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Associated Press

Your Friends & Neighbors begins with a once high-flying hedge fund manager waking up in someone else’s luxurious house, next to a dead body and in a pool of blood.
How he ended up there consumes the first season of this compelling Apple TV+ series, which stars Jon Hamm and takes a peek at the lives of the ultrarich in a leafy New York suburb.
“I was interested in writing about the status symbols, about the way wealth informs community,” says creator, showrunner and producer Jonathan Tropper.
“And then at the same time, what I really wanted to do is subvert it a little bit and talk about how impermanent it all is.”
Like White Lotus and Big Little Lies before it, Your Friends & Neighbors revolves around the woes of the wealthy and questions why we chase social status.
“Why is more always better?” asks Hamm. “Is the only metric really the accumulation of these larger and larger piles of stuff, whether it’s money or goods or houses or wives or what have you? We’re kind of arrived at this time where this story is particularly resonant.”

Hamm plays Princeton-educated hedge fund star Andrew Cooper, who finds himself divorced and unemployable. Drowning in debt, he turns to petty crime: breaking into neighbours’ homes to steal US$350,000 watches, Hermès handbags and US$32,000 bottles of chardonnay.
“It’s the old story about what happens when you go bankrupt,” Hamm says. “It happens very slowly and then all of a sudden… Coop’s at the all-of-a-sudden part.”
Tropper’s show is exploring the notion of entitlement and how self-worth can be wrapped up in what people own. He is also showing how close to disaster we all really are.
“We’re all handed a script: do well in school, go to these colleges, get these jobs and you’ll be set. And you can do all that and excel and get it all right and the system may still spit you out.
“That’s really what this show is about. It’s about this man who is in a simmering rage that the system he bought into spit him out.”

There is a perverse delight in watching Hamm’s Cooper saunter into mansions when he knows the owners are away and make off with luxury goods, becoming a sort of down-on-his-luck burglar sticking it to the rich.
Cooper becomes acutely aware that life in this well-to-do suburb is fuelled by conspicuous consumerism and country-club boasting.
“It’s not like I’d never noticed,” he says as the narrator. “But I guess now I was seeing it differently.”
Among the things he sees are the ways people have monetised the emptiness some men feel when they reach the top of the mountain – career, marriage, children and prestige – and yet feel unfulfilled.
“Scotch, cigars, smoked meats, custom golf clubs, high-end escorts – entire industries built to cash in on the quiet desperation of rich, middle-aged men,” Cooper says.
Cooper soon grapples with the underworld to fence his stolen merchandise, while hooking up with a divorcee (Olivia Munn) and scheming to get his old job back. His children resent him and his unstable sister needs him.
Munn says it is great to see Hamm tap into one of his most loved roles: Don Draper in Mad Men, a complex character with a flawed personal life.
“In this case, he’s this finance bro, for whom everything has come so easily. And he’s sort of despicable, but you kind of feel sorry for him at the same time, somehow,” she says. “It’s really fun to go on the spiral with him.”
Tropper came up with the premise after living for many years in New York’s Westchester County, in which communities like Scarsdale and Larchmont are among the nation’s wealthiest.
Tropper was in a community near the kind of super wealthy one depicted in the series and watched the financial upswings where “people started to make stupid amounts of money”.
“I was a novelist. I was just feeling that it can’t possibly be sustainable,” he says. “As a non-finance person living among financial people, I had an insider’s access, but an outsider’s point of view.”

He would drive down the pristine blocks and wonder what troubles were going on behind the closed doors of the mega-mansions. “What you realise is a lot of these are built on foundations of rot.”
Tropper pitched the series to Hamm and did not write the show until the actor was on board. In his head, Cooper was always played by Jon Hamm.
“He’s an actor who really walks the line perfectly between comedy and drama. And, as a result, he can behave badly and you will still sympathise with him,” says Tropper.
“Hamm is a classically handsome man who people still find relatable. And maybe that’s because everyone’s delusional, or maybe it’s because he has a certain quality that he exudes that still makes him an everyman, even though he’s an everyman who looks like Jon Hamm.”

