C+

In Your Friends & Neighbors, Jon Hamm clicks in a comedy that doesn't

The actor leads Apple TV+'s heavy-handed new series.

By Tim Lowery | April 4, 2025 | 11:00am

Photo: Apple TV+

TV Reviews Your Friends & Neighbors

In Your Friends & Neighbors, Jon Hamm clicks in a comedy that doesn't

You’d be a fool not to at least check out a show in which Jon Hamm delivers lines like “If you call me sir one more time, I’m gonna punch you in the dick” only for his character to literally punch that person in the dick a few episodes later. It’s an enticing proposition to watch the actor in this capacity at all: Your Friends & Neighbors marks Hamm’s first starring TV role since Mad Men ended a decade ago. What’s more, this new Apple TV+ series was renewed five months ago, well before any audience or critical responses. On paper, all of this bodes very well. But something about the breaking-bad comedy (which, it should be stressed, Hamm is really good and basically perfectly cast in) isn’t quite clicking.

In the show, which comes from Banshee co-creator Jonathan Tropper, Hamm plays Andrew Cooper, a country-club type who gets blindsided by bad news: His wife Mel (Amanda Peet, who has a natural chemistry with Hamm here) cheated on him with his best friend (Mark Tallman’s ex-NBA star), ending the marriage, and—the coup de grâce, which says a lot about Coop and his upper-crust world’s priorities—he gets the chop from his hedge-fund gig that has a “two-year no solicit” clause. Compounding that, his teenage kids—the monosyllabic, ever-headphone-wearing Hunter (Donovan Colan) and tennis whiz Tori (Isabel Gravitt)—don’t seem to like him all that much. And he doesn’t seem to like the guys in the bucolic, one-percenter suburb he calls home all that much either.

Most Popular

Coop is drowning and turns to lifting rare watches, cash, fine wine, and even a Roy Lichtenstein painting from the show’s titular friends and neighbors in the hopes that it will get him above water. (To drive this metaphor home—something the show does quite often—we see him submerged in a pool after a robbery gone wrong in the series’ opening minutes, with our narrator wondering “how the hell everything could go so wrong so fast.”) Hamm, as ever, is a compelling screen presence, and watching him rip off dorky rich guys is, indeed, entertaining. “It was a strange new feeling, being around someone when you had just been in their house, going through their things, when you had their $225,000 watch in your pocket, and they had no idea,” he narrates in a lightbulb moment while watching Tori’s tennis match. “If I’m being honest, I wasn’t hating it.”

But unfortunately, the show is about a lot more than these rip-offs that have breathed new life into this handsome and charming guy who’s been stuck in a midlife malaise. And during some very long stretches between jobs, Your Friends & Neighbors bluntly satirizes this community, with one episode splitting the sexes into guys’ and girls’ nights (the former involves drinking scotch in a ridiculous man cave, the latter a self-defense class with weed brownies). Maybe people in this rarified economic strata actually talk and act as lamely and annoyingly as they do here. But if Your Friends & Neighbors‘ handling of drugs is any indication, there’s a good chance they don’t. (Hunter is goaded into doing mushrooms at a party with some “Come on, it will be cool!” peer pressure, and Somebody Somewhere‘s Ólafur Darri Ólafsson lets out an “It’s so good!” after a little dance and a bump of coke while playing a maniacal art dealer.)

The show also leans into the sort of heavy-handed comedy that may have read as fun and outlandish on the page—and, especially, in pitch meetings—but often lands with a shrug onscreen, like when Coop’s bestie (played by Hoon Lee) pukes into a ridiculously expensive e-toilet prototype or our novice thief has to listen to a successful lawyer have sex with her daughter’s teen boyfriend before tiptoeing out of there. Plus, the narration feels, while certainly well written, eventually unnecessary, as this isn’t exactly a subtle show to begin with. After a certain point, audiences don’t need to have the irony swirling around Coop or his inner thoughts spelled out for them.

But if you strip away the non-stop banter—this becomes tiring, particularly in scenes with Sam (Olivia Munn), a divorcee who’s sleeping with Coop—some of the coming-into-my-own dramatic arcs of side characters, and that aforementioned satirical underscoring, there is a pretty fun dark comedy bubbling under here. The dynamic of Coop’s unlikely crew, which is rounded out by Aimee Carrero’s strapped-for-cash housekeeper and Randy Danson’s no-nonsense Bronx pawnshop owner, certainly has potential. And when the walls finally close in on this smooth, Macallan 25-sipping outlaw, thanks to Sandrine Holt’s detective late in the season’s run (seven of its nine episodes were screened for critics), Neighbors picks up steam and its renewal starts making more sense. Here’s hoping it’s leaner and meaner next time.

Your Friends & Neighbors premieres April 11 on Apple TV+