Your Friends and Neighbors is stuck in the wrong financial crisis
A rich man getting screwed over? In this economy??
Your Friends and Neighbors is stuck in the wrong financial crisis
One thing you can say in favor of Your Friends and Neighbors, the Apple+ show starring Jon Hamm as an unravelling finance bro, is that it’s definitely better than Apple’s other Jon Hamm vehicle, The Morning Show, in which he plays an Elon Musk-style space entrepreneur. The casting makes sense—if I wanted to make an otherwise unsympathetic rich white male character more likable, I would cast Jon Hamm too.
Your Friends and Neighbors is a perfectly fine show where Hamm stars as a hedge fund manager named Coop who gets screwed out of most of his accumulated wealth by the head of the fund’s CEO and is “forced” to steal from his friends to get by. And by “get by” we mean: pay for a second enormous house to live in after his ex-wife gets the first, bigger house in the divorce, and continue to make payments on his Maserati Gran Turismo, oh and buy his kid a drum set. He’s not exactly paying for groceries with change from his childhood piggy bank.
(And I didn’t even mention that he loses his job over a fabricated sexual misconduct accusation.)
The only thing preventing Coop from getting another equally high paying job in finance is a two-year non-compete and an ego that won’t let him take a less appealing job when it’s offered to him. This man, to be clear, is still extremely employable. And yet, he’s emboldened by his circumstances to start stealing rolls of cash and Patek Philippe watches out of his friends’ sock drawers. If he were played by anyone other than Hamm it would all be completely unwatchable.
It’s hard to believe this show was a fresh pitch and not an idea dusted off from the 2008 prestige TV boom and sold, at last, to the spendiest of streamers.
It’s hard to believe this show was a fresh pitch and not an idea dusted off from the 2008 prestige TV boom and sold, at last, to the spendiest of streamers. A hero who loses his hedge fund job? In THIS economy?? Not only do we not care about this particular kind of man right now, it’s impossible to imagine a current scenario where the finance bros are the ones losing their bag.
Your Friends and Neighbors feels like it belongs on Showtime circa 2009, when banks were failing and you could imagine the people losing their jobs and homes as victims of a larger scheme they didn’t perpetrate themselves. But now when the people losing jobs to economic instability and inflated AI claims are designers and writers and artists and recruiters and marketers who were already making do with stalled salaries, an inflated cost of living and a flaming hot housing market, I think we’re less inclined to care about the trials and travails of someone who’s fallback plan is a slightly less well-designed mansion with a smaller pool.
Coop doesn’t seem to be suffering in any recognizable way. He’s not Easy Applying to jobs well below his seniority level on LinkedIn. He’s not cutting back on steak dinners. He’s not moving back in with his aging parents. The only person who has suffered a real setback is his mentally ill sister who has to give up her apartment, which Coop has been paying for, and move into a bedroom in her brother’s mansion. I personally think the loss of your own space is one of the worst things that can happen to you and yet I cannot help but think: now you have a pool, though. Coop is enduring the greatest trial of his life—his dark night of the soul—and viewers can only be jealous of him the whole time.
Ok, so his wife had an affair with his best friend, that’s bad. But he’s still having a breakdown in a house a millennial could never dream of possessing.
It’s a tough comparison to the breakout TV show of the 2008 recession: Breaking Bad. The premise is similar on the surface: good guy gets desperate for money and goes bad trying to get it. And yet, a teacher resorting to making and selling meth would be a much more poignant illustration of the current destruction of both the economy and the Department of Education. Coop’s behavior only shows us that he probably never was such a good guy after all, that his penchant for stealing now is just an extension of the finance philosophy that made him rich in the first place. The only thing that keeps us on his side at all is that every one of his friends is a slightly bigger asshole than he is. Also, he’s played by Jon Hamm.
But I think our current environment calls for Hamm to activate his powers as a villain. In the most recent season of Fargo, he also leaned into his skills playing a rich white man, but this time an abusive, violent, utterly immoral rancher terrorizing his ex, his son, his enemies, his friends and neighbors. It’s a character that much more closely reflects the rich white men of our times. It’s the Hamm we need right now.