Your Friends & Neighbors - Season 1

I've been a long and very vocal supporter of the quality of Apple TV+'s television efforts. It was only a couple of weeks ago that I shared my thoughts on the fantastic The Studio, and now it's time to expand on that by leaving comedy behind for pure drama. The focus of today is on the Jon Hamm-led Your Friends & Neighbors, a series that hones in and focusses a dirty magnifying glass on the decadent and complicated lives of a collection of families that make up one of America's richest communities.

Essentially, the idea of the show is to prove just how far from reality many of these folk seem to be, serving as a bit of a satire and example of what goes into a lifestyle worth millions of dollars a month. It's frustratingly raw at times to watch, but in the same vein as series like Dynasty, it's also hard to look away from, more so when everything falls apart.

Your Friends & Neighbors revolves around Hamm's Andrew Cooper, a man whose life has fallen to pieces in the space of a few months. His wife left after an affair with his best friend, his employer unlawfully sacked him, and now he's staring down a life where he's struggling to make ends meet financially. Again, this is on a very different scale to most of us, meaning "Coop" worries about how he'll afford $30,000 tables at charity galas and how he can maintain the illusion of success and balance when compared to his, well... friends and neighbours.

This leads us to the main dish of this series, which is Coop's criminal pastime. As someone with an absurd knowledge of the elite and rich, Coop decides to employ this skillset to tactfully rob his "friends and neighbours," snagging a $170,000 watch here, a $300,000 diamond necklace there, or perhaps even switching rare art for an almost perfect fake. It's an idea that seems genius at first, but Coop makes the mistake of breaking into the wrong house one day, and this leads him on an elevating crime spree that eventually sees him on the wrong side of a bad man.

This is effectively all that needs to be said about Your Friends & Neighbors' plot, and frankly after watching the first season it's clear that this is all it ever needed to be. The idea is sound, tackled with grace and excellence, and all while being witty and having the right kind of jealousy-inducing moments that all these eccentric and debaucherous projects offer. The narrative continues to surprise and grows into itself as the season progresses, beginning as quite mellowed and a little boring if anything before spiralling into chaos, seeing Coop dealing with murder investigations, crime bosses, love interests, and all while feeling somehow relatable. This means that as the season unfolds, the pacing just gets better and better, and keeps you guessing about what will happen next, all by leaving breadcrumb clues that you want to follow but get side-tracked by when another twist and turn is introduced.

It should be said that Hamm's performance in the role of Coop seems to fit perfectly into the archetype that he has always nailed with utmost brilliance. It's very Mad Men in a way, and Hamm stands out in a cast that generally has interesting, complex, and well performed personalities too.

This show is another example of how Apple TV+'s productions seem to manage to get all the core building blocks of what makes a successful TV series spot on. And, as is always the case with Apple's movies and shows, the camera work, the location choices, every single part of the production is of the highest quality and never fails to impress.

It may lack the wow factor of some of Apple's series, the tighter nature of others, and is perhaps a bit too tough to digest at times for the average consumer. But if you give it time - only a few episodes - Your Friends & Neighbors will ultimately hook you and make you desperate to see what happens in the next episode. It is, once again, another winner for Apple TV+.