling one over on them, snatching their Cartier bracelets and Patek Philippe watches while they’re on vacation or at their children’s tennis matches. Not that he’s new to deception; he’s in a furtive situationship with a woman named Sam (Olivia Munn), a friend of Mel’s who’s going through a divorce. The local cops aren’t too interested in the mini crime spike—it’s grim having to track down baubles with price tags that exceed your annual salary—until Sam’s husband turns up dead.
Hamm, who had trouble finding a new groove after “Mad Men,” is perfectly cast as Coop, who, like Don Draper, constantly looks both imperious and ill at ease. His performance is the show’s main asset. Otherwise, “Your Friends and Neighbors,” created by Jonathan Tropper, is more notable for its shortcomings than its pleasures. Across nine episodes, it squanders a great premise by shoehorning in that most rote of genres, the murder mystery, and by failing to meaningfully develop its secondary characters. The sole exception may be a Bronx pawnshop owner, Lu (a fantastically weary Randy Danson), to whom Coop sells his stolen goods. When Coop tries to negotiate a higher price for one of his purloined Pateks, she calmly dresses him down: “You’re a man who buys and sells things he never touches. You assign value out of your ass. Your skill is in selling that value to other rich schmucks.” No one knows better than a pawnshop owner how little value has to do with worth.
Other recent shows about the ethically challenged rich, such as “Succession” and “The White Lotus,” have emphasized their characters’ elaborate personality disorders along with the trappings of the high life. “Your Friends and Neighbors” flips the formula, to unsatisfying effect. Coop and Mel, despite their nauseating wealth, are meant to be emotionally relatable: former college sweethearts who can’t admit to themselves that they still love each other. The show gestures toward a remarriage plot, but it’s hard to know how much to invest in the possibility; Mel’s foibles, including her anger issues, serve more to drive the plot forward than to deepen her as a character. There’s also an antiseptic quality to much of the town’s luxury. Coop’s former family home, in a neighborhood where houses regularly cost eight figures, is a gray monstrosity, and parties in the community are occasions for exhausting one-upmanship.
Throughout the season, Coop holds forth in voice-over monologues long on faux profundity, mannered phrasings, and lists. Reluctantly attending a party that Mel’s new boyfriend (Mark Tallman) throws for his guy friends, Coop catalogues the men’s tastes—“Scotch, cigars, smoked meats, custom golf clubs, high-end escorts”—and observes, unnecessarily, that these commodities arise from “entire industries built to cash in on the quiet desperation of rich, middle-aged men.” The only person there whom Coop actually likes is his financial adviser, Barney (Hoon Lee), who later confides that his marriage has become so defined by consumerism that spending now feels like a “bodily function”: “We eat, we drink, we buy all this shit. Then we talk about the shit we bought, and then we talk about the other shit we’re gonna buy, and then we go buy that.”
Inevitably, such expressions of anti-materialist anomie run up against the need to seduce viewers with expensive objects. Coop drives a sleek black Maserati, which at one point is filmed from below, with the vehicle rushing toward the camera—a shot that wouldn’t be out of place in a car commercial. (True, the trunk pops open at random times, but, with Hamm behind the wheel, the brand comes out just fine.) Similarly, the specialness of the items Coop steals—a Birkin bag, a Richard Mille timepiece, a bottle of Domaine d’Auvenay wine, a Lichtenstein painting—must be explicated at length. Coop purports to disillusion viewers, but he is simultaneously creating a list of objects for us to covet—the kinds of possessions that signal to other affluent people that one has made it. The overwhelming reaction that the series elicits, then, is not sympathy but cognitive dissonance.
How to account for the spate of TV series about rich people being terrible? By now, it’s become a genre unto itself, all but synonymous with HBO’s drama division. Gawping at lavishness isn’t new, of course—“Dallas” and “Dynasty” dominated the airwaves during the greed-is-good eighties—but the tone has changed. In shows like “Big Little Lies” and “The Undoing,” the characters are glamorous, in the way we assume the rich are, but also unhappy and oblivious. I used to think that the underpinnings of this world view were rather Protestant: you could be materialistic, but you had to endure some moralizing about it. Wanting had to be tempered by shame. But it’s equally possible that depicting opulence is an area where TV, which is steadily losing audience share to YouTube and TikTok, can still outperform its competitors. Influencers have made social media a platform for wealth porn, but their videos still fall short of what Hollywood budgets and finesse can offer—an experience that transports instead of merely tantalizing.
The inescapability of the genre certainly feels symptomatic of our times, when oligarchs can buy their way into power and men like Coop never had to pay for the damage to the economy and to the middle class which the financial crisis wrought. More than that, though, such shows pander to our heightened consciousness about these issues. By now, when terms like “inequality” and “one-per-center” have become buzzwords, exposing the panoply of ways that money can warp relationships seems less like daring social commentary than like preaching to a choir that craves both moral superiority and stuff.
Speaking of stuff, “The White Lotus,” perhaps now the poster child for the rich-people-suck genre, raised eyebrows this spring, when the third season was accompanied by branded collaborations with a dozen retailers, including Banana Republic, H&M, Away, and CB2. It might seem like hypocrisy to treat the show’s noxious characters as aspirational, but you can be a cynic and still be a loyal customer. Coop notes that his country club, where dues are a hundred thousand dollars a year, keeps its membership rolls full not by providing frills but by stoking fear of what it might mean to not belong. The club operates by “social extortion,” he says, but “seeing it for what it was never stopped me from falling in line with all the other suckers.” You might be able to see through Apple’s marketing, too, but the corporation doesn’t mind, as long as you’re still buying. ♦
