In the new series &quot;Your Friends &amp; Neighbors,&quot; the &quot;Mad Men&quot; protagonist has met his three main criteria: a character different from Don Draper, a strong point of view and a plot that can&#39;t be put down.

Text by LAUREN LARSON Photography MAGNUS UNNAR Styling WARREN ALFIE BAKER

Winner of two Golden Globes for “ Mad Men ”, and nominated for the same award for four more seasons of the series, Jon Hamm, born in 1971, orphaned by his mother as a child, and his father still very young, made his debut on the big screen in a tiny role directed by Clint Eastwood, without managing to gain visibility for years. Then he suddenly found fame at 36, thanks to the cult series set in the world of New York advertising in the 60s. His Don Draper , cynical, but with a moral code, a past to hide, irresistible to women, a serial drinker and smoker, breaks through the small screen. In the opening scene of “ Your Friends &amp; Neighbors ”, the new Apple original series starring Jon Hamm, a young woman approaches Hamm’s character, hedge fund manager Andrew “Coop” Cooper. And after a few exchanges the woman assesses him: «You have a strange mix of confidence and low self-esteem».

Coop, it turns out, is newly single, his wife ( Amanda Peet ) having left him for a professional athlete. He’s at what he thinks of as the nadir of adulthood, though he soon goes deeper. He and the woman, a co-worker, sleep together, and the encounter — which both parties later say was consensual and respectful of her and his position at the company — sends Coop into a tailspin of unfortunate events. While “ Your Friends &amp; Neighbors ” isn’t quite the same as “ Mad Men ,” the series that sent Hamm into a tailspin of very fortunate events, it’s easy to imagine a casting director reading the show’s synopsis and immediately thinking of Hamm: His “ Mad Men ” character, Don Draper , was also an irresistible mix of confidence and desperation. It’s also easy to imagine Hamm drawn to such a detailed portrait of a man. He is an avid reader of biographies , he tells me one afternoon in early February. He is calling from his office and reporting the contents of his library: 60% fiction and 40% nonfiction .

He’s currently reading three books, all biographies , and recently finished one about Lorne Michaels , whom he’s known for years. “I didn’t know anything about how he grew up, and he does a lot of things deliberately and inconspicuously,” Hamm says. But as he read about his friend’s upbringing, he’s been fascinated by how Michaels , the legend , began to take shape. “ Your Friends &amp; Neighbors ” is the opposite: Viewers watch Coop’s life deconstructed . When Hamm considers the TV shows that preceded “ Your Friends &amp; Neighbors ”—“ Fargo ,” “ The Morning Show ” and “Landman,” an oil-industry drama in which he plays a callous oil titan—he can see two similarities: The characters felt new to him, and each series had a distinct perspective . “Landman,” for example, highlights the tension between Americans’ resentment over the ravages of the oil industry and our dependence on oil. “It’s clear to these people that [oil] is essentially a finite resource,” he says. “It’s clear to no one that it’s somehow making the world harder and worse. It’s about saying, ‘What can we use instead?’ And how can we do that in a way that meets our needs? And I think that’s a fascinating point of view.” In “ Your Friends &amp; Neighbors ,” Coop experiences a rapid and radical shift in his perspective.

After settling into a certain lifestyle as a hedge fund manager, Coop is unceremoniously fired in the first episode of the series. He doesn’t tell many people about the turnaround, but a cut has occurred nonetheless. After his firing, he moves through his community as an outsider, disillusioned by the superficiality of his former friends. Our possessions and our status , Coop discovers, are fleeting—viewers are reminded of this every time the cursed trunk of Coop’s luxury car unexpectedly opens. “Everything seems so fragile and, if you’re cynical, so insignificant. What does it really mean if everything can vanish in the blink of an eye?” Hamm says. This question drives his character to steal from his friends. The fact that Hamm is so thoughtful surprises me, especially because I’m watching “30 Rock” for the ninth time and have started to confuse him with his character on the show, whose good looks make him seem profoundly out of touch. Hamm is quick to delve into a conversation and challenge his own ideas. In describing the anti-materialism of “ Your Friends &amp; Neighbors ,” he references the recent fires that have devastated communities in Los Angeles .

“The fires were a lesson in how quickly our circumstances can change, but also proof that things, or the loss of them, can have a huge impact. There is some kind of meaning, of course, in the things we buy,” he says. “It’s just that the value we ascribe to them is not necessarily the value an insurance company ascribes to them.” As a result, Hamm is drawn to television that engages his entire brain, television that “absorbs into the pores,” as he puts it. But he enjoys a passive viewing experience: He and his wife, the actress Anna Osceola , often watch Bobby Flay cook. (Although he’s never said anything disparaging about Flay, Hamm is now launching into a strong defense of Flay’s work, from which he says he’s learned a great deal about cooking and restaurants.) But he’s not particularly interested in acting in shows that are meant to be, or likely to be, passively watched. These shows are becoming hard to avoid, so much so that in 2023, Netflix executive Eunice Kim pledged to be more strategic about “second-screen” viewing, recognizing that viewers often watch TV while also on their phones. Hamm is a one-screen man.

