Coop (Jon Hamm) loses his job and embarks on a series of burglaries in Your friends and neighbors
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During the decades which followed the Second World War, America was flooded with novels, films and studies with a chud button reflecting on the nature of the suburbs – its comfort and its consumerism, its security and its foolish. No one explored these themes better than John Cheever, whose elegantly devastating stories captured suburban life in its sunny splendor and dark desolation. Take, for example, his famous 1956 story “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”. His hero, Johnny Hake loses his prosperous job and needs dough, begins to steal the houses of his friends.
You get a 2025 RIFF on this same idea in the new Apple TV + series Your friends and neighbors. Created by Jonathan Tropper – which has made its name with a series of novels in the vein of Hornby Tom Perrotta -Nick – This comic drama features Jon Hamm as a hotshot of cover funds whose existence of a soft suburbs goes Kerflooey. However, the spectacle does not simply concern the flamboyant crisis of a privileged beautiful guy but on a culture in which wealth is lined with rage and melancholy.
Hamm plays our hero and narrator, Andrew Cooper, known as “coop”, which is preserved for sexual indiscretion and finds his career in ruins. He has already lost his family, which happened when he caught his wife, Mel (Amanda Peet) in bed with one of his friends, an ex-player from the NBA.
Outly Coop claims that nothing has happened, but internally, it has changed. Where he once thought of his luxurious city of Westmont Village as a paradise, he is now cynical about his values. He begins to enter the houses of his friends – stealing things like Patek Philippe looks worth $ 250,000 – and, in the process, to discover their secrets.
From there, the spectacle expands to the outside, presenting many other characters, such as the lover of Coop, Sam (Olivia Munn), who took an unpleasant divorce; his money manager, Barney (Hoon Lee); The Dominican house cleaner of his wife Elena (Aimee Carrero); And her musician sister, Ali (winner of Tony, Lena Hall), whom Coop welcomed after her breakup. They all appear in a scenario of betrayal, theft, infidelity and murder – juicy things – not to mention the Sardonic Coop voice -to -off -off, mocking country fees and fetish scotch brands that define the suburban enclave that he dedals now.
In recent years, we have used the shows in which Alpha men love coop almost a tattoo that reads “toxic masculinity”. I am happy that Tropper is taking the slightly more subtle spectacle, juggling with the truth that his hero can be both an injured soul with which we often identify and an echocentic man who oozes, his degree of Princeton and Maserati, to his discovery that the unjust world – only after that was unfair to him.
It is a perfect role for Hamm, which takes with him our memories of the charisma of Don Draper Dark -Souled, then takes this kind of character in a new direction – funnier, sadder and more friendly. He was never better. Although Coop begins like a self -proclaimed shock, its character becomes wiser and more aware of self -self as the episodes take place. The problem is that theft is a risky company that requires expertise more than self -knowledge. While his fence warns him, “nothing is as dangerous as someone who does not know what they don’t know.”
Looking Your friends and neighborsI found myself thinking that, in a huge way, today’s suburbs are undeniably better than they were in the past. They are less exclusively white and the wives have fulfilling careers. But in other respects, they feel worse. Tropper offers little tender lyricism that makes the suburbs of cheever so attractive. It is not only that the world of coop is more coarsely materialistic than before – with Rolls Royces and bottles of wine of 40 large – but that its inhabitants are much more cut from each other and any more noble feeling of values.
In Shady Hill’s HousebreakerJohnny Hake steals $ 900 to a friend and spends the story to feel guilty and ashamed that he has become a thief. In the distance more flash Your friends and neighborsCoop undergoes little remorse of this type, not in the first six episodes anyway. The show does not judge him hard for his flights. He has an expensive life to pay, after all, and in addition, his victims are only rich tremors like him.
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