In the decades after World War II, America was flooded with novels, movies and hot-button studies pondering the nature of suburbia — its comfort and consumerism, its safety and soullessness. Nobody explored these themes any better than John Cheever, whose elegantly devastating stories captured suburban life in both its sunlit splendor and shadowy desolation. Take, for instance, his famous 1956 story "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill." Its hero, Johnny Hake loses his prosperous job, and needing dough, begins robbing his friends' houses.
You get a 2025 riff on that same idea in the new Apple TV+ series Your Friends & Neighbors. Created by Jonathan Tropper — who made his name with a series of novels in the Tom Perrotta-Nick Hornby vein — this comic drama stars Jon Hamm as a hedge-fund hotshot whose cushy suburban existence goes kerflooey. Yet the show isn't merely about the flamboyant crisis of a handsome, privileged guy but about a culture in which wealth comes lined with rage and melancholy.
Hamm plays our hero and narrator, Andrew Cooper, known as "Coop," who gets canned for a sexual indiscretion and finds his career in ruins. He's already lost his family, which happened when he caught his wife, Mel (Amanda Peet) in bed with one of his friends, an ex-NBA player.
Outwardly Coop pretends nothing has happened, but internally he's changed. Where he once thought of his luxurious town of Westmont Village as paradise, he's now cynical about its values. He starts breaking into his friends' houses — stealing things like Patek Philippe watches worth $250,000 — and, in the process, discovering their secrets.
From there the show expands outward, introducing many other characters, such as Coop's sometime lover, Sam (Olivia Munn), who's caught in a nasty divorce; his money manager, Barney (Hoon Lee); his wife's Dominican house-cleaner Elena (Aimee Carrero); and his musician sister, Ali (Tony winner Lena Hall), whom Coop has taken in after her breakdown. They all figure in a storyline chockful of betrayal, theft, infidelity and murder — juicy stuff — not to mention Coop's sardonic voice-over mocking the country club fees and fetishized brands of scotch that define the suburban enclave he now disdains.
In recent years, we've grown used to shows in which alpha males like Coop all but wear a tattoo that reads "Toxic Masculinity." I'm pleased that Tropper takes the show someplace subtler, juggling the truth that his hero can be at once a wounded soul with whom one often identifies AND a self-centered man who oozes entitlement, from his Princeton degree and Maserati, to his discovery that the world's unfair — only after it's been unfair to him.
It's a perfect role for Hamm, who carries with him our memories of Don Draper's dark-souled charisma, then takes this sort of character in a new direction — funnier, sadder and more sympathetic. He's never been better. Although Coop starts out as a self-described jerk, his character grows wiser and more self-aware as the episodes unfold. Trouble is, robbery is a risky business that requires expertise more than self-knowledge. As his fence Lou warns him, "Nothing is so dangerous as somebody who doesn't know what they don't know."
Watching Your Friends & Neighbors, I found myself thinking that, in some huge ways, today's suburbs are undeniably better than they once were. They're less exclusively white and the wives have fulfilling careers. But in other ways they feel worse. Tropper offers little of the tender lyricism that makes Cheever's suburbs so seductive. It's not just that Coop's world is more grossly materialistic than before — with Rolls Royces and 40-grand bottles of wine — but that its denizens are far more cut off from one another and from any sense of nobler values.
In The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, Johnny Hake steals $900 from a friend and spends the story feeling guilty and ashamed that he's become a thief. In the far flashier Your Friends & Neighbors, Coop suffers little such remorse, not in the first six episodes anyway. Nor does the show judge him harshly for his thefts. He's got an expensive life to pay for, after all, and besides, his victims are just rich jerks like him.
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