Your Friends and Neighbors Review: Jon Hamm Shines in Apple TV+’s Tonally Uneven Suburban Dramedy

Jon Hamm can sell anything. That’s not actually the premise of the new Apple TV+ series Your Friends and Neighbors, but it’s the general idea behind it.

In his first leading television role since Mad Men, Hamm is perfectly cast as a rich, overly privileged businessman (shades of Don Draper?) who must confront the existential emptiness of wealth and status when he loses everything and turns to a life of crime. 

Unsurprisingly, he’s great. It’s just unfortunate that the show around him is so uneven.

Your Friends and Neighbors is many things: A social satire, an ensemble dramedy, a meditation on the essentially meaningless nature of consumerism. Its great flaw is that it can’t seem to decide which aspect of itself should take precedence, and remains painfully muddled throughout the seven episodes available to screen for critics (out of nine).

Are we meant to be envious of the characters’ capitalist success (and excess)? Critical of their seemingly endless opportunities to fail upward? Entertained by how demonstrably out of touch they all appear to be? Are we supposed to feel sorry for the series’ main character or delight in the idea that he might be caught?

This is a series that wants to have it both ways at all times, and it’s what keeps it from reaching the heights its premise promises. A late-season twist seems poised to reorient the show in a new direction, but we’ll have to find out whether that prospect plays out satisfactorily together when the final episodes air. 

Hamm stars as Andrew “Coop” Cooper, a hedge fund manager who lives in a gated suburban community that comes complete with all the overpriced status symbols of American wealth. But despite all the fancy packaging, his life isn’t as picture-perfect as it seems.

Coop’s wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), left him after cheating on him with his best friend, Nick (Mark Tallman). His kids, the irritatingly monosyllabic Hunter (Donovan Colan) and tennis enthusiast Tori (Isabel Gravitt), don’t seem to like him all that much.

His house is no longer his, his family is distant, and he can’t even manage to make sure the trunk on his image-boosting Maserati stays closed most of the time. Getting fired from his high-powered (and high-paying) job is the icing on the cake of his struggle. 

Coop, being a typical American middle-aged male in the year of our Lord 2025, is too anxious, embarrassed, or simply attached to his status to tell anyone the truth about the financial calamity that has befallen him.

Nor does he downsize his house, sell the Maserati, or admit that he can’t afford to bankroll his ex’s home improvements, his daughter’s professional tennis coach, or a five-figure table at a charity gala. 

Instead, he turns to petty crime, boosting mega pricey watches and pieces of jewelry from the homes of his rich friends and neighbors, convinced that because they have so much, they’ll likely not notice the loss. He sells his ill-gotten gains with the help of caustic Bronx pawn shop owner Lu (Randy Danson).

There’s also a murder mystery—the first shot of the series is Coop regaining consciousness in a puddle of blood—but that doesn’t really come into play until toward the end of the season, and you’ll likely forget about it until you’re required to remember. 

To the show’s credit, Hamm is mesmerizing, an appealing mix of swagger and vulnerability, and much of this series is held together by little more than his charm.

Because nothing about this show works if you don’t mostly like its lead, Your Friends and Neighbors is loath to let Coop stray too far into Walter White-style antihero territory, and his cat burglar escapades are as much about luck as they are any sort of skill. (It also helps that his “victims” are all generally terrible people whose “losses” are negligible in the grand scope of their lives.)  

Unfortunately, there’s just not enough of such moments. Despite being ostensibly Coop’s story, in many ways, Your Friends and Neighbors is a standard Apple TV+ ensemble series in disguise. 

The show is sharpest when it leans into the social commentary and class critique at the heart of its premise.

As Coop’s late-night forays into his neighbors’ homes increase, the series (often through Hamm’s own voiceovers) comments on the excess of the lifestyles of the 1%-ers and the emptiness that can still result in lives that seemingly have everything.

The show flirts with ideas about everything from male loneliness and privilege, and Coop’s slowly growing outsider status puts him in a position to see how cliche and meaningless so much of the privileged world he inhabits actually is.

As eat-the-rich satires go, Your Friends and Neighbors isn’t particularly biting, with its on-screen breakdown of expensive watch brands and send-ups of next-gen toilets. But these are the moments when the show feels the most as though it actually has something to say. 

The addition of Dominican immigrant housekeeper Elena Benavides (Aimee Carrero) as Coop’s literal partner in crime adds some much-needed cross-class perspective, and watching the pair of them challenge one another’s preconceptions about the lives they’re living is compelling television.

Not to mention that it’s one of the only times we see Coop realize that even when he’s broke, he’s still viewing the world around him through an upper-class attitude that people like Elena don’t—and can’t—share.

Subplots abound that are connected to the show’s larger story by the thinnest of threads, and it’s not immediately apparent why any of us should care about Coop’s troubled sister’s (Lena Hall) hook-up with her ex-fiance or his business manager’s (Tong Hoon Lee) frustration at how much a backyard renovation is costing. 

Unfortunately, every character that isn’t Coop gets too little interiority to make their individual stories truly crackle.

Peet effortlessly walks a fine line as Coop’s ex, making Mel’s uncomfortable position as a woman trying to figure out what’s next after a longtime relationship fizzles relatable. But as she’s stuck in the position of either “Nick’s girlfriend” or “Coop’s ex,” there’s precious little time for an arc of her own. 

Munn is given the relatively thankless task of both playing a stereotupical trophy wife whose spouse has left her for a younger woman and the person having a secret affair with Coop, it’s no wonder that it’s her scenes with Peet that are her most interesting. 

Yet, despite its often inconsistent tone, Your Friends and Neighbors remains surprisingly watchable, a generally entertaining bit of early summer escapism that hints at a greatness we can only hope it will eventually achieve, either in its final episodes or the already-greenlit second season.

There are certainly worse ways to spend your time and, if anything, you’ll just wind up only vaguely disappointed that this show isn’t all it could be. 

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Your Friends and Neighbors premieres April 11 on Apple TV+.

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