Like Mad Men, Your Friends & Neighbors sees Jon Hamm explore the emptiness beneath the glamour

It’s the opening scene of Apple TV+’s Your Friends & Neighbors (correct spelling, sadly), before a flashback reveals how slowly, then quickly, someone’s life can turn on a dime.

In your standard TV drama montage, we get the job straight out of college, the pretty wife, the house, the car, the children, the bigger house, the bigger car… and then, the deluge. The divorce. The being sacked by your boss while sharing a Jacuzzi. The solitary drink in a bar and the eternal question, what’s the point of all this?

We shouldn’t have expected anything different, not just because so many US TV shows and films set about puncturing the balloon of the American Dream – from Dallas to Desperate Housewives via the laser-sharp Succession – but because our Friends & Neighbors protagonist Andrew “Coop” Cooper is played by Jon Hamm, whose stardom has been built on his ability to carry the external trappings of success – a sports-star jawline, droll timing, looks good in a suit – while leaking the existential emptiness within.

Hamm’s been described as a character actor with a leading-man face, a complicated luxury of riches he brought to advertising exec Don Draper in Mad Men, the Holy Grail of “all that glisters” TV drama.

Over seven seasons, we learnt that Draper’s excellence in every department – work, women, cigarette smoking – was the deliberate construction of a much shadier, less soulful character intent on not being seen. Or, as Hamm put it, Draper was: “broken, a survivor who’s tried to make something out of his life. In many ways succeeded, in many ways failed”.

None of this is new. This month marks the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, still considered by many the definitive American novel. F Scott Fitzgerald painted his enigmatic millionaire party host in similarly bright colours – remember Robert Redford and all those shirts in the 1974 film! – before sticking the knife in.

Another pool, another metaphor for all that was precarious about building your dreams on the acquisition of things, what Coop calls “making some big bucks which only makes you aware of the bigger bucks you could be earning”.

We’ve had at least a century of such existential reckonings, but what have they given us? Nothing more than a brief escape behind picket-fences and palace walls, and consolation that, at least on screen for a while, those wealthier than us are no happier.

Meanwhile, in real life, we continue to accept business savviness and its rewards as proof of intelligence, superior vision, all things holy. In fiction, the montage is served up as a warning; in reality, it’s an instruction manual.

Some people just have it easier, I realise. The comedy 30 Rock once had a whole storyline about how life is better for people who look like Jon Hamm – with the character played by Jon Hamm. The actor himself struggled for years before his Mad Men big break, and recognises the luck you need to have any kind of good life.

I interviewed him a while ago and asked if people often assumed he and Draper were one and the same. He replied as drolly as you’d hope: “Everybody who meets me is tremendously disappointed.” And added: “Don was slick but, with him, I learnt how not to be in this world.”

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Your Friends & Neighbors is now streaming on Apple TV+ with new episodes airing weekly. Sign up for Apple TV+ here.

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