NEW YORK (AP) — “Your Friends & Neighbors” begins with a as soon as high-flying hedge fund supervisor waking up in another person’s luxurious home, subsequent to a useless physique and in a pool of blood.
How he ended up there consumes the primary season of this compelling Apple TV+ sequence, which stars Jon Hamm and takes a peek on the lives of the ultrarich in a leafy New York suburb.
“I was interested in writing about the status symbols, about the way wealth informs community,” says creator, showrunner and producer Jonathan Tropper. “And then at the same time, what I really wanted to do is subvert it a little bit and talk about how impermanent it all is.”
Like “White Lotus” and “Big Little Lies” earlier than it, “Your Friends & Neighbors” revolves across the woes of the rich and questions why we chase social standing.
“Why is more always better?” asks Hamm. “Is the only metric really the accumulation of these larger and larger piles of stuff, whether it’s money or goods or houses or wives or what have you? We’re kind of arrived at this time where this story is particularly resonant.”
A cat burglar is born
Hamm performs Princeton-educated hedge fund star Andrew Cooper, who finds himself divorced and unemployable. Drowning in debt, he turns to petty crime: Breaking into neighbors’ properties to steal $350,000 watches, Hermès purses and $32,000 bottles of chardonnay.
He rationalizes the thefts are only a fast repair till he figures out a method to get his cash faucet again on. Plus, he’d by no means be a suspect. “I figured, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’” he thinks.
“It’s the old story about what happens when you go bankrupt. It happens very slowly and then all of a sudden,” says Hamm. “Coop’s at the all-of-a-sudden part.”
Tropper says his present is exploring the notion of entitlement and the way self-worth might be wrapped up in what folks personal. He is additionally exhibiting how near catastrophe all of us actually are.
“We’re all handed a script: Do well in school, go to these colleges, get these jobs, and you’ll be set. And you can do all that and excel and get it all right and the system may still spit you out. That’s really what this show is about. It’s about this man who is in a simmering rage that the system he bought into spit him out.”
There is a perverse enjoyment of watching Hamm’s Cooper saunter into mansions when he is aware of the homeowners are away and make off with luxurious items, changing into a form of down-on-his-luck burglar sticking it to the wealthy.
Quiet desperation
Cooper turns into acutely conscious that life on this well-to-do suburb is fueled by conspicuous consumerism and nation membership boasting. “It’s not like I’d never noticed,” he says as the narrator. “But I guess now I was seeing it differently.”
Among the many issues he sees are the methods folks have monetized the vacancy some males really feel after they attain the highest of the mountain — profession, marriage, children and status — and but really feel unfulfilled.
“Scotch, cigars, smoked meats, custom golf clubs, high-end escorts — entire industries built to cash in on the quiet desperation of rich, middle-aged men,” Cooper notes.
Cooper quickly grapples with the underworld to fence his stolen merchandise whereas additionally hooking up with a divorcee (Olivia Munn) and scheming to get his outdated job again. His children resent him and his unstable sister wants him.
Munn says its nice to see Hamm faucet into considered one of his most cherished roles — Don Draper in “Mad Men,” a fancy character with a flawed private life.
“In this case, he’s this like finance bro, for whom everything has come so easily. And he’s sort of despicable, but you kind of feel sorry for him at the same time, somehow,” she says. “It’s really fun to go on the spiral with him.”
The origin of ‘Your Friends & Neighbors’
Tropper got here up with the premise after residing for a few years in New York’s Westchester County, through which communities like Scarsdale and Larchmont are among the many nation’s wealthiest.
Tropper was in a group adjoining to the form of tremendous rich one depicted within the sequence and watched the monetary upswings the place “people started to make stupid amounts of money.”
“I was a novelist. I was just feeling that it can’t possibly be sustainable,” he says. “As a non-finance person living amongst financial people, I had an insider’s access, but an outsider’s point of view.”
He’d drive down the pristine blocks and marvel what troubles have been occurring behind the closed doorways of the mega-mansions: “What you realize is a lot of these are built on foundations of rot.”
Getting his man
Tropper pitched the sequence to Hamm and did not write the present till the actor was on board. In his head, Cooper was all the time performed by Jon Hamm.
“He’s an actor who really walks the line perfectly between comedy and drama. And, as a result, he can behave badly and you will still sympathize with him,” says Tropper.
“Hamm is a classically good-looking man who folks nonetheless discover relatable. And perhaps that’s as a result of everybody’s delusional, or perhaps it’s as a result of he has a sure high quality that he exudes that also makes him an Everyman, though he’s an Everyman who appears like Jon Hamm.”
Hamm, who was a fan of Tropper’s novels and TV exhibits that embrace “Banshee,” “Warrior” and the science fiction drama “See,” calls the author a gifted storyteller and jumped aboard.
“He pitched this idea to me, which I thought had a lot of potential, not just to be an entertaining vehicle but to think about where are we as a culture and society,” says Hamm.
What’s subsequent?
Season two of “Your Friends & Neighbors” was greenlit even earlier than the primary episode premiered. Tropper would not understand how far the sequence will go however it will possibly’t stand nonetheless.
“I don’t believe we do five seasons of a man robbing houses,” he says. “As soon as we’ve bought the viewer shopping for into this neighborhood, on this world, Coop’s survival techniques will change.
“I think the important thing with his journey is that he will never trust the system again. So we watch him struggle between wanting to keep up this lifestyle but rejecting the traditional ways of achieving it,” he provides.
“I think we’ll continue to be able to explore this community in this neighborhood and the wealth divide in our country.”
