In 2022, Jon Hamm starred in an Apple TV+ commercial with a twist. Titled ‘Everyone but Jon Hamm’, it cheekily featured Hamm, clad in a full suit, slumped on a sofa and scrolling through the screener’s many TV shows. And generally being bitter that he isn’t making an appearance in any of them.
“What about Jon Hamm?” he asks, plaintively. It’s a joke that has paid off, big-time.
“I had so many people talk to me about that commercial saying, ‘God your house is amazing!’” he jokes. “I was like, that's not my house! [But] it seems to have paid dividends, I will say, my goodness. I did not think it would bear this much fruit, but I'm very happy that it did.”
In addition to a much-vaunted appearance on The Morning Show, opposite Jennifer Aniston, Hamm is about to front his very own Apple TV+ show. Called Your Friends and Neighbors, it opens with his character waking up next to a dead body – and goes rapidly downhill from there.
To the untrained eye, Hamm’s new character – Andrew ‘Coop’ Cooper – embodies much the same energy as his breakthrough Mad Men character Don Draper.
As does Hamm himself. “Hello Vicks, we're having a hard time hearing you, my dear,” he booms through the speakers. “I'm glad to meet you.” It’s classic Hamm: ever the gentleman, he’s clad in a suit and glasses, as indeed most of his characters seem to be.
But his latest show is no Mad Men retread. Coop starts the show as a high-flying banker and spends the rest of the season on a downward spiral. As we’re told in voiceover, his wife has cheated on him with his friend (and kicked him out of the family house), he’s haemorrhaging cash like there’s no tomorrow – and he’s just been fired for sleeping with a younger colleague.
He turns to stealing from his wealthy neighbours to finance his lifestyle, only to discover that they’re hiding dark secrets alongside the Rolex watches in their safes.
“How do you tell a story about how meaningless our consumer culture at this moment can be?”
It’s the dark side of the American Dream – which Hamm says is kind of the point: “How do you tell a story about how meaningless our consumer culture at this moment can be, without it just being one note and sort of dreary and didactic and judgmental?”
This is the answer. Coop lives in the present day – or at least, in those heady few years before the 2008 crash. He spends his life in pursuit of wealth, only for things to collapse around his ears once he thinks he has it all. As Hamm puts it, he’s the type of man, “who you could walk out of this hotel in New York City and run into four or five of [them] here in Midtown, within a few blocks.”
Rich people on television is ratings catnip, currently. We’ve just come to the end of another season of The White Lotus, and the wealth inheritance drama Succession still casts a long shadow over the industry.
“There seems to be a bit of a rich privileged people behaving badly genre in television right now,” Hamm acknowledges. “That speaks to the moment in in our culture and the moment in in time that we're all kind of going through. Rich people behaving badly could [describe] the current government right now – but, uh, we won't get too far down that road.”
“Rich people behaving badly could [describe] the current government right now”
While he’s certainly well off now, being wealthy isn’t a natural state for Hamm. Born in 1971 to a secretary and a trucking manager in Missouri, Hamm spent his early years balancing shifts as a waiter with auditioning for jobs and struggled to find roles until his 2007 breakthrough in Mad Men.
“I never really came from a lot of money,” he says. “So it was always something that I was worried about; thinking about. I never really had a lot of stuff.”
That said, why does he think we enjoy watching the rich so much? He doesn’t hesitate.
“I think in some ways it feels like it's punching up. It's not kicking people when they're down,” he says. “Obviously your country has a deep and glorious history of rich idiots. We have no shortage of them over here either. As I said, some of them are running the country right now.
“But I think that there's something satisfying in seeing people that ostensibly have it all, fuck it up. Mostly I think it's because when we all watch things like that, we would go, ‘Well, I wouldn't do that.’”
“Your country has a deep and glorious history of rich idiots. We have no shortage of them over here either”
Sadly for us, we’re not about to see Don Draper return to take on the issue anytime soon. Despite finishing exactly a decade ago, when I ask Hamm if he thinks the show might come back, the answer is a firm no.
“I don't think it's going to come back. We're going on 20 years from when we started that show and about 10 years from when we finished it,” he says. “There'll be some retrospectives and some looks back. But I don't think the show will ever be rebooted or sequelised.”
Bad news for us. Still, the allure of Mad Men remains undeniable, and all these years later, a new audience is discovering the show. “I've had a lot of friends of mine whose kids are starting to get in later high school and college and they're telling their parents how they've discovered this new show Mad Men, and how cool it is.”
Well, I venture as the interview draws to an end: there’s always James Bond. He snorts. “Good luck with getting them to hire an American as James Bond!”
Who knows? With those suits, and those wry one-liners, he’s got a decent shot.
Your Friends and Neighbors is streaming now on Apple TV+