Hamm, who was a fan of Tropper’s novels and TV shows that include Banshee, Warrior and the sci-fi drama See, calls the writer a gifted storyteller.
“He pitched this idea to me, which I thought had a lot of potential, not just to be an entertaining vehicle but to think about where we are as a culture and society,” he says.
Season two of Your Friends & Neighbors was greenlit even before the first episode premiered. Tropper does not know how far the series will go but it cannot stand still.
“I don’t believe we do five seasons of a man robbing houses,” he says. “Once we’ve got the viewer buying into this neighbourhood, in this world, Coop’s survival tactics will change.
“I think the important thing with his journey is that he will never trust the system again. So we watch him struggle between wanting to keep up this lifestyle but rejecting the traditional ways of achieving it.
“I think we’ll continue to be able to explore this community in this neighbourhood and the wealth divide in our country.”


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TV shows and streaming video

Jon Hamm on Your Friends & Neighbors and stealing from the ultrarich in Apple TV+ series

Jon Hamm as ex-hedge funder Andrew Cooper in a still from Apple TV+ series Your Friends & Neighbors. Photo: AP

Jon Hamm and Hoon Lee in a still from Your Friends & Neighbors. Photo: AP

Hamm in a still from Your Friends & Neighbors. Photo: AP

Series creator Jonathan Tropper attends a premiere for Your Friends and Neighbors, in Los Angeles, California, on April 4, 2025. Photo: Reuters

Amanda Peet and Hamm in a still from Your Friends & Neighbors. Photo: TNS

Aimee Lou Wood says SNL apologised for White Lotus sketch that parodied her looks

Aimee Lou Wood as Chelsea in The White Lotus. Photo: HBO / TNS

Walton Goggins as Rick and Wood as Chelsea in The White Lotus Season 3 finale. Photo: HBO / TNS

The end of dystopian series The Handmaid’s Tale ‘hasn’t hit’ its star Elisabeth Moss yet

Elisabeth Moss as June Osborne in a scene from The Handmaid’s Tale. The show’s star is reflecting on the end of an era as the series debuts its final season. Photo: AP

Elisabeth Moss as June Osborne in a scene from The Handmaid’s Tale. Photo: AP

Ann Dowd as Aunt Lydia Clements in a scene from The Handmaid’s Tale. Photo: AP

Demonstrators dressed as handmaids from The Handmaid’s Tale take part in a ‘Hands Off!’ protest against President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk on the Washington Monument grounds in the US capital on April 5. Photo: Reuters

K-drama Crushology 101: vapid youth romance with Roh Jeong-eui wallows in cliché

Roh Jeong-eui in a still from Crushology 101.

Roh Jeong-eui as gifted sculpture major Bunny in a still from Crushology 101. Between its nauseating visuals, its shallow characters, and its uninspired clichés, the K-drama fails to entertain.

Roh Jeong-eui (left) as gifted sculpture major Bunny and Jo Joon-young as new sculpture student Cha Ji-won in a still from Crushology 101.

Roh Jeong-eui (left) as gifted sculpture major Bunny and Lee Chae-min as visual design major Hwang Jae-yeol in a still from Crushology 101.

Kim Hyun-jin as sculptor Jo A-rang in a still from Crushology 101.

Roh Jeong-eui as Bunny in a still from Crushology 101.

What killed Bruce Lee? 4 leading theories medical and martial arts experts proposed after his shock death 50 years ago in July, 1973

Bruce Lee on the set of “The Big Boss”. Lee died two years after the movie’s 1971 release, and in the years since, competing theories have been posited as to what exactly killed the martial arts star.  Photo: Yau Leung

Bruce Lee in a still from “Fist of Fury” (1972).

Lee with Taiwanese actress Betty Ting Pei. The two spent time together soon before Lee’s death.

Bruce Lee in a still from “Enter the Dragon” (1973). Photo: TNS

 Lee circa 1970. He had “chronic fluid intake” by virtue of his alcohol- and juice-based diet. Photo: Getty Images

Lifestyle

Entertainment

Hamm talks about playing an ex-hedge fund manager drowning in debt who breaks into his wealthy neighbours’ homes to steal luxury items


Hamm talks about playing an ex-hedge fund manager drowning in debt who breaks into his wealthy neighbours’ homes to steal luxury items.


Apple TV+

Fame and celebrity