Your Friends and Neighbors Are No Friends of Mine
(Light spoiler thoughts on the first three episodes)
We’re deep into the era of watching miserable rich people squirm. The White Lotus perfected it. Now, Your Friends and Neighbors wants to play the same game: rich people facing ruin who, for all intents and purposes, are still rich.
This time it’s Jon Hamm’s Andrew “Coop” Cooper — a direct descendant of Don Draper — who feels like he's bought the American Dream Don once sold. Hamm, ever the professional, has been selling the show hard. He’s said Coop’s story is “of the time,” the way Mad Men was during the Obama/Romney years — but is it really? Hamm’s almost as good at selling things as Draper. That’s the job. And framing Coop as Don’s spiritual inheritor? That’s how you sell a show.
But the pitch only gets you so far. What’s left is the show itself — and it’s stuck between wanting to roast the rich and making sure the rich are still comfortable enough to laugh along.
Hamm is great at being a likable guy who plays deeply unlikeable characters, and Coop is no exception. There’s vulnerability there — flashes of insecurity, glimpses of decency — but ultimately, he’s at best the least bad of a bunch of awful rich people. It makes it hard to fully root for him (and to be fair, I'm not sure you're supposed to). His likability makes you want to lean in, but the writing hasn’t yet given you a compelling reason to stay.
Maybe I’ve just been around enough wealth-adjacent spaces (I’ve been to a Nick Brandes party, fancy toilets and all) to find the whole thing more exhausting than entertaining. BTW, Nick is played by Mark Tallman, great name for that guy. We love nominative determinism.
This is a show full of characters fighting to transcend their own writing. Amanda Peet (Mel Cooper) is perfect casting: sharp, intelligent, quietly wounded. But right now, the scripts have her playing scold more than human being. Like the three female friends in White Lotus season 3, you get the dynamic because of the performances, not the expository writing.
Olivia Munn — who plays Sam Levitt — has always felt like an odd fit to me. I remember Attack of the Show and have always found her career puzzling. I never finished The Newsroom, supposedly her critical high point, and don't remember her in it if I got that far. I do remember her turning down the role of Vanessa in Deadpool (the role that went to the great Morena Baccarin) because she wanted to play the superhero, not the superhero's girlfriend— a fine sentiment, if she hadn’t gone on to play Psylocke in the completely forgettable X-Men: Apocalypse while Baccarin stayed on to star in two wildly successful Deadpool films arguably with a lot more depth than just "eye candy". Bad beat.
She tends to bring an intense, raw energy even when a lighter touch would work better (New Girl, anyone?). Same here. She’s good, her energy just doesn’t quite match the tone of this show. That's not necessarily her fault, just perhaps another bad choice/fit. I'm holding final judgement till the end of the season.
That said, Sam herself is fascinating. Unlike the other characters, she didn't start rich. She was a waitress who married into it, and her vulnerability—especially around Coop—feels real. They're not in love. They’re just offering each other kindness and support in the wreckage of their lives. It’s a very believable rebound.
In contrast, Sam’s ex-husband Paul (Jordan Gelber) is a walking stereotype: fat, gross, cheating diner tycoon. When Coop defends Sam’s honor and things get physical, you’re more worried about the $30k bottle of wine than the characters. If the show wants that triangle (Paul, Sam, Coop) to work, it needs to flesh Paul out beyond “fat asshole.”
And that’s the real tragedy of this show’s early episodes: if you cast actors this good, you don’t need clunky exposition or stock character writing. You can trust that they'll show the relationship dynamics in a glance, a hesitation, the weight of a pause. Instead, the scripts overload scenes with overly explicit dialogue. When you deliver something heavy-handed with the full gravitas of Jon Hamm or Amanda Peet, it just makes it sound even worse. If you have the right actors, your job isn’t to narrate the connection for the audience. It's to give them smart, human dialogue and trust the chemistry and performances to do the rest.
Your Friends and Neighbors is written like it’s afraid we won’t “get it” unless a character says the subtext out loud. It doesn't make the emotions clearer, it makes them cheaper. At the end of episode three Coop says:
"If you’re looking for metaphors, look no further than a man vomiting into a $30,000 toilet that isn’t connected to plumbing. Though, once you get into a certain frame of mind, everything in this town is a fucking metaphor, which can make it really hard to figure out what, if anything, is real."
Shauna's high school diary entries in Yellowjackets are better written than this.
