Apple TV+’s new series “Your Friends and Neighbors” opens with the image of its protagonist, Andrew Cooper (Jon Hamm), laid out in a pool of blood. It’s not his own, though: it belongs to the body of an unknown man, whose corpse Cooper walked in on when he was attempting to steal from his house. The Cooper that the series opens on is significantly different from the version we subsequently get to know in flashbacks, detailing what led up to this moment. After striving to get to the top, he resides in a picturesque neighborhood while maintaining a career as a New York hedge fund manager. However, his life comes crashing down after he sleeps with a younger employee.
This moment doesn’t even scratch the surface of how badly Cooper’s life has been going. Months prior to his firing, he walked in on his wife Mel (Amanda Peet) cheating on him with his best friend, Nick Brandes (Mark Tallman), a cataclysmic event that upended their already failing marriage. Single, unemployed, and desperate to still maintain the life that his wealth has gotten him, Cooper is left with no choice. He quickly turns to petty crime and realizes that there’s no one better to steal from than the wealthy residents of Westmont Village that he is surrounded by each day.
As the value of the objects Cooper steals increases, so does the weight that his crimes carry. Buried within each house that he steals from are dormant secrets and affairs that turn out to be more dangerous than he could have ever imagined. Backed by the grating cries and hushed whispers of these wealthy inhabitants, they let these mysteries fester until they become gaping wounds that take on a life of their own. Cooper justifies his thieving by admitting that most of his friends won’t miss these belongings and attempts to place himself outside of the black hole of despair that threatens to swallow him up.
“It’s not like I’d never noticed, but I guess now I was seeing it differently,” Cooper relays to the audience one night as he’s planning a heist. Because he has lost his job and his wife—along with their two children, who seem to want nothing to do with him—Cooper has become an outsider in the community in which he once thrived. This otherness propels him into a new world marked by self-doubt and precarity. However, when he teams up with housekeeper Elena Benavides (Aimee Carrero), it becomes clear that he still exists within the confines of the upper class. Even though his assets may dry up in six months, he cannot compare to the lives of the people he may get hurt in the midst of his pursuits.
Although the series isn’t brave enough to thoroughly explore this thread, it’s impossible to watch “Your Friends and Neighbors” and not think of the disparity of wealth between Cooper and the people whose lives he begins to encroach upon. It becomes a point of contention more than once, and although it takes the show more than a few episodes to get there, he finally seems to be reckoning with the mistakes he’s made in his life. Hamm portrays Cooper with the cockiness that made him the on-screen icon he is today, but at the series’ halfway point this cockiness slowly gets chipped away, morphing into a shame that is fascinating to watch Hamm convey.
While the series initially captures its audience’s attention with the prospect of watching a rich man stealing from his neighbors, the secrets that continue to unravel are what will truly reel viewers in. The people Cooper surrounds himself with are so far removed from reality that it makes watching them crumble under the weight of their own mistakes thrilling to watch. However, watching them become caught off guard by their own emotions—which they only reveal in bursts of anger or fleeting moments of introspection—shapes this series into a tragic, albeit shallow, examination of a class that is at war with itself.
When “Your Friends and Neighbors” introduces us to its cast of wealthy individuals, it’s easy to become filled with jealousy. The sun gleams off of the windows of grand houses and expensive cars, and the lives of each of these people seem so much easier than that of your average American. But the existence of wealth in their lives gives ample time for boredom to strike, leading to bad decisions that chip away at the quaint lives they’ve built for themselves. As the walls these characters have put up begin to crumble, the jealousy one may have formed quickly dissipates. By the time the final few episodes roll around, it gets easier to be grateful that you aren’t one of these characters, no matter how rich they are.
Seven episodes were screened for review.
