Jon Hamm in Apple TV+ Crime Dramedy

In John Cheever’s expert short story “The Swimmer,” the protagonist announces his intention to swim from a small afternoon gathering to his home, exclusively using an interconnected series of suburban Westchester County swimming pools. What initially presents as a lark, as he eagerly accepts drinks and warm greetings from his friends and neighbors, becomes an ever-darkening 12-page realization on the part of the audience and hero alike that Neddy Merrill’s life has collapsed in ultimately unspecified ways. He has fallen into debt and become estranged from the people he loved. The home to which he has been journeying, in very mythologically tinged fashion, is now empty and uninhabited.

Is Jonathan Tropper’s Your Friends & Neighbors inspired by John Cheever? I’m going to say yes, mostly because I find that prospect more interesting than just listing off the similar prestige TV dramas and dark comedies that inspire this Apple TV+ work, which begins with Jon Hamm‘s Andrew Cooper — “Coop” to everybody other than his sister Ali (Lena Hall), to whom he’s “Andy” — waking up in the marble foyer of a McMansion in a pool of blood that’s partially his and partially that of an initially unidentified dead body. After a frantic attempt to clean up the scene of a crime he doesn’t remember, Coop panics, stumbles into the backyard and then falls into a swimming pool, which he hastily tells us is both a metaphor and very literal.

The journey of the series is how Coop, a wealthy and Jon Hamm-looking hedge fund manager, went from a position at the apex of the suburban social scene to living a desperate life in which his family is no longer his family, his house is no longer his house and his Maserati no longer has a trunk that latches properly. He does not undertake this journey by going from swimming pool to swimming pool — though swimming pools play a crucial role in more than a couple of scenes — but rather from walk-in closet to walk-in closet, stealing tokens of conspicuous consumption along the way.

If the links between Your Friends & Neighbors and “The Swimmer” are real, then it’s surely no coincidence that “The Swimmer” was adapted as a feature with Burt Lancaster, since Hamm’s stardom has always been at least somewhat Lancaster-esque, a frequently wry commentary on exaggerated masculinity.

Now, is Your Friends & Neighbors also a wry commentary on exaggerated masculinity and privilege? Occasionally — which points to my frustration with the series, which is anchored by a reliably strong Hamm performance and boosted by an excellent ensemble. This series is “occasionally” a lot of things, including a disappointingly predictable entry in the always robust Middle-Aged White Guy Dabbles in Crime genre and an inconsistently soft critique of that same genre, but consistently none. Every time it tries to become more expansive and introspective, it backslides into familiar TV tropes that are always watchable, but at least 10 or 15 years behind the cultural curve.

Critics have been sent seven of nine episodes and the seventh puts the narrative in position to need to pivot into yet another show entirely, but I can’t say what that will be or how well it might be handled.

Let’s go back quickly to what the show is about: Coop is, as I already said, a hedge fund manager when the tale begins. He’s fairly newly divorced from Mel (Amanda Peet) and generally distanced from daughter Tori (Isabel Gravitt), a high school tennis star with dreams of Princeton, and son Hunter (Donovan Colan), who wears noise-cancelling headphones at all times. He’s had to move out of his suburban mansion into a much smaller home that he’s now sharing with his sister, a musician managing an assortment of psychological difficulties. Coop is maintaining some connection to their shared circle of friends, which includes his business manager, Barney (Hoon Lee), and his on-the-sly sex buddy, Sam (Olivia Munn), going through a divorce of her own. Things aren’t great, but at least Coop has lots of money.

Then, for reasons that are somewhere between confusing, arbitrary and completely irrelevant, Coop loses his job and he’s too fragile and attached to his status to admit it (or to move to a smaller house or give up that Maserati). So Coop does what all dispossessed and therefore emasculated television characters do: He turns to a life of crime, breaking into his friends and neighbors’ houses and filching their expensive watches and other tchotchkes, and then moving these high ticket items with the help of Randy Danson’s ethically challenged pawn shop owner, Lu.

