Friends & Neighbors is Divorced Dad Mid-Life Crisis Porn

I will watch anything Jon Hamm creates—especially if he’s the leading man of a television drama about a depressed rich asshole. Friends & Neighbors allows Hamm to step back into a role he’s already mastered. This should be batting practice for him.

Jon Hamm plays Andrew Cooper, AKA “Coop”—a handsome, successful-ish hedge fund manager, divorced with two teenage kids, struggling to find happiness or financial security—as we’re given a little montage of how, despite the castle and cars, Coop isn’t as rich as his “friends & neighbors”.

I’m in.

Let’s take a look at the trailer together.

After watching that, you’d think you were sitting down to watch a sharp, clever, captivating thriller about the man who has everything turning to a life of crime when his seemingly perfect life decays in the blink of an eye.

Makes all the sense in the world to cast the man who played Don Draper as this feels like an almost direct continuation of that story.

However, after watching the first episode last night, I think I’m all set on Friends & Neighbors. Y’all can have it. I’ll watch something else…

The show starts with Coop regaining consciousness, lying on a mansion floor next to a dead body—before he springs up to wash away the gallons of blood and DNA linking him to whatever is going on.

We then cut to 4 months earlier because streaming has forced television writers to shove some horrific death in the first scene so audiences stick around through the slow, brutal unveiling of how we eventually get to that murder. Every show these days cuts back and forth between 2-5 concurrent timelines. I’m watching Paradise on Hulu right now. There’s flashbacks inside of flashbacks inside of flashbacks.

Whatever happened to just telling stories in chronological order?

Anyway, it’s 4 months earlier and Coop sits alone in the corner of a dark bar—brooding—when a woman half his age approaches him, basically begging to taste his penis. The banter between Coop and his horny female suitor is overly wordy and not as clever as the writer thinks it is—and honestly, it’s too long of a scene. It has none of the Don Draper charm. It’s a lame, old divorced dude’s fantasy of what it would be like to be picked up at a bar.

The entire show is through the lens of what a middle-aged, divorced, narcissist would think is cool.

Throughout the pilot, burdens are placed upon him as if he bears no responsibility for the destruction of his life. He loses his job at the hedge fund because the woman he takes home from the bar is an employee of another hedge fund manager on a different floor so technically she’s his subordinate and it’s against the rules. The show doesn’t even have the teeth to make him a drunk who pressures the girl or perhaps promises her a promotion in exchange for sex. Nope. The girl lowkey bothers him—pesters him for sex—and he gets fired on a technicality.

He’s just too hot and desirable, I suppose.

His wife leaves him for a friend and professional basketball player—he even catches them cheating in his bed—but it’s not Coop’s fault his marriage failed. Nope, it’s his no-good, cheating whore wife. Sure, Coop may have been working long hours, giving no attention to his spouse or offspring—but he was sacrificing to make more money so his family could be happy and comfortable. And that dang slut took his house and his children.

Oh, and of course she cheats with a black guy. Every white divorced dad’s dream scenario—allowing them to maintain all of their preconceived prejudices against people of color.

Imagine how much greater the world would be if these people didn’t spend so much brain power manufacturing scenarios in their brains in which it would be totally acceptable to use the n-word.

Coop is depicted as some fallen hero—surrounded by spoiled wealthy elites who only wish to take and leech.

This is AI, ChatGPT bullshit made for sad, over-the-hill Fox News viewers who believe the world is turning against the forgotten, downtrodden, abandoned, rich white man. The world’s just changing so fast, ya know. One day you can casually call your coworker gay slurs, jokingly, and now you’re one “Where my hug at?” away from an early retirement.

Even the whole Robin Hood-esque premise of the show doesn’t hold up. He’s not poor and stealing from the rich out of principles or a higher moral code or sense of righteousness. At the end of the pilot, Coop sneaks into a neighbor’s home, stealing a Patek watch he claims they won’t miss—not because he’s desperate for money. The character literally purchases an expensive drumkit for his son, like, earlier that day. He steals from these people because they kind of annoy him at a BBQ one time.

Maybe I’m being harsh on the pilot episode and the rest of this show is fire. But from what I’ve seen, Friends & Neighbors lacks an interesting worldview. The writing is heavy-handed. Don Draper was complicated. Andrew Cooper is a blank slate—an avatar for successful white guys who place value in money and power over real, meaningful interpersonal relationships and lack the accountability and maturity to grasp a changing culture that no longer exclusively caters to their every whim.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to return to hate-watching Paradise. (review soon cometh).

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