Jon Hamm and The Death of TV Masculinity
There aren’t many true masculine figures left in television. Jon Hamm is one of the last.
You feel it immediately when he appears in Your Friends & Neighbors, his first major TV lead since Mad Men ended over a decade ago. Hamm doesn’t just fill a role. He fills the space itself. The 54-year-old reminds us, almost painfully, of something television used to have and has almost entirely forgotten. Specifically, he reminds us of a time when men carried weight, mystery, and danger — not through CGI, not through over-the-top theatrics, but simply by being.
Like Draper before him, Cooper is a man built for a different world than the one crumbling around him.
Hamm emerged during a golden age of TV-transmitted masculinity. It wasn’t just him. James Gandolfini in The Sopranos defined the antihero before it became a worn-out cliché. Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad charted a man’s slow descent into pure evil. Kiefer Sutherland in 24 gave America a raw, unpolished vision of masculine duty in a post-9/11 world.
Today, the landscape appears very different. James Gandolfini has passed away. Kiefer Sutherland continues to work, but his projects hold little relevance. Bryan Cranston, once the face of dark American ambition, has scorched his own credibility by campaigning like a lackey for Kamala Harris in the waning days of 2024. Less Breaking Bad, more Breathtakingly Bad.
Relatable masculine figures are in short supply. In many ways, they are an endangered species. The seemingly deliberate erosion didn’t happen overnight.
Gradually, the prevailing depiction of men on screen changed from a blend of strength and relatable flaws to absolute ineptitude. The rise of sitcom characters like Al Bundy in Married … with Children, the bumbling, bitter father figure, paved the way. Ray Barone in Everybody Loves Raymond carried the same torch, a man-child constantly outsmarted by his sharper, exasperated wife. Doug Heffernan in The King of Queens wasn’t much different. He was hapless, lazy, clueless, and barely capable of boiling an egg without supervision from his other half.
Later, we got Phil Dunphy in Modern Family, the lovable idiot dad, perpetually ten steps behind his wife and kids. Shows like The Big Bang Theory took it much further: a parade of neurotic, infantilized men who could barely muster the courage to say hello to a woman. Even more recent series like Brooklyn Nine-Nine continued the trend, turning its male leads into amusing but essentially silly sidekicks. What began as parody solidified into expectation. My generation was raised to view adult men not as leaders or protectors, but as pathetic punchlines.
This brings us back to Jon Hamm and his new show.
Your Friends and Neighbors isn’t Mad Men. It isn’t trying to be. But Hamm carries the best of Don Draper with him into this new world — the gravity, the restraint, the quiet danger. As Andrew Cooper, a hedge fund manager unraveling under the weight of his own missteps, Hamm doesn’t act so much as inhabit the screen. He belongs to an older tradition, the kind once defined by actors like Cary Grant and Robert Redford, men who held audiences’ attention and refused to let it go. A glance, a shift of weight, a pause between words, that’s all it takes. Hamm reminds you that true leading men never have to chase the room. The room moves to them, then with them.
Like Draper before him, Cooper is a man built for a different world than the one crumbling around him. He is commanding yet conflicted, magnetic yet deeply restless. He carries the quiet burdens of failure and ambition without collapsing into self-pity. In an era that feeds audiences a steady diet of bumbling, dithering caricatures, Cooper stands as the antithesis. He stands as a reminder of a time when male characters were allowed to be flawed and formidable all at once.
Chalamet Is Not Jon Hamm
I imagine this is what more men and women really want to see on screen. Instead, Hollywood churns out leading men who look more like teens in eyeliner — delicate, ethereal, ephemeral.
Timothée Chalamet is the poster child for this new generation. He’s many things, including a fine actor, but he does not embody rugged strength. The world of strong men has been replaced by a conveyor belt of fragile, anxious adolescents, all suffering from incurable forms of emotional incontinence.
Yet the culture itself, the real world beyond Netflix boardrooms and Hollywood shindigs, aches for figures like Hamm. There is an unspoken hunger for men who embody traditional masculine values.
Chances are Your Friends & Neighbors won’t change television like Mad Men did. It won’t start a renaissance of complex masculinity on screen. Nevertheless, Hamm’s very presence reminds us that something important has been lost and that it is still possible, with the right men on screen, to find it again.
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