Your Friends & Neighbors
No spoilers. Just analysis and appreciation. For what it's worth, five stars.
YOUR FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS is not a show about wealth. It is a show about obscene, excessive, wasteful living. It is about consumerism out of control, consumption of things that are neither sustainable nor necessary. For example, one episode brings our attention to a Richard Mille watch with a six-figure price tag that the owner keeps in a drawer and never wears because…well, it’s expensive, and while it is insured against theft or damage, he frankly has more watches than he knows what to do with. The main character on the show is Andrew “Coop” Cooper (Jon Hamm). (Everyone calls him Coop, except his sister Ali who calls him Andy and his kids, who call him Dad.) He’s a clever and ambitious hedge fund manager at the outset, but a one-night-stand with a woman who works at the same fund leads to his boss firing him and taking his entire client list. This is clearly not the beginning of Coop’s troubles, for we are shown through the first (and so far only) season that he was already disillusioned with his existence. His marriage, also, was already on the rocks prior to his one-night-affair. His wife, Mel, played by Amanda Peet, was having a recurring affair with his best friend. The loss of his job was a catalyst for, not just more trouble, but rather his awakening to an awareness of the absurdity of the lifestyle he had been leading. At first, he’s upset with his boss (Jack, played by Corbin Bernsen) for taking what he considered to be his (the client list). He earned those clients, he argued. He had a “right” to them. Jack rejects that argument, insisting that nothing Coop had was actually his. Indeed, Coop does take us through the number of mansions his family goes through—always upgrading, never owning, just borrowing more, and more, and more. Like the investment portfolios he managed, his whole life was in the abstract. He bought and sold value for his clients. He collected stuff for himself and his family so they could do things the way their friends and neighbors did things. Mounds and mounds of stuff, collected in draws, secured in closets and safes, just so you could be a legitimately recognized member of the club, not to be outdone, and not to be outcast.
What is this show like? Simply, it’s kind of part Desperate Housewives, part Ocean’s Eleven. The episode where Coop and Elena swap out somebody’s genuine Lichtenstein for a fake one in order to sell the real one to a sleazy gallery owner reminds me of the book Ripley Under Ground, by Patricia Highsmith. It’s full of satire and sex, high crimes and misdemeanors; full of contradictions and turned tables, like good girls and good guys doing bad stuff, and bad guys and bad girls attempting to do good stuff. In a way, there’s an echo of the Robinhood legend. Coop isn’t giving to the poor, but he is demonstrating the absurdity of stealing under appreciated luxuries from friends and neighbors just to keep his head above water in the club. It’s complicated. It’s sex, lies, and wifi chambers. (I didn’t even know what a wifi chamber was until this show! Coop uses one to check the wifi networks and devices in the houses he steals from without BNE. He just finds a door that’s unlocked and walks in. It’s a really safe neighborhood.)
The writing team, headed by creator Jonathan Tropper, make heavy use of metaphors. I feel like the defect in Coop’s Maserati (the trunk that keeps popping open while he’s driving) has to be a metaphor for something. But what? Brokenness? Being ripped off? The trick pony of the free market system that says if we roll the dice and play the game we too can get rich? The Assmobile might also be a metaphor. Everyone loves Nick, the driver, and owner of the “Ass Gym.” Work your ass off. Try not to have it handed to you.
Some of the lines are priceless. After the murder of a character (no spoilers) some of the guys stand around and speculate about what’s going to happen to the crime-scene house: “Murder homes trade for 25% below market. Maybe less.” I love that the season begins with a glimpse of the pivotal crime and, through Coop’s flashback, we arrive at that moment midway through the season. I like the “housekeeper network” and the kickbacks to the guys who install the security systems. That definitely echos Robinhood, but sadly it also echoes every mafia movie ever made, as well as Tom Ripley and the upstairs/downstairs dynamic in Downton Abbey. Yet I think my favorite thing about the show is just the closeness and relatability of Coop’s family. His parents give him a hard time. He and his sister, Ali, have a strong bond and take care of each other. Coop and Ali are “opposites” from an outsider-looking-in point of view, but they are the same in that neither is fooled by cultural absurdity. Coop and Mel, his ex-wife, seem to deeply love each other. Years of cultural bullshit left them estranged for a long time, but as Coop awakens and the fog clears for Mel, they begin to reconnect with whatever made them fall in love in the first place. I’m always intrigued by the idea of peeling off the mask and rediscovering buried secrets and unfulfilled yearning.
Your Friends & Neighbors is watchable on Apple, Prime, and YouTube.