In “Your Friends and Neighbors”, in the first Friday on Apple TV +, Jon Hamm plays Andrew Cooper, called Cooop, a well -paid and well -placed coverage merchant who is dismissed from his work, apparently for having broken a corporate policy on fraternization in the ranks. He has already lost his wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), whom he discovered in bed with his best friend, Nick (Mark Tallman), triple NBA champion. And he is not doing so well with his children – Princeton Tori (Isabel Gravitt), who plays tennis, and the second school student (Donovan Cola), who plays the battery. What they have in common is a failure to communicate.
Coop and Mel and all their rich friends and neighbors live in an exclusive community somewhere in the switches of New York. To keep this universe entangled in balance, Coop sleeps with Sam (Olivia Munn), whose husband left her for a much younger model. We imagine that similar cases take place just beyond the limits of this series.
Although withdrawn from the family – he left his large fantasy house in an establishment rental (“it's small, but don't worry, it's also depressing”) – Coop always supports them in the style he worked for years to get them used to. (“When is it sufficient?” He wonders their material advantages.) It does not help he keep his secret, that he does not find any other work in his field and that his former boss Jack (Corbin Bernson) is sitting on money that Coop considers his (it looks like right). But the lie, its complications and its consequences, is, after all, at the heart of the theater and comedy, which could not get along without characters who hesitate to tell the truth.
There is something old -fashioned in these people and their power relations, including the decision of Coop that he prefers to fly rather than admitting that he is without work – toxic male insecurity. Mel obtains a scene or two to show that she has a job, as a teenage therapist, and a minor character is described as the best lawyer for the Defense of New York, but the female characters – wives and ex -wives – appear for the most part as subordinate and dependent of men. However, everyone, men and women, are dragging above all, at the Country Club horribly expensive, near the swimming pool, on the links, on the tennis court, at the gymnasium (Nick owns one), in yoga, during self -defense and during many parties – which does not mean that they have fun.
During one of these festivals, with the guests outside, Coop will root in the house of its host. He comes on a cover of extremely precious watches and costly pockets, a practice he will repeat in other houses, with their “piles of forgotten wealth that drag in drawers doing no property”. (He develops a gauged vision of luxury articles.) At this stage, the series has the impression of heading to the territory of John Cheever – something like his new “The swimmer”, “ About a man crossing the county of Westchester through the pools of his neighbors, but with a flight.
Jon Hamm, Amanda Peet and Mark Tallman play rich characters and country club in “Your friends and neighbors”.
(Apple)
A habit becomes a kind of livelihood, while Coop transforms its loot into species. This puts him in contact with dangerous characters, how much “Break the bad“Seems the relevant comparison. There is a meaning in which the situation is out of its control, but, it admits to the spectator:” Maybe I just loved it. “”
Ensuring that you will not have to work on the themes of the series for yourself, Narrator Coop is a bit like Joan Didion. “Here, scotching was like an AF – Ining religion; Whenever someone poured you with a drink, he had to give AF – Ining Ted to talk about scotch, then someone would inevitably be admitted to a bottle of everyone that you could no longer get and blah blah. The void started;
As has become too common, “your friends and neighbors” open onto an exciting scene of crisis before returning in time to show how we get there. Like a little show called “The white lotus”, “ There is an unidentified corpse, promising the violence to come, and most likely the police. Well, you might expect it anyway in a show on theft of things.
There is no really desirable result, from the point of view of a sympathetic spectator, apart from Coop and Mel who meet, because everything that points to this end is satisfactory and almost everything that indicates is … boring. (At the same time, I have never felt emotionally invested in the result, just, you know, intellectually.) The multiple sons of the series – including a focus on Barney (Hoon Lee), the Coop's financial advisor, who is confronted with the renovation plans of his wife and his disapprove of Old World energy, we want to be careful about the language. But they fill the space in a stretched story at nine o'clock.
As a man who succeeds supposedly undergoing a spiritual crisis, Hamm is back in the territory of Don Draper. (“I realized how much you could get away from your own life without going nowhere.”) But Don has never been the most interesting person of “Mad Men”, and Coop is less convincing than Mel, and his sister, Ali (Tony Winner Lena Hall), who has mental health problems, and which we meet on the lawn of his old fiancé, rolling up a guitar and singing the “false trees plastic ”. (Hunter's group performs Matthew Sweet's “Sick of Myself” – “In a ugly world and a lie / It is difficult to want to try” – to emphasize the suburban anomie in song.) As Elena, a young Dominican cleaning woman who falls with cooperative in her misdeeds, Aimee Carrero provides the necessary class and cultural variation.
Only seven episodes were made available for examination, so I really don't know which creator of Destiny Jonathan Tropper (“Banshee“) In reserve for his parents. I suppose that the characters can be thrown into a hole they need to go out or stay suspended from a cliff at the end of the season, but to the extent these people come together earlier than late.
