The newest Jon Hamm-led drama, Your Friends and Neighbors, opens with a cinematic bang: a disoriented wake-up at a murder scene, followed by the now-standard rewind to “X hours earlier”. It’s a familiar trick—a jolt of excitement designed to grab attention before the story has earned it.
Let’s call this method of storytelling what it is: cheating. It’s a narrative sleight of hand that substitutes structure for substance. It’s a tactic increasingly used in the attention economy—grab the viewer before there’s anything for them to hold on to.
What follows in Your Friends and Neighbors is a parade of high-thread-count nihilism: extravagant homes in a presumably affluent New York suburb, exclusive bars and fitness clubs, and hot sex used not as character development but as candy—meant to light up the brain’s reward center and keep us coming back, distracting us from what little depth the story is actually offering. Hamm delivers a slick, insight-laced monologue to a 28-year-old woman at a bar that feels more like a fisherman’s trailer bait. It’s polished and seductive, but the promised sustenance is deceptive.
This isn’t a knock on the acting. Jon Hamm (as Coop) brings gravitas to even the flattest scenes. If anything, Your Friends and Neighbors‘ cast deserves sympathy for being trapped inside a prestige drama wearing the mask of a softcore ad campaign.
Coop begins as a finance bro archetype—slick, detached—but as his life collapses (divorce, betrayal, job loss), he finds pockets of emotional truth the script rarely earns. Amanda Peet (as Mel, his ex-wife) adds early depth to a role that could’ve been reductive. She starts guarded—distant, disappointed—but her empathy resurfaces as Coop’s unraveling becomes undeniable. When her vulnerability breaks through, it adds an unexpected dimension to an otherwise familiar role.
Lena Hall (as Ali, Coop’s sister) brings raw emotional texture—wounded, impulsive, and unmistakably human. Hoon Lee (as Barney, Coop’s financial advisor) quietly conveys a man cracking under elite pressure—suffocating beneath mortgages, expectations, and in-laws, yet he’s too proud to ask for help.
Olivia Munn (as Sam, Coop’s on-again-off-again flame) is magnetic and mysterious, especially as Your Friends and Neighbors hints she may be hiding something darker. Her performance balances surface charm with just enough detachment to keep you guessing—one of the few genuinely suspenseful threads the show offers.
Indeed, the problem with Your Friends and Neighbors‘ isn’t the delivery; it’s the design. The show mistakes provocation for meaning and dopamine for depth. It’s not just that sex is used gratuitously—it’s that sex is used as structure. It’s that substanceless bait again.
I felt a slight pull by the end of Your Friends and Neighbors‘ pilot episode. I sat with that intrigue until the premise came into focus: a wealthy man betrayed by his peers, spiraling into a life of crime, not for survival, but as a self-righteous middle finger to the world he once believed in. At first, Coop doesn’t see that world as shallow. He was that world. Yet once the ground gives – his wife cheats on him with his best friend, his boss fabricates a MeToo complaint to steal his clients, and his neighbors toast to his downfall over cocktails—he starts to see this world for what it is: not just cold, but lacking depth.
Your Friends and Neighbor gestures at satire, but it captures the ego’s collapse better. This isn’t a tragedy in the rich-people-have-feelings-too vein. It’s an ego-revenge fantasy. Coop doesn’t steal because he’s awakened. He steals because he’s trapped—no longer welcome in the world that made him matter, and unwilling to fade quietly. If he can’t win the game, he’ll break it.
In a world where moral language can be twisted into strategy, even his slimeball boss knows how to invoke social justice not out of principle, but for gain. The game hasn’t changed. The costume has. Greed adapts.
The show offers catharsis to the jaded, the burned, and the bitter—albeit of a different class—and then sells it back to them wrapped in sexy clothing, luxury watches, and moody lighting. Your Friends and Neighbors is not a critique of the elite, which is sorely needed in these times; it’s a product of them. Specifically, the producers, writers, and financiers behind Apple TV+—a platform owned by one of the world’s most valuable companies—stand to profit from a show that pretends to expose the sickness of status obsession while trafficking in its imagery.
As viewers of Your Friends and Neighbors, we’re meant to feel seen: Look how empty the elite world is! We’re given just enough recognition as the passive observers to feel validated, and just enough spectacle to stay numb. This show is not a mirror, however. It’s merely morphine.
Your Friends and Neighbors doesn’t invite reflection—it avoids it. It gestures at moral decay but never dwells long enough to ask why it festers. Viewers are not pushed to consider the personal costs of success of this type, what systems sustain our numbness as we watch, or whether we ourselves are complicit. Instead, we’re offered another hit of stimulation—another shiny lure.
The more we applaud shows like this—The Idol, Succession (in its more indulgent stretches), Industry, Billions, Euphoria—the more we normalize entertainment that scratches our wounds instead of healing them. These aren’t critiques of excess. They’re extensions of it.
Since Your Friends and Neighbors‘ pilot, the plot has thickened, but not deepened. We meet Detective Lin (Sandrine Holt), who begins investigating Coop’s destruction trail; Lu (Randy Danson), a pawn shop owner, who blackmails him into stealing for her full-time; and Elena (Aimee Carrero), a housekeeper from the Bronx, who catches Coop mid-theft—and decides to join him. Her character seems poised to introduce class complexity, but the show offers little more than a narrative device: an immigrant teaming up with a disgraced financier.
You can almost hear the pitch: It’s satire! It’s sexy! It’s socioeconomically diverse! Yet there’s no awakening here. Just more consumption. Your Friends and Neighbors is prestige TV for a spiritually bankrupt culture. Produced by Hollywood elites, distributed by Apple, one of the world’s most powerful corporations, and served to us as both critique and craving. It flatters our cynicism, so we keep watching