Dave Nemetz Reviews Your Friends & Neighbors: Jon Hamm Can't Shake Don Draper In A Mediocre Rich-Guy Drama
After Jon Hamm wrapped up his iconic role as Don Draper on Mad Men in 2015, he consciously moved away from it, taking on more comedic and ensemble roles for the next decade. But now he's back playing another divorced rich guy stewing in dissatisfaction in Apple TV+'s new drama Your Friends & Neighbors (now streaming; I've seen the first three episodes). Maybe it's unfair to compare Hamm's current work to Don Draper, but with a role like this that's so similar, it's impossible not to — and Your Friends & Neighbors suffers from the comparison. It does add a crime twist in an attempt to set itself apart, but it's also overwritten and underbaked, and falls victim to too many Peak TV clichés.
Hamm stars as Andrew "Coop" Cooper, a hotshot hedge fund manager who finds himself scrambling to hang on to his upper-crust status after he gets fired. As he looks around his friends' lavishly decorated homes, he realizes how easy it'd be to rob them. So he starts doing just that, stealing expensive baubles and telling himself they won't even miss what he's taking. (Plus, his targets are all jerks, so we don't feel bad about them getting ripped off.) But we know that soon enough, his luck will run out — and then the wheels will really come off.
Of course, we've seen desperate suburbanites turn to petty crime before in Breaking Bad and Weeds, and a lot of Your Friends & Neighbors (hailing from Banshee and Warrior creator Jonathan Tropper) feels recycled from other, better TV shows. The Mad Men echoes are tough to shake, too: There are shots in here, like Coop looking forlorn in an elevator, that might as well be episodic photos from Mad Men. The premise is a solid enough start, but the show isn't even that much about Coop robbing houses, really. It's 90 percent rich people complaining.
It takes the whole premiere for us to get around to the premise, too, and it's fairly bland until then. Tropper's scripts toy with satire at times, but never fully commit to it. The supporting roles are mostly undeveloped, falling back on archetypes we've seen before: the withdrawn teen son, the unstable sister in need of medication. The dialogue is overly ornate, with long monologues filled with highfalutin references, and there's no distinct characterization: A Bronx pawnbroker talks the same as a Manhattan equities trader. We also get lots of ham-handed metaphors — and then narration to call attention to those metaphors, in case we missed them.
Hamm does what he can here to steady the ship. He knows how to do this, and do it well. Coop is a little less haunted than Don Draper and a little more playful... but still, we've seen these moves before. He drinks whiskey, he watches old movies, he broods. (Coop shares his inner thoughts in narration, but in Hamm's voice, it ends up sounding like a Mercedes commercial.) Hamm is always a compelling screen presence, and he hits some good notes here, but the writing doesn't rise to his level.
There are small touches here that I appreciate. Coop's ex-wife doesn't completely despise him, and Amanda Peet manages to give her more dimension than what's on the page. Plus, it's fun when Coop rattles off the specifications of stolen watches and wines and we see them on screen like sports statistics. But that points to a fundamental problem with Your Friends & Neighbors: It can't decide whether it wants to criticize all this obscene wealth or just gawk at all the expensive toys.
In the end, Your Friends & Neighbors is a fairly predictable, pretty blah rich-guy drama that just made me want to watch Mad Men again, mostly. Maybe casting someone other than Hamm would've avoided these comparisons, but then again, this show probably doesn't get made without Hamm attached to star. To anyone who watched him as Don Draper, all of this will feel very familiar. But Mad Men had truly great writing, some of the best in TV history. This... well, doesn't.
THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Overwritten and underbaked, Your Friends & Neighbors borrows from other, better shows — notably star Jon Hamm's Mad Men — but falls short by comparison.