For two or three chapters, I struggled with Your Friends & Neighbors, unsure of the necessity of another show about a very rich, very handsome white guy lamenting the inconvenience of the upending of a life of exhausting privilege under circumstances almost completely within his control. The genre twist relies not on Coop exercising some preexisting skill (he isn’t Walter White or Marty Byrde or even Nancy Botwin) but rather on the complacency of his victims and his ability to quickly watch YouTube tutorials. He’s fundamentally unsympathetic, but not so much that you’re meant to do anything other than like him, and his solution to his problems exhibits no real ingenuity — an unfortunate double-whammy that it isn’t instantly clear that the series recognizes.

Coop is the sort of character who’d be most interesting if he were one of 15 people settling in for a week at a White Lotus resort with the possibility he might be dead in the end.

It has to be acknowledged, though: As Your Friend & Neighbors progresses, it becomes more and more obvious that Tropper and his writers know that Coop isn’t an especially compelling focal point.

Around the fourth episode, (Aimee Carrero), the Dominican housekeeper to Coop’s former friend and Mel’s current boyfriend Nick (Mark Tallman), becomes increasingly central, and the series benefits as it exhibits more and more curiosity toward Mel and then Barney. It’s possible that Coop even begins to understand that what he thinks of as his story shouldn’t be his at all. But this isn’t one of those early ’90s movies in which an awful guy becomes less so after a near-death experience, substituting larceny for a brain tumor.

Coop remains the only character who gets voiceover narration, in which he explains metaphors like the swimming pool and generally offers sardonic platitudes that might come across as self-aware satires of various Cheever/Updike archetypes, except that they’re probably not. Coop still dominates the story despite the story telling us that Coop shouldn’t dominate the story. Because it can’t commit to leaving him behind, or even pushing him into the background, a lot of the supporting figures who aren’t hunky white men — or one hunky white man in particular — are reduced to glorified props.

Elena is an afterthought despite Carrero’s appealing series-shifting presence and the acknowledgment that her plot has more gravity than Coop’s. Lu is an afterthought despite the jolt of energy that accompanies Danson’s arrival. Ali and her dull affair with a married man are afterthoughts, though the dramedy is very eager to give Hall many opportunities to showcase her Tony-winning vocal chops. Barney is an afterthought, though the episode in which he gets a fully developed C-story might be my favorite from this initial run.

The truth, of course, is that most viewers won’t resent this determination to stick with Hamm, because he’s in comfortable territory here. After the in medias res intro with the pool-falling, Coop is reintroduced having a flirtatious conversation at a bar with a young work colleague — Kitty Hawthorne’s Liv Cross, whose inconsistent presence makes her the most prop-y of the supporting props — that allows him to repeatedly emphasize that he’s too old for this kind of dalliance, while leaving little doubt that Coop and Jon Hamm can still, as the kids don’t say anymore, “get it.”

In various contexts, Coop’s age is repeatedly raised and then dismissed as an issue, because when Jon Hamm is in “master salesman experiencing ennui” mode, who could resist him? This combining of Walter White and Don Draper — think of it as Break In? Bad! — is the best use of his powers we’re likely to get, since it doesn’t look like we’re going to get a full Hamm-centric Fletch franchise.

Hamm and Peet have very real chemistry, capturing both the affection and frustration of a long marriage that’s fizzled, and its lingering consequences. Peet and Munn are generally very good as frazzled women who don’t have Coop’s masculine luxury to break down or break bad.

While the dramedy has some smart, if overwritten, dialogue and traces of worthwhile commentary, fans of Tropper’s work on Banshee and Warrior are likely to find this a somewhat flat and domesticated version of his voice. Every time you think the series might be ready to do something dangerous or at least adventurous, there’s just another TV roadmap to be followed, as it goes from an AMC show circa 2008 to a Showtime series circa 2011 to, in the sixth or seventh chapters, basically an East Coast version of Big Little Lies.

Your Friends & Neighbors doesn’t necessarily need the pulpy brutality of Tropper’s earlier works. But instead of taking risks, it’s generally accommodating, content to be real estate porn and a gentle lampooning of real estate porn all at once — which makes it easier for Apple to call it a drama, when I like it much more when it’s being a dark comedy. Regardless, to return to Cheever, it’s a show that’s too content to swim with a too conventional tide.