As the star of Mad Men, Jon Hamm excelled as the sort of mid-20th-century type-A schmoozer who could do anything and get away with it. The list of things Don Draper could get away with almost certainly included sleeping with a junior colleague at his swanky Manhattan firm – which is where we meet Hamm at the start of Your Friends & Neighbors (Apple TV+ from Friday), a delicious, delirious satire of upper-middle-class life drastically upended and shaken every which way.
Hamm plays Coop, a suave, recently divorced hedge-fund bro who thinks nothing of hitting on a woman 20 years his junior whom he vaguely recognises from work. One thing leads to another – but not to any place Coop expected, and a high-paced career unravels more quickly than Don Draper could have knocked back a midday scotch.
He takes the bad news with a hangdog shrug – as well he might, given that his wife (Amanda Peet) has already left Coop for his best friend and thrown him out of their huge Hamptons home. Also, his 17-year-old daughter is dating a 20-year-old creep, and his son has no interest in speaking to him. Things can’t get any worse until they do – and so Coop finds himself at an impasse that Don Draper would never have seen coming. He is middle-aged and surplus to the requirements of everyone in his life.
At a certain level, Your Friends & Neighbors harks back to an older type of American melodrama: in its DNA you will find traces of a John Cheever short story for the New Yorker or an early Philip Roth novel. It might as well have been called The Pain of the White American Male – the twist being that Hamm brings a real comedic punch. He doesn’t care if we’re laughing with or at Coop, only that we are laughing – which gives what could have been a po-faced drama a fantastically fizzy quality.
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Your Friends & Neighbors: Jon Hamm is hilarious in this riotous, satirical romp
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It gets even funnier when Coop decides the best way to amuse himself is by stealing from his megabucks friends. They’re all so well off that they don’t even miss these empty trophies to their success anyway – and what a hoot Coop has until his recreational burglary takes a turn for the disastrous.
To reveal more would be to spoil. Suffice it to say that, amid the many ups-and-downs Coop experiences, Hamm is reliably hilarious in a romp that satirises the idea of masculinity portrayed in Mad Men. It’s a story about a rich white American that transcends satire or social commentary and is, in the end, nothing more or less than riotously funny.
