1 Your Friends and Neighbors, showrunner Jonathan Tropper (Apple TV). In a show that over two seasons with a third to come makes The White Lotus play like The Sopranos, or maybe the Army-McCarthy hearings, house porn in an enclave commuting distance to New York. And also TV porn, as if the whole engine of the show is everyone—writers, directors, actors, characters, and whoever is watching—consciously reveling in the complete vapidity of it all. And everyone is subsumed into Jon Hamm. He’s as watchable as a TV star can be, because from Mad Men on he always seems to be asking himself one question: What am I doing here? The theme song is a horrible ditty about keeping up with the Joneses but as the show plays you can hear This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife in the way Hamm’s grin doesn’t reach his frightened eyes. You’re watching the character thinking about his own life, Don Draper there, Coop as everyone calls him here. You’re seeing the actor asking why he took this role, asking what he can do with it, how long he can make it pay, if he can get out of it before it dies and sends him over the hill or eats him alive so he can never do anything else. And on and on from there. Even though season three will start with the body fished out of the lake, that’s the drama.
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