I feel like there have always been two competing sides to Jon Hamm. On the one hand, you have the steely masculinity of “Mad Men,” the show that both made him famous and continues to haunt his career. Yet, on the other, it’s the loveable goofiness of “Bridesmaids” or “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” No offense to “Mad Men,” a show I loved at the moment but honestly haven’t exactly wanted to revisit, but Hamm’s decisions post-‘Men’ have steered closer to the latter than the former. For every “Beirut,” we have a weird cameo in “30 Rock.”  At his best, he splits the difference between character actor and leading man, playing up how unaware he is of his good looks and charisma. This was true of “Confess, Fletch” and even more so in his newest Apple TV+ series “Your Friends & Neighbors.”
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It’s the first show he’s headlined since “Mad Men” went off the air almost a decade ago. A charming, criminally inclined loser trapped in the body of Jon Hamm seems to be an easy sell on paper, yet Jonathan Tropper’s newest show can never figure out what it’s trying to say. 
Ostensibly, it’s a class critique of the Westchester County crowd. Hamm’s Andrew Cooper is a well-to-do hedge fund manager who has it all: a Maserati, two kids, a beautiful house, and a wife in Amanda Peet’s Mel. Yet, as the pilot lays out in stark terms, he essentially loses everything. His wife was cheating on him with his best friend Nick (Mark Tallman), his kids are essentially alienated because he focused so much on making money, and, to top it all off, he’s summarily fired after his boss uses a consensual fling with a junior executive as pretext. 
“Coop,” as everyone calls him, has nowhere to turn and appearances to keep up, so he decides to become a petty thief. Petty being the operative word there, because he goes about stealing trinkets from his wealthy neighbors and friends — watches, handbags, bottles of wine —  that they’ll probably never miss or even forgot they bought. 
As it often goes with these types of sad white men midlife crises, what starts out well for Coop very quickly sours. The first scene of the pilot hints as much when he wakes up next to a dead body with little memory of how he got there and who the man is. That question is eventually answered in the seven (out of nine) episodes sent to critics, but it’s also just a hook for Tropper to hang his interest on how the wealthy lead empty lives. 
Not that such a theme is particularly radical. Tropper has had an interesting career. A novelist who broke out into screenwriting with his own adaptation of his novel “This is Where I Leave You,” he essentially continued with a particular type of dramedy — “Kodachrome” especially — before jumping into the TV genre fare. While he was the creator of Cinemax’s “Banshee” and “Warrior,” this show returns to the type of domestic interests that got him started. In some ways, the Jason Bateman character in “This is Where I Leave You” — a film that you and I forgot exists but is actually pretty decent — could be Coop with a little more money. 
The problem is that Tropper hasn’t exactly figured out what he wants to say about Coop and the life he lives. Pretentious narration aside, Hamm’s character is likable because, well, he’s played by Jon Hamm. That screen presence does much work to smooth over some narrative gaps. Also, although he’s stealing for reasons never really unpacked outside of suburban boredom, Coop is an empty figure at the center of the film. 
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While the show makes pains to populate the periphery with other, more compelling characters — Peet’s Mel, Olivia Munn’s recent divorcee Sam, who’s sleeping with Coop, Lena Hall’s troubled sister Ali, and, eventually, Aimee Carrero’s housekeeper Elena, the show is too invested in Coop’s epiphany about the horrors of the 1%. 
Why he comes to that realization is never exactly laid out, though pilot director Craig Gillespie takes pains to point out the empty materialism present in these people’s lives. We got postmodern asides about scotch, wine, watches, and art. It’s all flashy and infinitely watchable, if also almost as empty as the characters who define themselves by these things. 
Which isn’t to say that “Your Friends & Neighbors” is bad. It’s an addictive binge-watch with the type of Apple TV+ sheen that you’d come to expect. Further, it centralizes a Hamm performance that perfectly encapsulates the type of likable loser that he’s so good at portraying. But, it’s also something of a missed opportunity, never able to make the type of statement it is so obviously reaching towards. By the end of the seventh episode, Tropper had burned through enough plot that I was interested in where he goes next — and even more interested in how he gets to an already greenlit second season — but I never found myself caring for these people outside of the plot mechanics they are participating in. [B-]
“Your Friends & Neighbors” premieres April 11 on Apple TV+.