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Does Your Friends & Neighbours love its unhappy, very wealthy characters, or despise them? Does it laugh at the 1%, envy them, pity them? It does all of the above at once and, as we return to the fictional enclave of Westport, New York – an obvious stand-in for real financiers’ playground Westchester – this mischievous US dramedy is still a rich dessert of a show, unhealthy but oh so moreish.
Jon Hamm is Andrew “Coop” Cooper, a role that, if it were given to any other actor, would require them to do their best Jon Hamm impersonation. Sturdy, smooth – this is a man made of oak and mahogany, when the rest of us are bags of twigs and jelly – and seemingly always with a tumbler of $500 whisky in his fist, he is blessed with the ability to charm any man/woman into a deal/his bed. Other men have been handed their place in the banking elite and are now drifting through a life of luxury; Coop is better at playing the game than they are because he is sharp enough to see what a sham it all is. He has that trademark deep Hamm gaze, a tension behind the eyes.
But whereas Don Draper in Mad Men looked like that because he was raging with secret shame, Coop’s fear of being found out is a gentler beast, the driver for a comedy caper. In the very first episode of Your Friends, he was ousted from his job at a Manhattan hedge fund. This followed the end of his marriage to Mel (Amanda Peet), the mother of his two teenage children, after years of Coop barely being present in the household.
Wronged and rejected, Coop has chosen crime as the remedy for his disaffection and for his need to maintain a very high income. His neighbours have giant houses filled with grotesquely expensive hardware and collectibles, bought on a whim and never used or enjoyed. They have exquisite Swiss watches tucked in drawers and priceless artworks hanging in rooms they never go into. They were not inconvenienced by paying for this treasure and would not even notice if it were no longer there. So Coop breaks in when he knows his associates are out at a swanky social function, steals their swag and sells it for cash.
In season one, Coop tried to establish his new burgling business, forging uneasy alliances with two women as smart as he is, but without the privilege: intel on which house to hit next comes from ambitious housekeeper Elena (Aimee Carrero), while the goods are fenced by streetwise pawnbroker Lu (Randy Danson). Watching Coop’s normal authority being repeatedly punctured by Elena and Lu, a humiliation he is generous enough to accept, is endlessly enjoyable. This fun was interrupted in season one by Coop being framed for murder, but he beat the rap and is now free to break and enter once more.
His comeback job is Your Friends season two in a nutshell. Inside some mansion or other, Coop is suavely ransacking the study, bantering spikily via walkie-talkie with Elena, his lookout and getaway driver. He finds a Montblanc pen: its value, $165,000, appears on screen as, like readers of a broadsheet colour supplement who are both appalled and aroused by how unaffordable the recommendations are, we tut and coo at the obscene extravagance. Then, disaster! Coop hits the floor. He’s approaching 50 now and he’s put his back out. Burglary is a young man’s pursuit.
Elena being unable to haul Coop to his feet forces the pair to call a friend for help and thus to add a new member to their clandestine gang. Separately, the arrival of the brash, super-wealthy Owen (James Marsden) upsets the delicate Westport ecosystem. But Coop’s sudden frailty also introduces a theme of the new season: ageing. He is not the infallible beefcake he used to be, while Mel is facing the perimenopause and the looming misery of her kids going to college, leaving her alone in her pristine labyrinth of a house. Hamm and Peet are brilliant at conveying the wistful sadness of middle-aged exes, bonded together for ever by the mistakes they made while they were doing their best – feelings that aren’t entirely nullified by the extra zeroes on their bank balance.
When their increasingly disillusioned daughter Tori (Isabel Gravitt) deliberately flunks her Princeton interview by ranting about the university being an engine of rigged, corrosive capitalism, it’s an unsubtle reminder of the show’s satirical intent. Perhaps we’re meant to recognise how on the nose the scene is, and revel in it. Your Friends isn’t supposed to be rigorous prestige drama. It’s a guilty pleasure, with a bit more heart than you might expect. It gets away with it.
