Jon Hamm plays a millionaire twisted thief

Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for the series premiere of “Your Friends & Neighbors”, which now streams on Apple TV+.

“It was at times like this … when I realized how far you could drive your own life, without really going somewhere.” – Andrew “Coop” Cooper

And that contains the life lesson of Coop, the Uber-rich New York Hedge Fund manager played by Jon Hamm in Apple TV +’S “Your Friends & Neighbours”, who premiered on 11 April. At first glance it is rather difficult to be sympathetic to stop after he has been fired from his high-profile job and has only bought money of money in the neighborhood of the Lavushof that the Lavushof demanded. Boo Hoo, right?

The good news is that Coop quickly discovers a way to keep bringing in the big dollar, without anyone being wiser for his unfortunate turn. The bad news: that ‘way’ can lead to him exchanging his country house for a prison chat of 6 by 8. If you are caught, Grand Larceny does not pay well.

“It is just like Robin Hood-Bijna. Besides a pretty striking part of it: he doesn’t really give the poor,” says Hamm van Coop, who finds a big win by stealing high-quality items from his super-rich friends and neighbors (so the title of the show). “I think there is certainly a relatible aspect to make COOP. Not everyone is worried about how they will pay for their $ 300,000 mortgage or repair their $ 200,000 car. But apart from the mathematics of scale, I think they have problems that people have.”

From the perspective of Coop, there are numerous “bastards” in the neighborhood with mansions “filled with expensive shit” that would never be missed and that no one, including the police, would ever suspect a man like him as a perp.

“The lie he tells himself is that he has to feed his family, but there is” your family feeding “and then there is” your family to keep at home in their 10,000 square foot, “says show maker Jonathan Tropper.” But he is not willing to admit the defeat and to be ashamed of this community. He is not prepared for someone to know [that he was fired]. He can no longer pay these bills, and he is not willing to give up consumerism and the aim he was raised. And so it becomes a journey for him to understand that what these robberies really are really, in a sense keep track of the Joneses as well as the removal of the system that abandoned him. ”

The inner monologue of Coop is effectively intertwined with the episodes, in which the restless character explains what he does, why he does it and what he really thinks about himself. Almost like what Coop would say to a therapist after years on the couch. Tropper says he wanted Coop to have the position of the series, and the voice -overs were the way to make that happen.

“I thought it was a nice reverse anachronism to have a kind of Noirish Voice -over the 60s in a very contemporary show,” says Tropper. “What is really interesting for me – and the reason I think that the voice -overs work – is that it doesn’t matter what you are looking at on the screen, you hear from the person from another lookout point. You hear from much calmer, detached person than the person who is going through at the moment.”

The tropper adds that the use of the voice overs if a device enabled it to “lock the tone of the show to a certain extent”. They illustrate the contrast between the self -destroying, risky things that we see doing the character on the screen, and when he later thinks about it: “Coop is in your ear and makes a kind of ironic observation about life.”

Hamm thinks it takes a step back and observes his life from outside. “Somehow he disciates a bit of himself, or the version he always thought of himself, maybe that is another better version of himself. Maybe that’s how we grow. But at least he is self -conscious enough to observe that he is eager.”

Although he is robbing of the rich and, well, keeping it for himself is a financial goal, is there something else behind it that, perhaps, Coop enjoys the challenge, the danger?

“I don’t know if I want to put a name on it, and I don’t think it’s necessarily the danger,” says Hamm. “I think it is more of the absurdity of the amount of wealth that is built up in this community that gives him some bizarre pleasure to relieve people of it.”

Tropper intervenes: “It is very easy to get lost in the attributes of the sexy plot machine of the show, a hedge fund manager who robes houses. But for me this show is really about a family. It’s about the dissolution of a family, and it is about a man who has not come up with the mourning of his family.

‘Before he was fired [from his job]He was fired from his marriage – he lost his wife, “tropper continues.” And it still did not occur to him that it happened because he took his eye off the ball. He focused on the wrong things. And for me the real danger is to acquire wealth that there is nothing bad about wealth in itself: the danger is the amount of time and effort you spend on obtaining it. It becomes consuming, and you put your energy into it instead of your family and your marriage and things that will actually mean much more for you. “

But as Coop comes behind, when you get a bite from the criminal world, it bites you back.