There are three broad spirits in which American television portrays the rich: aspiration, judgment and reassurance. The aspirational spirit makes you want to have what they have, the judgmental spirit condemns them for what they’ve done to get what they have, and the reassuring spirit tells you that you don’t want what they have, anyway.
Often these spirits coexist in the same portrayal. Even exercises in what seems like pure aspiration — a reality TV real estate show, say — can feel like a rough draft for an eat-the-rich jeremiad, while even stories that are intent on portraying rich people in a critical light find it hard to escape from some sort of aspirational identification. Imagining oneself hanging out in the resorts on “The White Lotus” is part of the show’s appeal, even when you’re officially glad you aren’t one of the characters. And a show like “Succession,” in which the Murdoch-esque family was not just flawed but also malign and aggressively miserable, still stirred a certain kind of envy in the frictionless way its billionaires moved from yachts to palazzos to alpine and tropical retreats.
So the most interesting thing about “Your Friends & Neighbors,” a new Apple TV show in which Jon Hamm plays a New York City moneyman who starts thieving from his gilded neighbors to keep up appearances after he loses his high-paying job, is that it manages to eliminate almost any sense of aspirational identification from its portrait of leafy Connecticut hyperaffluence.
It isn’t just that its characters, inhabiting a world that resembles the richest parts of Greenwich or New Canaan, are unhappy, flailing, depressed. They are also denied the compensations that are supposed to attach to wealth. For all their millions, they still don’t seem financially or socially secure, and although the show deliberately showcases various luxury goods (high-end watches, Rolls-Royces, fancy Scotch), the overall ambience is extraordinarily bare of style and beauty, offering instead a world of blah décor, undistinguished fashions and cavernous homes that just look like overpriced McMansions.
A couple of years ago I praised the show “Fleishman Is in Trouble” for its effective portrait of a specific kind of almost-upper-class anxiety, the sense instilled in many striving meritocrats that even if they are doing well, they’re still missing out on a security that you simply can’t achieve on a doctor’s or lawyer’s salary: the trust fund, the financial cushion, the assurances of generational wealth.
The characters in “Your Friends & Neighbors” are the people that the striving meritocrats in “Fleishman” might reasonably envy — not the Bezosian billionaire class but the people for whom $15 million homes are normal and watches worth $100,000 can be stolen and not missed. And the new show functions as a very direct and reassuring response to meritocratic status anxiety by portraying its rich world as a place where unhappiness is only magnified and financial security is still an illusion. Generational wealth or no, they are all still stressing about getting their daughters into Princeton, and the pressures of keeping up with the mansion dwellers next door mean that even a top dog like Hamm’s Andrew “Coop” Cooper is just one bad break away from financial calamity.