There isn’t much love, and there’s definitely little sympathy, for rich people right now — a fact that is entirely rich people’s fault. You may be fretting over your health insurance premiums going up. They are optimizing their faces with $300,000 worth of microscopic tweaks and buying their way out of the indignities of flying commercial.
Like many other people, I unreservedly disdain the billionaires who’ve taken a wrecking ball to our cultural and political institutions while giving up on the “giving pledge.” And just the mention of quiet luxury now makes me want to scream that there’s nothing low-key about $1,050 slides from The Row that are basically just zhuzhed-down Birkenstocks. So perhaps that’s why people have been conflicted about the show “Your Friends & Neighbors.” It’s about rich people, and is brilliantly acted with nuance and dark hilarity, but it arguably doesn’t hit the one-percenters viciously enough for the times.
When the Apple TV+ series debuted in 2025, Emmy voters gave it a single nomination, for its theme music. It did not win. Online conversations continue to dissect why this exploration of an American class distinguished by landscaped estates, private jets and families who pay list-price tuition at Ivy League institutions is so unappealing. No small amount of that disdain is directed at the women who populate the show’s fictional town of Westmont Village — a mash-up of upmarket commuter towns in Westchester County with a hint of Greenwich, Conn. — where everyone seems to be striving, competing, winning and yet still feeling like a loser.
This year, Emmy voters did better. While they failed to specifically acknowledge any of the actors, writers or directors, they gave “Your Friends & Neighbors” a nomination for best drama — which it should win. For all its aspirational schadenfreude, it’s really a humane homily for us all about the bumbling universality of trying just to be seen.
“Your Friends & Neighbors” revolves around Andrew Cooper, known as Coop, who is played with chest-forward confidence by Jon Hamm. Coop, a discontented midlife version of the effortlessly seductive Don Draper, is conventionally handsome and has a body made for a business suit: a jock foundation with a soft outer layer formed by cocktail-soaked suburbia.
Coop worked in hedge funds, where clients trusted him to make their money make more money, until a one-night stand with a junior employee doomed that career. His wealth lacks the patina of the Gilded Age, the sweat stains of the Industrial Revolution and the tech bro’s blithe futurism. Coop didn’t invent anything or improve anything. He’s just well paid, and he lives among other very well-paid people who spend their money in a competition to accumulate things. It’s expensive being rich; you have to keep up.
When Coop loses his job, he begins robbing these same friends and neighbors of watches, artwork and baseball cards and fencing the loot.
For a time, Coop enjoys being a thief — the relative ease of it, the payoff, but also the sense that he is exacting a degree of revenge on the smug community he both loathes and admires. Coop is like so many of us, no matter our income. We’re conflicted by the financial success of others. We always think we’d be better at being rich — more empathetic and philanthropic, better dressed and better behaved — than the people who actually are. You think you wouldn’t be a jerk, until you realize being the only decent soul in a room full of rich jerks makes you feel like a sucker.
“Your Friends & Neighbors” makes you wonder: Does anybody actually earn outsize financial success? Can you be that rich and also be a good person? Are the only people putting faith in the American capitalist dream just creeps or chumps? That’s not the most uplifting story line, but it’s a timely one. After all, we’re living in the self-dealing era of the “Epstein class,” when the president of the United States made $2.2 billion last year, mostly through crypto schemes.
During one of Coop’s earliest capers, he slips into a neighbor’s home and slides open a drawer containing a collection of watches, each of which fits the human wrist with about as much grace as a saucer strapped to a twig. In a voice-over, Coop offers a detailed description of the watch: “The Patek Philippe Nautilus sealed 18-karat white-gold blue sunburst dial, water-resistant up to 30 meters.” He states these technical details in his flat tone, without any hint of the romance a salesman might inject to convince a customer that he deserves a high-performance watch to wear to his kid’s soccer game. All anyone really needs to know is that the Nautilus retails for more than $70,000. It’s valuable because it’s expensive and the right people know just how expensive. Coop may be stealing glitzy objects to maintain his socioeconomic standing, but he’s also leveraging the audacity, desires and insecurity of his neighbors to manage his own version of that toxic monster.
That monster is in all of us. We don’t turn into cat burglars, but plenty of us scour sample sales, vintage shops and discount bins looking for certain brand-name costumes to heighten the character we feel compelled to play in our own lives. We’re all aspiring to a vision of the American idyll, one that gets ratcheted just out of reach with each step closer.
Do you ever really arrive? Life’s basic necessities are taken care of, but there are other worries. You’re hoping that you’ve accurately defined happiness. You’re hoping to be seen, to be acknowledged, to matter beyond the dollar signs associated with your name.
Coop’s ex-wife, Mel (played by Amanda Peet), spends much of Season 2 wrestling with perimenopause. She is also in a fight with her neighbor, whose dog keeps pooping on her lawn. One drunken evening, she plots to push over a construction worker’s port-a-potty so it spills onto her neighbor’s lawn, turning it into a gloppy, blue swamp.
“I asked these people 50 million times to curb their dog. ‘Keep your dog in your own yard.’ They ignored me time and again,” she explains to Coop in a mix of anger and despair. “They never took me seriously. They made me feel like I was nothing.”
Rarely have I seen such righteous, existential rage expressed with such relatable vulnerability. Packed into her storm of emotions are big questions, petty ones and simple observations — all of them rooted in the need to matter. Would Coop have been ignored by the neighbors if he’d made a similar request in his deep, white-man baritone? Would one of the “20-something models walking around like concubines” at Mel’s ex-boyfriend’s housewarming be as invisible? And why wouldn’t her neighbors hold up their end of the social contract?
“Your Friends & Neighbors,” which has been renewed for a third season, doesn’t ask us to feel sorry for the rich, nor does it throw gasoline on the roaring fire of hatred for them, and it’s certainly no free-range anticapitalist polemic like “I Love Boosters.” Its creator, Jonathan Tropper, told The Times: “We are skewering a value system, but at the same time, we’re making the show aspirational. We’re still showing you the cars and the houses and the watches.” It spends a good deal of time reminding viewers that money isn’t a promise of happiness. (But the series does acknowledge the sad truth that unhappiness is a lot easier to manage with financial privilege.)
Americans reflexively run toward money. Long after we’ve made enough to be comfortable, we keep running in search of respect, a reality made plain in a Season 2 episode devoted to the death of Coop’s father. After the funeral, Coop finds a pair of Cartier cuff links, still in their original box, that he’d given to his dad.
“Only a fool would give Cartier cuff links to a man who regularly shopped the Brooks Brothers sale rack,” Coop says in voice-over. “I doubt Ron Cooper even had a shirt that took cuff links. But it was his birthday and I wanted to give him something nice. So, I went with a pair of $4,800 designer cuff links that he apparently never took out of the box.”
“Like all gifts, this one said more about the giver than the recipient,” Coop says. “And I didn’t love what it said about me.”
They reminded me of much more modest, yet “nice,” presents I gave my father. After he passed away, I went through his belongings and found a Thomas Pink shirt I’d given him that he’d never worn. It was folded neatly in one of his dresser drawers. The cuff links I’d purchased to go with it were there, too, tucked into the French cuffs. I suppose he liked the shirt. I know he kept it because it came from me.
“Your Friends & Neighbors” asks: In the pursuit of the American dream, how do you avoid being a jerk or a sucker? We’re so busy trying to make sure that who we are and what we’ve accomplished doesn’t disappear from view. If we’re really lucky, we have people in our lives who see us clearly, not because of our successes, but despite them.