He’s keenly aware of the changes in the way we watch television, especially because “ Mad Men ” began in tandem with a trend whose ubiquity is now taken for granted: reviews . Hamm recalls reading Basket of Kisses , a blog that chronicled every episode of “ Mad Men .” He would sometimes lurk on the site to read the comments. “They had all the theories there, and people were engaged. Fortunately, I never participated in that activity. I would start reading the comments and things would start to get a little dicey, and I’d say, ‘This is unhealthy; I know this is a problem. This is unhealthy; I know this is unhealthy, and there’s no good way to deal with this that’s productive.’ But, having said that, I read the reviews. I was fascinated by hearing what people had to say. And I think it was a new way of consuming television, where you could, if not in real time, then in a relatively short period of time, have your feelings validated.” Even today, after seeing something he likes or dislikes, he goes online to find out what other people think. But most of all, Hamm is wary of social media ; he has no public social media and does not allow private accounts.

“I’ve been a bit of a veteran, so I’ve never had to deal with it,” he says. He notes that his wife, though much younger than Hamm at 36, feels the same way. He and Osceola have no incentive to amass followers , and Hamm sees no point in building a presence on one platform when a new one will surely replace it in five years. “We all know now what it really does and what its real purpose is: to collect and mine data about you and make it easier to sell whatever it is they want to sell you,” he says. “Everyone says they want their private life to be private, and yet every day people are opening all the doors to their homes and their lives. On purpose.” He acknowledges that being a public figure has perhaps radicalized him against social media . After “ Mad Men ,” he spent 30 days in rehab—he went for many reasons, he says, “and they were my reasons, and they weren’t meant to be shared.” TMZ seized on the moment, publishing a statement from Hamm’s team asking for privacy and sensitivity under the headline “Jon Hamm Completes Alcohol Detox.” “There’s a reason Alcoholics Anonymous has to be anonymous, and there’s a reason HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) laws exist to protect people. But even then, that doesn’t explain the cowardice of people. And they know there’s a market for selling this information,” Hamm says. A nasty post in the Daily Mail “isn’t enough to change someone’s life in any material way, except momentarily, but it’s enough to affect the person you’re selling to, and that’s the really sad part of it.”

Celebrities often add a caveat when describing the invasion of press and social media: They don’t complain, they realize they’re so privileged, and they’re so grateful for their fans. Hamm doesn’t, not because he doesn’t feel privileged or grateful, but because he’s stating a fact: Being a celebrity today can be emotionally difficult. “There’s literally no one safe. If you’re near that car, you’re going to get chewed out eventually.” He says there are two ways to live with that truth. You can avoid social media , as he has, leaving yourself vulnerable to whatever people write about you, with no platform to defend yourself if they misinterpret something. “Or you can play it. You can take control of your own stuff,” he says. “But for me, I didn’t choose to be a social media manager . Obviously most people don’t do their own social media , but I don’t want to hire someone to do my social media. I don’t want to be responsible for the person I hired to do my social media when they write the wrong thing or use the wrong pronoun or say the wrong name.” Actors starting out today don’t always have that choice: To stand out from a slew of up-and-coming actors with huge followings, newcomers need to not only engage on social media , they need to bring something new or unique to the table.

“The iPhone came out in 2007, and it was the second year of ‘ Mad Men .’ And by the end of that year, we were all getting iPhones,” he recalls. Then came Twitter and Instagram . “I was really drawn to those things at one point, when they were just starting out and growing and manageable. But then, in the second or third year of all these apps, it became crazy and global and instantaneous, and that terrified me.” Coop is not (fortunately) a mirror image of Hamm. But both the character and Hamm have become disillusioned by superficiality. One addresses the problem by stealing watches from his friends. The other addresses the problem by making television that absorbs into your pores.

<div class="page" title="Page 4"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"> GROOMING Kim Verbeck @ THE WALL GROUP SET DESIGNER Abraham Latham @ ART DEPARTMENT CREATIVE CONSULTANT Mariana Suplicy SET DESIGNER ASSISTANT Jacob Pillot STYLIST ASSISTANT Brittany Guereque</div></div></div>

Jon Hamm, From Don Draper in "Mad Men" to New Series on AppleTV+

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