YOUR FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS – Season One

Andrew “Coop” Cooper (Jon Hamm) is a hedge fund manager whose perfect life is slowly slipping away. After a liaison with a co-worker, Coop loses his job. This hardship comes not long after he’s removed from his family home after his wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), cheats on him with his so-called friend Nick (Mark Tallman).

Your Friends & Neighbors starts with Coop waking up in a pool of blood in the foyer of his neighbor’s mansion, a dead body beside him. Coop’s voiceover informs audiences that this was a culmination of the last four months of his life. This intro is a misdirect because this series is less a crime caper and more a satire on gated communities and the narrow lives of those surrounded by wealth.

After being fired in disgrace as a hedge fund CEO, the divorced dad is struggling to maintain his life of luxury. An Ivy League graduate, Coop’s become spoiled by a life of expensive parties, charity dinners, and gossiping over rounds of golf. After being embroiled in an HR scandal, which is slightly brushed under the carpet in the show, no company wants to touch Coop. So, he resorts to robbing the mansions of his gated New York community.

However, the treasures he finds aren’t the expensive paintings, designer watches, and jewellery, but the priceless gossip. This isn’t the first story about the murky lives of the rich and famous, but what it does is effective. Now that Coop’s locked out of a life he created for himself and his family, he truly sees the absurdity of the power structure.

Your Friends & Neighbours starts slowly as it introduces Coop’s life, his fall from grace, and the supporting players. The leisurely pacing makes it a slog at times, but the introduction to this community ultimately pays off. The struggle with the premiere is that many of these moving parts feel predictable—from the new, younger, prettier girlfriend (Olivia Munn) to the moody teenage children (Donovan Colan, Isabel Gravitt), and stressed financial advisor (Hoon Lee).

By the third episode, the show reveals itself to be edgier and smarter than it initially appeared. The writing stands out from the black comedy ‘eat the rich’ theme that’s becoming increasingly popular (see: The White Lotus and Succession). It’s less concerned with their outward motives and behaviour, and more concerned with the psychology behind the wealthy. Those who initially appear archetypes of the genre are much more layered than expected thanks to creator Jonathan Tropper’s sharp writing.

As great as the writing is throughout Your Friends & Neighbours, Coop’s intermittent voiceovers do grate. His smugness works on screen when interacting with others, but comes across as too self-serving to work as a narration. As Coop plays around in the mansions of others, he opens up jewellery drawers and finds the most expensive watch graphics appear on screen, listing the worth of the items he is stealing. These types of obvious storytelling features belong in another show. Your Friends & Neighbours sometimes needs to trust that its audience is smart enough to read the nuance.

An early scene, in which Coop verbally battles a woman he’s trying to flirt with, is chronically overwritten. We already know the type of wise-cracking yet cynical man Coop is without this heavy-handed and frankly annoying writing. Luckily, after the opening few episodes, Your Friends and Neighbours realises that it doesn’t need to rely on such clumsy storytelling.

Your Friends and Neighbours smartly plays with our moral code too. Not many people will be on the side of the clueless rich who make insensitive comments throughout the show and frequently prove how tone-deaf they are. But can anyone support a former hedge fund manager robbing family homes and moving luxury items through illegal resale channels? Luckily, the series doesn’t make you choose sides, instead it ponders how people can be so desensitised to the imbalances of society.

What Your Friends and Neighbours really wants to say is that the rich are so disconnected from the world around them, and their humanity is because they’re so unfulfilled. This series peels back the white picket fences to reveal that those in this tax bracket are merely people acting as passing participants in their lives. The only people who really understand their lives are the cleaners, the gardeners, and the siblings who are looking at it all from the outside. Coop only understands the nuances of this world once he’s forced out of it.

Your Friends and Neighbours is the perfect use of Jon Hamm’s mix of wry humour and old-fashioned charm. You believe he is both a man suave enough to earn this life and slimy enough to lose it. It helps that Coop feels like a 21st-century update of his Don Draper character from Mad Men (2007-2015), with a similar discontented smugness and superiority complex. Hamm understands how to pitch that one man’s hero is another man’s anti-hero type of character. While this show is an ensemble cast of talent, it’s never at its best unless Hamm’s on screen.

Amanda Peet is also likeable as Coop’s ex-wife, who sought attention elsewhere after struggling to find happiness in his own marriage. The writing and performance understand that affairs and marriage breakdowns are complicated things. She’s never the villain of Coop’s story, nor is her behaviour celebrated by the show. She’s just another empty, lost woman, wandering aimlessly around her house, waiting for the next social invite.

Olivia Munn (X-Men: Apocalypse) also mines her role as Coop’s new girlfriend, Samantha, for depth. The show never plays into pitting women against each other or falls for the traps often set up by male-written shows. She’s self-destructive and feisty, still young enough to have not become another person sleepwalking through their own existence. It’s only a shame the show uses Samantha and her ex-partner’s infidelity as a subplot rather than exploring how it feels to be the discarded trophy wife, prematurely replaced by the newer model.

The subplot involving Coop’s sister Ali (Lena Hal) stands out for being out of place within the show. Her career as a singer derailed by her mental health and romantic failures. She weaves in and out of his life, always at arm’s length from the main plot. Thankfully, the show portrays her mental health issues sensitively, making it another character trait rather than a big plot point to mine for drama. Ali exists as a way to show audiences the alternative Coop, who eats pasta on the couch of his cosy flat rather than in the sterile kitchen of an empty mansion.

Despite a slow start, Your Friends and Neighbours kicks into gear when Coop befriends a young housekeeper, Elena (Aimee Carrerro). She works as a cleaner to try to help her immigrant family with their debt. It’s through her and her family’s story that the real exploitation of the working classes is displayed. This plot is underplayed, letting the audience come to their own conclusion about the ethics of their behaviour.

Ultimately, Your Friends and Neighbours struggles with identity. It’s at its best when a subtle yet biting satire of gated communities and the sleepwalking wealthy. The crime caper interludes get repetitive, especially when paired with Coop’s smug voiceovers. The procedural side plot that comes heavily into play in the last three episodes is far less interesting than the character-based drama surrounding Coop’s family and friends. With a second season already commissioned, Your Friends and Neighbours would benefit from understanding its strong points, which is the nuanced black comedy of the absurdity of wealth, and not Jon Hamm sneaking around mansions in the dark.

USA | 2025 | 9 EPISODES | 16:9 HD | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writers: Jonathan Tropper, Jamie Rosengard, Evan Endicott, Josh Stoddard, Jennifer Yale, Danielle DiPaolo & Bryan Parker.
directors: Craig Gillespie.
starring: Jon Hamm, Olivia Munn, Amanda Peet, Mark Tallman, Hoon Lee, Lena Hall, Aimee Carrero, Isabel Gravitt, Donovan Colan & Eunice Bae.