Sometime in April a new fantasy dropped: a walk-in wardrobe swish enough for Jon Hamm to want to break into it.
Hamm’s role as Andrew “Coop” Cooper, a sacked hedge-fund manager turned neighbourhood burglar, in Your Friends & Neighbors has been a rare source of unalloyed television pleasure this year, with each Friday episode notification from Apple TV+ becoming the starting pistol for the weekend.
Still, forget what I said about wardrobes. This dark comedy with a dash of Dynasty might be set in a fictional “exclusive hamlet” in New York state, but no one in their right mind would actually want to be one of the neighbours in Your Friends & Neighbors.
They are, as Coop’s conspiratorial voiceover tells us, “assholes”. It makes for a fun blend of soap, satire and farce, but it’s not aspirational, not unless you genuinely fancy being in the market for torn jeans that cost more than monthly rent.
Potential new names for the Department of Arts: Smacc, Cacs, Scam and – my favourite – DoSac
You might think it’s Your Friends & Neighbors, but And Just Like That... is the only true aspirational show on TV
A big summer gig without tracking devices? There was only one for me
Liz Hurley playing The Deceased on a Channel 4 game show? It’s camp and it’s on-trend
The now completed, already renewed nine-parter, created by Jonathan Tropper, instead fits into the recent vogue for depicting the ultrawealthy as venal, ludicrous and unhappy, prompting chicken-and-egg questions about which came first, the money or the grasping personality.
[ Your Friends & Neighbors: Jon Hamm is hilarious in this riotous, satirical rompOpens in new window ]
To be clear, I loved it. Rich people have very funny problems sometimes. Perhaps their greatest flaw is their desire to hang around only with other rich people, which in Your Friends & Neighbors means going to parties organised by your ex-wife’s new boyfriend.
Westmont Village has those eye-popping American proportions going on but is as oppressive as elite enclaves come. Even the “keeping up with the Joneses” theme-tune refrain is all pressure, no joy. Yes, how nice to have the time to laze about sharing local arrest gossip in a sauna with four other women wearing matching towels, but how claustrophobic, too. And who really wants to be a member of the sort of stultifying country club that won’t stick by you when you’re charged with murder?
But at least Westmont Village isn’t a five-star hotel so suffocating it would put you off the entire concept of holidays. In The White Lotus the lifestyles of the rich and tedious have their own hypnotic quality. I certainly felt as if I was being hypnotised into watching the third season’s slow depiction of wellness hell.
Never mind the gunfire. It was the forced phone-detoxing and poolside man-pests that were the true horror. That third run reaffirmed my long-held belief that there’s never been a massage that hasn’t been enlivened by some kind of security emergency.
By the finale I felt sorry for the Thailand tourism authorities, who got such a raw deal compared to Taormina, in Sicily, the HBO show’s second-season star.
And that’s the essence of this recent fashion for wealth porn. It’s not aspirational lives we’re watching, it’s aspirational scenery. Maybe the more the real world falls apart, the more audiences – and producers – gravitate towards glimpses of picture-postcard unreality.
In Netflix’s Sirens, for instance, we’re presented with an unnervingly pristine shoreline as the camera follows a perky personal assistant skipping up endless flights of beach steps to the Cliff House. This island mansion has a perfectly positioned swimming pool and grounds so enormous you need a buggy to drive around them.
I don’t recommend Sirens – it’s not so much escapist as a series to escape – though it should be noted that it also possesses some enviably spacious walk-in wardrobe action. To access it, however, you must put up with Julianne Moore being creepy for the best part of five episodes. Never work for someone who might suddenly demand you procure a harp.
Speaking of work, it remains gloriously incidental to the only true aspirational show on television: the Sex and the City spin-off And Just Like That...
Carrie Bradshaw, the never-knowingly-underwardrobed Manhattanite played by Sarah Jessica Parker, has rats in her back garden, but her back garden is in a Gramercy Park townhouse, where her new apartment is otherwise shaping up delightfully. Because real estate is no bother to Carrie, she has once again moved on from the rent-controlled studio apartment that Elle Decor has dubbed her “emotional support brownstone”.
The women of And Just Like That... occasionally have to contend with woes such as malfunctioning alarms and demanding podcast producers, but they are radically content, in the main, with being rich. They know their money allows them to enjoy everything from eccentric headwear to ballet. They’re free.
This seems a good time to revisit remarks made in 2022 by Candace Bushnell, the columnist who inspired the original series, about how much she used to be paid.
In the 1990s she received $5,000 a month for writing the People Are Talking About column for Vogue. The New York Observer, home of Sex and the City, “paid less”, but she could afford that because of Vogue. Before these columns she would “get an assignment for 3,000 words, $2 per word”, which she described as “failing”. Ah. Failure has never sounded so aspirational.
