Jessica Kourkounis/Apple TV+Jon Hamm could not be more well-suited for his new role as Andrew Cooper, a recently divorced hedge fund manager who gets abruptly fired and resorts to stealing from his wealthy neighbors to make ends meet, in Your Friends & Neighbors (premiering Friday, April 11 on Apple TV+).
Yes, he could sell his fancy car rather than spend his time sneaking into nearby mansions, but the loss of his job so shortly after losing his wife has resulted in a bit of a midlife crisis — which is unfortunate for him, but a fun watch for us.
Of course, there’s more to it than that, because author Jonathan Tropper — who was also behind the hilarious and compelling film This Is Where I Leave You and the unique crime drama series Banshee — is at the wheel as showrunner and director of this well-written comedic drama showcasing yet another group of unhappy rich people.
“I lived in Westchester for 15 years and I know that world very well, and I just thought there was a really interesting story to tell there,” Tropper says of the inspiration for this series. “But the fun was figuring out a way to tell it that could subvert it at the same time. There’s a line in the pilot after he gets fired, where his boss says, ‘It’s not yours if you can’t keep it.’ Thematically that resonates through the show a lot — the notion that you spend your whole life striving to build your home and your family and your career, and it all feels incredibly permanent, but how many wrong turns in your life does it take before you lose it? I think a lot of people are so busy trying to get ‘there,’ that it’s only after they get there that they either realize it’s not where they belong, or they realize you don’t necessarily get to keep it.”
It’s not just Coop who is having this epic realization; it seems just about everyone in this very wealthy community is going through their own version of a midlife crisis. Cooper’s multilayered ex-wife, portrayed by Amanda Peet, is struggling with her own demons; his artistic, whimsical (and heavily medicated) sister (Lena Hall) is still pining for her former fiancé a decade after their breakup; and Sam (Olivia Munn), a fellow divorcée and love interest who wants more than Cooper can give her, is trying to navigate being a mother with dating in her 40s.
And even though just about every character has more money than the average person would know what to do with (and does not seem overly appreciative of this fact), they’re all still very relatable and human as they discover there really are some things money cannot buy.
“That’s the fun in writing a show that’s supposedly about wealthy people,” Tropper adds. “It’s really just about people struggling.”
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