Has the Time Come to Stop ‘Eating the Rich’?

Apple TV’s new cheeky comfort show, ‘Your Friends and Neighbors,’ offers a self-reflective and delightful alternative

Rich people ruin everything (including themselves). Their arrogance, obtuseness, and greedy worldview destroy countries faster than we can catch up with their long list of wrongdoings. By now, we’re all too familiar with the dickest ones — Toddler Trump, Man-child Musk, Bully Bezos, or my most hated for personal reasons, Ork Orban — because we simply can’t escape their omnipresent influence permeating our lives like invisible cancer. While the economy is rotting, their bank accounts blossom. If there are still decent wealthy people out there (I hope), schmucks like those give them a bad rep every time they make a move or open their mouths.

So it’s unsurprising that a viciously satisfying trope to devour the rich in popular media has started growing in the past five-six years. How is it going now, you may ask, after we gave an Oscar to Parasite and indulged in the amusing chaos of Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, Blink Twice, and alike? Let’s just say that The White Lotus (a sumptuous TV show mocking and murdering rich people on vacation) just wrapped its third season and has no intention of stopping any time soon.

It might seem like this subgenre is beginning to overflow with more absurdist and scathing stories, but in all frankness, our desire for them has only been heightening. We never loathed the wealthy as vehemently and spitefully as we do now. We're hungrier than ever to feast on the pain and misery of the upper class. And yet, Apple TV+, approaching this trend from the opposite (or an entirely separate) direction, brings us a doozy and delightful show centered around a hedge-fund manager, his broken marriage, and a circle of superficial moneyed husbands and wives he’s deemed to call friends.

Your Friends and Neighbors has a catch, though: its hero, Andrew Cooper, or just Coop — Jon Hamm casually leading another show with stupendous charisma — is rapidly going broke. Despite trying to maintain a lifestyle branded with Patek Philippe watches, Macallan 25 whiskeys, and Maserati sportscars after he suddenly gets fired, Coop is stoically and elegantly drowning in his self-inflicted midlife crisis. Beneath the engineered façade, he’s actually stealing lavish watches and paintings from his “friends” and “neighbors” to cash them in a shady pawnshop to keep up appearances. His justification? “They’re so rich that probably won’t notice anyway.” I know how all that sounds, but Coop isn’t another well-off scumbag. He has morals (loose ones, but still), a healthy self-awareness, and an endearing charm that works in his favor even when he doesn’t try to wield it as a weapon.

We trust Coop because he’s honest with us from the get-go — his cynical, regretful, yet vulnerable voiceover couldn’t be more appealing. He's got what he has through hard work, perseverance, and luck. He went on to have a fruitful career, became a family man, adored his wife (the vivacious Amanda Peet), and provided beyond what his two kids needed for a comfortable life. But somewhere in the grind of it all, he lost himself, turned complacent, and made back-to-back bad decisions. It wasn’t an affair or a shady secret that tanked his marriage — he never cheated, gambled, or snorted his good fortune away. He just forgot what really mattered, ignored the obvious signs that led to divorce, and eventually lost his wife and children to his best friend, an all-star NBA player.

Ever since, he’s standing in the backyard of his own life, looking in, watching it go by, and leaving him behind.

Hamm’s Coop might be the first antihero in many years who’s actually a good guy. Yes, he steals and lies to maintain a luxurious lifestyle instead of facing reality, but his howling heart is always in the right place. He’s a man who deceives others to hide the truth from himself. The character reminds me a little of Californication's champion womanizer and hedonist Hank Moody — longing for a past life and family lost to his own inadequacy — except he doesn’t consciously make things worse by barging into explosive situations that result in catastrophic outcomes. They just happen to him. He never chases pleasures bullheadedly but doesn't outright reject them, either. No, Coop is trying to handle financial and emotional loss with pride — even if that pride bites bigger and bigger pieces out of him.

There’s a respectable and sympathetic masculinity in Hamm’s portrayal that millionaire men rarely retain anymore. He never brags about his possessions and achievements, but they make him walk with a proud swagger. And whenever he's trying to blame others for his own mistakes and misfortunes, there's a voice that keeps going off inside his head, reminding him of his culpability in the fuckups. He has a willingness to admit and own up to his failures in a way we don't see much these days — not in fiction or real life.

Rich men never apologize anymore. They forgot they’re fallible human beings and not heroic giants whose words and actions exclusively elicit worship and admiration. They’re excellent at convincing themselves that the blame is never theirs, going out of their way to prove why it is not, even if they have to spend millions of dollars and many months cleansing themselves for the sins they knowingly committed. It’s part of why we loathe them more day after day and find pleasure in seeing them socially crucified or criminally convicted — sadly more so in TV shows and films than IRL. Their irrefutable belief of being better than us just because they have money and influence, regardless of whether they earned it honestly or not, instinctually makes us hardwired to want to see them fall and burn. You know what they say: Money might not make us happy, but watching it getting taken away from those using it wrong certainly puts a shit-eating grin on our faces (ok, I say that).

Your Friends and Neighbors succeeds because it turns a well-to-do and vain man into a relatable everyday human. We feel for Coop in spite of leading a luxurious life that most of us are only allowed in when we pick up the wealthy’s trash or cut their lawns. We empathize with him because he loses his job unjustly, not because that job brings him millions. We root for him to get his wife back because he’s capable of reflecting on his flaws and showing an inclination to learn from his mistakes to find pieces of happiness again. Does he do it well, reasonably, or even legally? No, but most of us in the same position would be equally terrible, pissed, and disgruntled since we aren’t necessarily better or worse at this thing called life than him. The point is: he tries, fails, gets his mug beaten up, and then stands up to sarcastically smile in the face of another day.

To answer my initial question: “Eating the Rich” will likely remain our pastime in the foreseeable future (for better or worse), but as long as we get such sublime, delicate, and poignant portrayals of the wealthy like in Your Friends and Neighbors, we shouldn’t forget that relatively decent rich guys like Coop still exist somewhere out there. And they aren’t all that different from us — it’s just that they’re probably more exciting to watch as they fall from grace.

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A heads-up: I might put posts like these about new shows behind the paywall for early access for paid subs in the future to make the most of the screeners I receive. But later on, they'll become free like the rest of my essays.

This week, I reviewed Black Mirror’s Season 7 for Looper, which was a surprisingly good time after the disappointing last two seasons. If you lost faith in the series, give this one a go because it might change your mind.

And here’s one for the road:

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