Your Friends and Neighbors Review

There is a lot going on in Your Friends and Neighbors, the new Jon Hamm-fronted drama from AppleTV+. A lot. There are a lot of characters (played by a great set of actors who are more than capable of doing what they’re asked to do – or at least, almost all of them are). And there’s a lot of plot. A whole heck of a lot. So much plot that, by around episode three, I started to wonder if the series would actually start paying off any of the many plot threads at any point before throwing more and more storylines at us. In short, not really. So by the time I made it through episode seven, the final one screened for critics, I was pretty frustrated with, well, everything.

First and foremost, if you’re someone who is a bit burnt out on stories about the very wealthy being pretty awful and vapid people – including your leading man who also has a number of other undesirable qualities that the writing doesn’t quite want to interrogate – Your Friends and Neighbors is going to be a hard pass for you. Trust me. But if you still want to watch the rich eat each other, well, there might be something for you here. Because this is, essentially, that kind of story. Although it’s also about a dozen other stories. Hamm plays Andrew Cooper, a hedge fund manager who gets fired from his job after sleeping with a lower level associate (who wasn’t under his management and who came onto him, so per Coop, it’s not his fault at all and he shouldn’t be punished). Of course, the partner who fires him also has it out for him and wants his book of business, so despite Coop being in the wrong, he cannot see that – and the show is a bit on the fence as well. He’s recently divorced after his wife, Mel (Amanda Peet, who doesn’t do much with the little she’s given), carried on an affair with his best friend, Nick (Mark Tallman, who is congenial but bland), a former NBA player. The duo are still trying to play house, much to the dismay of Coop’s 17-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son. Coop is sleeping with his neighbor, Sam (a perfectly fine Olivia Munn), whose own husband was caught having an affair with a much younger woman so she’s also getting a divorce – and an acrimonious one at that. Oh, and Coop’s mentally ill sister (Lena Hall, who is thankfully allowed to sing a lot) resurfaces needing Coop’s help.

Amidst all of that, Coop, short on cash and not wanting people to know it, decides he is going to rob his neighbors, since they certainly have things they don’t remember having – like expensive watches, expensive handbags, diamonds – and likely won’t miss until it’s too late. And really, in that kind of neighborhood, people tend to get sloppy and forget to lock doors because the private security company that watches over all the homes lulls them into a false sense of security. Of course, this scheme runs into roadblock after roadblock while Coop tries to juggle his personal life and his neighborhood personna. And that’s only scratching the surface of the series. If the series had just focused on Coop robbing the neighbors and trying to fence the goods, maybe escalating late in the season, this would have been an interesting series. A Breaking Bad mixed with Robin Hood kind of thing. But creator Jonathan Tropper and his writing staff just can’t seem to help themselves from loading up unnecessary arcs – every character in the opening credits gets at least one arc of their own, independent from Coop’s story, as well as several of the supporting characters – stuffing the story to the breaking point and, frankly, past it.

Hamm, Peet, Hall, Munn, and others within the cast are wholly capable of delivering layered and complex performances when given the characters to do so. Hamm’s Coop is really the only character in the series that has any heft to him, and a lot of that is negated by the series’ over-reliance on him as a narrator (we randomly get voice overs from him throughout the series, which is odd since there are entire sequences that don’t include him and he’s an unreliable narrator to say the least) as well as the writing not wanting to interrogate just who he is as a person. Sure, his wife and best friend betrayed him, but Coop is also a pretty odious guy. His “let me steal from the rich and make money to maintain my lifestyle” gambit is shown to be “wrong” in that it’s illegal, but the morality of it is skated over without much thought. And, when it comes to morality, the series should have a lot to say about just how its characters treat themselves, each other, and the world at large, but instead of trying to delve into that potentially murky water, the general feeling seems to be “rich people can get away with pretty much anything so long as they have enough money – so make sure you have enough money.” It all feels incredibly shallow and devoid of any teeth.

And boy do I wish there were some teeth here. Or at least a character willing to look at themselves or the people around them and stop and think about just what their lifestyle means. Occasionally Coop starts to tiptoe around that type of introspection, but alas, there’s always a new scheme or threat pulling him away in another direction before he gets a chance to do what he really needs to do. Yes, I know if he got all self-reflective, it would mean the end of the show. But there are only so many times that I can watch vapid rich folks naval gaze and fail to look outside of their gilded gates to understand the wider world before I just give up and stop watching. Unfortunately, Apple renewed Your Friends and Neighbors for a second season prior to the premiere of season one, so it looks like we’ll get even more of these thinly drawn and wholly unlikable (and unremarkable) characters down the road. But not for me. I’m getting off this ride.

Your Friends and Neighbors premieres on April 11 on AppleTV+. Seven of the season’s nine episodes were provided for review.