In Your Friends & Neighbors, Jon Hamm clicks in a comedy that doesn't
The actor leads Apple TV+'s heavy-handed new series.
Photo: Apple TV+
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.
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.”