Why Jon Hamm’s ‘Your Friends and Neighbors’ is crime dramedy gold
Actor Jon Hamm tackles dark comedy and crime in “Your Friends and Neighbors.”
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Being rich isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.
At least not on TV, where increasingly the wealthy seem to be objects of pity, if not ridicule. In “Your Friends & Neighbors,” a new Apple TV+ series, Jon Hamm plays a fired hedge fund manager who decides his loaded pals are so clueless about their wealth that they won’t notice when he starts robbing them blind of five-figure bottles of wine and six-figure watches.
“The show holds up a mirror and asks, what’s really important? Is more always better?” Hamm says. “Is the point of life to just accumulate larger and larger piles of stuff?”
For some, apparently so. The third season of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” which ended this month, featured a wealthy North Carolina family whose matriarch, Victoria Ratliff (Parker Posey), casually explains she’d rather be dead than lose her material possessions. “At this age, I just don’t think I’m meant to live a hard life,” she told her husband.
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“Lotus” creator Mike White even seems to be worrying about boosting his own bank account as he renegotiates a deal with HBO for Season 4. “At a certain point with money, (one wonders) is this going to make me worse?” he told Howard Stern. “Is having more money just going to make me more dysfunctional?”
When it come to riches and dysfunction, TV obliges with Bravo’s sprawling “Real Housewives” franchise, whose catty episodes seem like advertisements for the adage, “more money, more problems.” And in HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones,” the money-loving Gemstone family leverages their mega-church to finance sprawling homes and fancy cars to great comedic effect.
For high-net-worth individuals, expensive goods are status symbols bought “mainly to signal to each other that they’re in the same club,” says Joseph Nunes, professor of marketing at USC’s Marshall School of Business.
That sort of showboating elicits laughs from TV audiences, partly because today’s younger shoppers are spending less on pricey goods and more on luxury experiences. “Gen Z seem to be more into showing off what they’re doing than what they have,” he says. “So now it’s become almost a joke to laugh at people who are attached to objects.”
Aaron Cheris, marketplace and e-commerce expert with consultancy Bain & Company, recalls an admission from a luxury brand executive that “we sell beautiful useless things to people who don’t need anything.”
Cheris says that the wealthy often stock up on so many “beautiful useless” things that they end up with closets full of items they rarely use, which is turn has fueled “double digit growth in luxury goods resellers” such as The RealReal (fashion items) and Chrono24 (watches).
TV today showcases rich folks who seem infinitely more wealthy than in the past
And that’s exactly who Hamm’s protagonist Coop is targeting with his thievery in “Your Friends & Neighbors”: people whose accumulation of material goods seems to be an end unto itself.
That stands in marked contrast to rich TV families from decades past, folks like the Carringtons (ABC’s “Dynasty”) and the Ewings (CBS’ “Dallas”). They might have had drama, but there was a grandness and sweep to their lives that seemed epic and enviable.
“The ’80s were all about aspirational wealth, whether it was ‘Dallas’ or ‘The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,’” says Jason Lynch, curator at the Paley Center for Media. “The rich were glamorous, and we wanted to be them.”
It doesn’t hurt that being rich in the 1980s is not the same as rich in the 2020s. Back then, there remained that aspirational quality for many viewers. J.R. Ewing might have had a nice car and house, but he wasn’t hopping into a $50 million Embraer Lineage 1000 private jet used by the Roy family on “Succession.”
Today’s TV shows focusing on over-the-top lifestyles heavy on dysfunction clearly makes for entertaining viewing and healthy ratings. There’s a frisson of schadenfreude as we watch folks with blacked-out helicopters and far-flung ranches writhe in a morass of backstabbing and malaise.
There now seems to be a laughable rich person for every type of viewer, whether you’re a fan of comedy (Apple TV+’s “Loot” features Maya Rudolph as a hapless but do-gooder billionaire) or drama (Netflix’s “The Perfect Couple” stars Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber as anything but that title). The list goes on.
“Watching shows like ‘The White Lotus’ or ‘Succession’ or ‘Big Little Lies’ allows you to have your cake and eat it too,” says Lynch. “You immerse yourself in a fabulous lifestyle and can talk about how it all clearly has its flaws, but no one wants to be these characters.”
As Coop muses, “You get the car, the house, the stuff. But how the hell could everything go so wrong, so fast?”
Fire up that popcorn, and be lucky you’re not loaded.
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