Your Friends and Neighbors: The Elites and Their Money

As a movie and television critic who scans industry publications for the latest news, I was quite surprised last November to read that the Apple TV series  Your Friends and Neighbors, starring Jon Hamm  (Mad Men, The Morning Show), had been renewed for a second season. Created and written by Jonathan Tropper (Banshee,  Warrior), Hamm (who also executive produces) portrays Andrew “Coop” Cooper, a recently fired hedge fund manager divorced from his cheating spouse Mel (Amanda Peet), who starts burglarizing his neighbors in his affluent New York suburb to maintain his lifestyle.

Given the sexy plot line and the talented actors featured, my first question was where was season one? How had I overlooked it? I quickly learned that season one was scheduled to premiere now, April 2025. Given Hollywood’s risk-averse culture of late,  the early second season pickup of Your Friends and Neighbors represented a rare moment of industry confidence, not to mention a compelling PR opportunity. 

Despite his other work, Hamm remains best known for his role as Don Draper in Mad Men (2007-2015). In that show, Draper steals another man’s identity to build a career as an advertising executive in the milieu of 1960s Madison Avenue and forges a path of upward mobility reinforced by a marriage to a Philadelphia Mainline woman (January Jones).

Hamm was recognized for his iconic performance with eight Emmy nominations and a win in 2015, and he played his Draper character as an inversion of Tom Rath (Gregory Peck), the protagonist in  The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956). While Draper’s determination to be a top player in the 1960’s ad game is unrelenting, Rath ultimately rejects the dog-eat-dog requirements of being a media executive in 1950’s Manhattan to be a nine-to five family man.

Given the early greenlight on season one, Hamm’s proven ability as a leading man, and the strong supporting cast —  which in addition to Amanda Peet includes Olivia Munn (The Newsroom),  Mark Tallman (First Wives Club ), Hoon Lee (Banshee,  Warrior),  and  Corbin Bernsen (LA Law) — expectations for Your Friends and Neighbors were high.  The series, which dropped its first two episodes on April 11, has been well received, with Rotten Tomatoes favorability ratings of 83 percent from critics and 92 percent from streamers.

The parallels between  Andrew Cooper and Don Draper have elicited mixed reaction from critics such as Nick Hilton of The Independent, who writes that Hamm  “is an actor of quite limited range — or, more charitably, is frequently typecast — but he is a master of a type of depressive confidence. He specializes in portraying men who exude charm but clearly have something missing.”

However, for the general public the similarities between the Draper and Cooper characters are likely a selling point given the immense popularity of Mad Men during its original run, not to mention its current availability on various streaming platforms including Apple TV, AMC, and Amazon Prime.

Your Friends and Neighbors is engaging entertainment because it dissects a subject that is of perennial fascination, the elites and their money. How do they earn or inherit their money? And how do they cope if they lose it?

Coop is a character for whom the bottom has dropped out. He turns to crime because he has difficulty landing another comparably paid position due to a two-year non-compete clause. The series considers why the elites are obsessed with maintaining the appearance of wealth. Why couldn’t Coop swallow his pride and take a lower paying job until he was able to return to his industry? He certainly has enough connections.

The show also poses important moral questions, such as whether stealing from people so rich that they don’t even notice is truly a crime. A revealing moment in episode one takes place when Coop tries to sell a $300,000+ watch that he stole from the Millers, his neighbors. When a traditional pawnbroker refuses to purchase the watch from Coop because it lacks the original paperwork, he refers Coop to Lu (Randy Danson), a pawnbroker in a shadier neighborhood willing to buy the watch at a fraction of its original value without the papers. In this scene, Coop, who arrives in his Maserati wearing an expensive suit, realizes that he has crossed over into a different world with its own set of rules.

While the premise of a top corporate executive being fired and turning to burglary seems far fetched, Your Friends and Neighbors works because the events which led up to the firing are not; namely a consensual sexual encounter with a junior staff member who is not in his immediate reporting group.

Moreover, Coop’s realization that he cannot maintain his lifestyle for more than a few months without his pay check is also a very relatable situation for people across the economic spectrum. That Your Friends and Neighbors premiered the same week that the Dow Jones experienced  its worst decline in five years is yet another reminder that financial stability is not guaranteed for any of us.

I highly recommend Your Friends and Neighbors. It is well written, the action is fast-paced with Hamm, Peet, and the rest of the cast delivering strong performances. While the series’ premise of a hedge fund manager turned cat burglar is somewhat fantastical, the financial and social insecurity depicted are very real. 

READ MORE from Leonora Cravotta:

The Studio: Seth Rogen’s Satirical Take on the Movie Industry Lives Up to the Hype.

Oscars 2025: Politics Takes a Back Seat

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