In ‘Your Friends & Neighbors,’ Jon Hamm is back in Don Draper territory

In “Your Friends and Neighbors,” premiering Friday on Apple TV+, Jon Hamm plays Andrew Cooper, called Coop, a well-paid, well-placed hedge fund trader who is fired from his job, ostensibly for violating a company policy about fraternization in the ranks. He has already lost his wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), whom he discovered in bed with his best friend, Nick (Mark Tallman), a three-time NBA champ. And he’s not doing so well with his kids — Princeton-bound Tori (Isabel Gravitt), who plays tennis, and high school sophomore Hunter (Donovan Colan), who plays the drums. What they have in common is a failure to communicate.

Coop and Mel and all their wealthy friends and neighbors live in an exclusive community somewhere in the commutable vicinity of New York City. To keep this entangled universe in balance, Coop is sleeping with Sam (Olivia Munn), whose husband has left her for a much younger model. One imagines that similar business goes on just beyond the bounds of this series.

Though removed from the family — he’s moved out of his big fancy house into an unfancy rental (“It’s small, but don’t worry, it’s also depressing”) — Coop is still supporting them in the style to which he worked for years to accustom them. (“When is it enough?” he wonders of their material advantages.) It doesn’t help that he’s keeping his firing a secret, that he can’t find other work in his field and that his old boss Jack (Corbin Bernson) is sitting on money Coop regards as his (one would say rightly). But lying, its complications and consequences, is, after all, central to drama and comedy, which could not get along without characters who are reluctant to tell the truth.

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There is something old-fashioned about these folks and their power relations, including Coop’s decision that he’d rather steal than admit he’s out of work — toxic male insecurity. Mel gets a scene or two to show that she has a job, as a teen therapist, and one minor character is described as the best defense lawyer in New York, but the female characters — wives and ex-wives — come across for the most part as subordinate to and dependent upon men. Still, everybody, male and female, mostly just hangs out, at the horribly expensive country club, by the pool, on the links, on the tennis court, at the gym (Nick owns one), at yoga, at self-defense class and at numerous parties — which is not to say they’re having any fun.

At one of these parties, with the guests outside, Coop goes rooting around his host’s house. He comes upon a cache of expensive watches and pockets an extremely valuable one, a practice he’ll repeat in other houses, with their “piles of forgotten wealth lying around in drawers doing no one any good.” (He is developing a jaundiced view of luxury items.) At this point the series feels as if it might be heading into John Cheever territory — something like his short story “The Swimmer,” about a man crossing Westchester County by way of his neighbors’ pools, but with robbery.

Jon Hamm, Amanda Peet and Mark Tallman play wealthy, country club-going characters in “Your Friends & Neighbors.”

(Apple)

A habit becomes a sort of livelihood, as Coop turns his loot into cash. This brings him into contact with some dangerous characters, at which point “Breaking Bad” seems the relevant comparison. There’s a sense in which the situation is out of his control, but, he admits to the viewer, “Maybe I was just liking it.”

Ensuring that you won’t have to work out any of the series’ themes for yourself, narrator Coop sounds a little like Joan Didion. “Out here, scotch was like a f—ing religion; every time someone poured you a drink they’d have to give a f—ing Ted Talk about the scotch, and then someone would inevitably chime in about some bottle they once had you couldn’t get anymore and blah blah. I think at some point it just started to dawn on everyone that this was it; these houses, these wives, these jobs, this would be the sum total of their lives. Their futures were already written, and so the quest to stave off the emptiness began; scotch, cigars, smoked meats, custom golf clubs, high-end escorts, entire industries built to cash in on the quiet desperation of rich middle-aged men.”

As has become too common practice, “Your Friends and Neighbors” opens with an exciting scene of crisis before shifting back in time to show how we get there. Like a little show called “The White Lotus,” there is an unidentified dead body, promising violence to come, and quite possibly the police. Well, you might expect them anyway in a show about stealing things.

There is no really desirable outcome, from a sympathetic viewer’s standpoint, other than Coop and Mel reuniting, because everything that points toward that end is satisfying and most everything that points away from it is … annoying. (At the same time, I never felt emotionally invested in the result, just, you know, intellectually.) The series’ multiple threads — including one focused on Barney (Hoon Lee), Coop’s financial advisor, who is dealing with his wife’s renovation plans and his disapproving old-world Korean in-laws (Barney is Korean but doesn’t speak the language) — take energy away from the plotline we’re meant to care most about. But they do fill up space in a story stretched to nine hours.

As a supposedly successful man undergoing a spiritual crisis, Hamm is back in Don Draper territory. (“I realized how far you could drift away from your own life without actually going anywhere.”) But Don was never the most interesting person in “Mad Men,” and Coop is less compelling than Mel, and his sister, Ali (Tony winner Lena Hall), who has mental health issues, and whom we meet on the lawn of her former fiancé, strumming a guitar and singing Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees.” (Hunter’s band performs Matthew Sweet’s “Sick of Myself” — “In a world that’s ugly and a lie / It’s hard to even want to try” — to further underscore the suburban anomie in song.) As Elena, a young Dominican housekeeper who falls in with Coop in his misadventures, Aimee Carrero provides needed class and cultural variation.

Only seven episodes were made available for review, so I really don’t know what fate creator Jonathan Tropper (“Banshee”) has in store for his folks. I suppose the characters may be thrown into a hole they need to crawl out of, or left hanging from a cliff at the season’s end, but to the extent that this is a story, with a shape, rather than merely a series of events, it isn’t screaming for another nine (or multiple of nine) episodes to conclude its business, to make its points. I could certainly stand to see more of Ali/Hall, it’s true. Still, I’d like these people to get it together sooner than later.