At least the kids are a pleasant surprise. In early episodes, Hunter Cooper (Donovan Colan)—headphones on, needing a drum kit—started out just kind of being there. I called him MCR in my head (I probably still will, Hunter Cooper is just mean). But by episode three, he's becoming a real person. Watching him witness his grandparents mistreat his aunt (Coop’s sister Ali)—seeing the cruelty and dysfunction play out in real time—you realize he might be starting to understand his dad, and himself. Later, his psilocybin-fueled crash-out at a house party feels less like a bad trip in a beautiful bathtub and more like a genuine emotional spiral. (Sidebar: Are high school kids in a band still playing guitar indie rock? I thought kids hated guitars these days.) His sister Tori (Isabel Gravitt) is another highlight. Her drive and ferocity on the tennis court are the same muscles Coop flexes at work. (More of that parallel, please.) Maybe by the end of the season she'll be the one punching her boyfriend in the dick.
The pilot had every Prestige TV sin. Too much talking. Clunky "how did I get here" in-media-res openings. Scenes that restart the story every ten minutes. One particularly bad offender: Coop and Liv’s (Kitty Hawthorne) bar scene, which felt like a Roger Dodger ripoff. (No surprise — apparently that scene was rewritten thirty times.)
Also, enough with the reality TV editing style. I get that people are scrolling their phones while they watch now, but it’s painful to see important story beats repeated three or four times just to make sure the audience doesn’t miss it. It’s not enough to show a "Welcome to Twin Peaks" sign. Now you have to have a character say "I guess we're in Twin Peaks now," and another character repeat it an episode later. It’s insulting.
While on the topic of Lynch, it reminds me how important subtlety can be in visual storytelling. The first time I remember learning about visual metaphor was the opening to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet: shots of a perfect suburban lawn, bright roses, and picket fences... before zooming in deeper, deeper, until you see beetles roiling just beneath the surface. No one needs to explain it to you. You feel the ugliness underneath the idyllic world.
Compare that to an attempt at a similar metaphor: Mel notices a hole in her sweater, then immediately opens a wardrobe and gets blasted in the face by a (bad CGI) cloud of moths. It’s trying for the same “things are rotting under the surface” feeling, but without any restraint or subtlety. It’s not unsettling — it’s cartoonish. Imagine how much better it would have landed if Mel had kept noticing small holes in her clothes, then she finally sees the single moth as she lies down at the end of episode three. The show goes for the hammer when it needed the scalpel. Trust your audience to get it, even if it's subconscious.
Speaking of excess: the show started life as a novel, and you can tell. The exposition-heavy pilot is what happens when you try to cram 100 pages of a book into 50 minutes of TV. A meeting with Jon Hamm inspired the writer to pivot to a series, but they didn’t kill enough darlings in the process.
Some bright spots:
Aimee Carrero’s Elena, the Coopers’ housekeeper, shows up in episode three — way too late for someone top billed, but promising. She’s on the other end of the gun we here being cocked at the end of episode three right?
Randy Danson’s Lu, the pawn shop owner, actually forces Coop into a real world with stakes and desperation. More of that, please.
Hoon Lee’s Barney Choi — pure chaotic energy, great comedic relief. Let’s spend more time in his messy house. I’ll enjoy the shade from all the trees he just had delivered.
Lena Hall’s Ali Cooper (Coop’s sister) might be the best thing about the show. Introduced with compassion, not pity (and performing a great cover of Fake Plastic Trees). I was worried she'd be the "save the cat" character to make us like Coop — but she’s growing into a whole world of her own. Watching her rescue MCR from a bad trip was maybe the first time the show felt truly human.
Quick sidebar: I saw Corbin Bernsen (Jack Bailey) on the street once and was mildly starstruck. I’m a Psych fan for life. Seeing him chew scenery as a corporate villain here is a treat.
And look, you’ll notice I haven’t talked much about the main premise yet: Coop robbing his rich friends after getting fired. That’s because it’s boring. It’s the sales pitch of the show, not the heart. The onscreen graphics, the Fight Club-lite narration, the Mercedes-Benz voiceover vibes from Hamm—none of it lands. The potential is in the secrets he uncovers: SAT cheating, wife caught Iuvenis in flagrante delicto with her high school daughter’s boyfriend. The show needs to let the cracks show in a real, human way, not just throw up another sexy scandal and call it depth.
So why do I watch shows about rich people I don’t particularly like? Because when they’re good, they have something to say about being an adult—about ambition, compromise, betrayal, aging—with or without the money. Because I like shows about adults that don’t have super powers, cannibalistic tendencies, or are fighting zombies (although those are all good too). Because I love seeing great actors stretch in new directions. I want Your Friends and Neighbors to be great. I want it to be more than a soft punch at wealth that still lets the wealthy feel good about themselves. Save that for White Lotus season 4.
I’m not asking for a revolution. Just a little less metaphor and a little more mess. And to see James Marsden, who's been cast for the already greenlit season two.