Why eat the rich when you can watch their messy lives instead?
For those who enjoy their television dramas served with excessive wealth and comeuppance, Jon Hamm has a new entry with the Apple TV+ series, “Your Friends & Neighbors.”
He plays Andrew “Coop” Cooper, a hedge fund manager grappling with life after divorce when he loses his job and resorts to stealing from friends in his affluent neighborhood to maintain his lifestyle of the one percent.
Considering the current cultural conversation around the economy and consumerism, it feels like an especially propitious time for such a series. Hamm told CNN his new show is far from alone in that lane.
“There certainly does seem to be a moment, especially on television, of sort of rich people behaving badly. If you want to look at ‘The White Lotus’ or ‘Big Little Lies’ or ‘The Perfect Couple,’ there’s quite a few examples of it,” Hamm told CNN. “Maybe the time is right for a show like this to really kind of say, ‘What is it we’re doing? What are we trying to say?’ That life is only about acquiring larger and larger piles of stuff? Because maybe that’s not exactly the most fulfilling way to live a life.”
That viewpoint is something that his costar Hoon Lee, who plays Coop’s friend Barney Choi, shares.
“I think the show really points out that oftentimes the trappings of wealth or money itself is just acting as a sort of papering over or a proxy for questions that people aren’t really ready to answer about themselves, or maybe questions they find difficult to find an answer to,” Choi said. “It’s very telling to me that the whole premise of Coop’s thievery is that these incredibly valuable objects simply won’t be missed because they’re lost in the shuffle, which means they’re not intrinsically valuable to the people except in the moment.”
It’s a world that Jonathan Tropper, the creator and showrunner of “Your Friends & Neighbors,” knows very well.
Before he became a screenwriter, Tropper was a novelist who drew from his experiences in wealthy New York suburban communities. Though some characters make questionable moral choices, Tropper said the series is “not a very judgmental show.”
“We’re treating everybody like real human beings. There’s an element of satire,” he said. “There’s certainly a statement to be made about consumerism on the show, but we care about these characters and the things they’re dealing with are the things you would be dealing with in any economic level.”
That includes love, loss and longing.
Amanda Peet plays Cooper’s ex-wife, Mel Cooper, and Olivia Munn stars as Samantha “Sam” Levitt, a family friend whose relationship with Coop is complicated, to say the least.
Set in the fictional New York enclave of Westmont Village, Munn described the show’s portrayal of actual elites as “nuanced.”
“The men care just as much about the social status as the women do,” Moon said. “It’s a really interesting enclave of people and a subset of people who have priorities that are different than most of the world.”
“I think it’s a cliche and kind of old fashioned, but I think it’s illustrated in the show that women are less likely to have a high-power career,” Peet said. “So there’s this ‘ladies who lunch’ kind of culture in which whatever intellectual pursuits they may have had in their youth gets sublimated into acquiring material goods and acquiring the right signifiers for that echelon of society. And it’s repellent, but it’s also addictive and shows an incredible sense of desperation, I think.”
So did working on the show cause Hamm to view Hollywood a bit differently, given it’s also a world in which the pursuit of wealth and success reign supreme?
The “Mad Men” actor laughed and said he’s always been “cynical” about the industry, but he has hopes for his new series when it comes to the audience.
“At the end of the day, I hope that they’re entertained,” Hamm said. “We’re trying to make something that not only entertains people, but also makes them think.”
“That’s why we made it a little deeper than just, you know, kind of consumer porn.”