In Jonathan Tropper’s new AppleTV+ series, Your Friends & Neighbors, Andrew “Coop” Cooper (Jon Hamm) is the sort of miserable only money can buy. After years of social and corporate climbing, he had reached the top. The sprawling home in the gated community. The top-of-the-line luxury car. The family. The coveted office. The country club membership. He had all of it and more.

“Had” being the operative term here.

By the time the audience meets him, things have already begun to take a turn. He caught his wife, college sweetheart (from their time at Princeton!) Mel (Amanda Peet) and his good friend, former NBA superstar Nick Brandes (Mark Tallman), rigorously putting the mattress in the owner’s suite through its paces. Divorce and exile to a rental home in a good but not great neighborhood followed. Next, his boss/” friend” Jack Bailey (Corbin Bernsen) seizes on a questionable choice to muscle Coop out of the company, leaving him without his savings or his clients. Bleeding money on private high schools, tennis lessons, and maintaining appearances, Coop quickly runs out of legitimate ways to fix the situation. So why not steal from your “friends” in the top 5% and pawn the goods to keep up?

Maintaining the status quo is a major motivator, it seems, for these elite upper crusters. Besides Coop’s own quest to act like everything is fine, his friends and former neighbors seem hellbent on not acknowledging change. They praise him and Mel for not making it weird. They beg him to attend events alongside his ex’s new lover as if it is no big deal. It’s the only thing more important than money and status in this community. Never feel or make others feel awkward.

Hamm is an excellent choice for Coop, embodying the duck qualities of the man. He looks great and in control on the surface. Out of sight, though, he’s churning in a panic. What comedy the show has predominantly comes from his bone-dry narration in which he reveals his disgust for the world he once hungered to join. However, and more compellingly, it also demonstrates his addiction to that world. Even as he sneers at those friends’ and neighbors’ excesses, he continues to rattle off brand names and specs. Coop’s refusal to admit his situation and cease the conspicuous consumption feels less like avoiding embarrassment and more like a man who still wants in. He’s the guy who insists he didn’t want to go to the party up to the moment he gets invited. Then he’s the first to show up.

Amid this churn and dark humor, Hamm doesn’t lose sight of the melancholy that permeates his existence. In his mind, he played the American game by its rules. He should have the Dream as a result. Instead, he’s divorced, his kids hate him even though he’s the one who got cheated on, he’s unemployed, and his luxury car trunk doesn’t even close properly anymore. He touched everything he thought he wanted but never got a chance to enjoy it. He’s angry, for sure, but mostly, he’s just deeply sad.

Your Friends & Neighbors, not unlike Coop, seems ambivalent about the largesse surrounding it. At times, the camera, under cinematographer Zack Galler’s guidance, renders the baubles as gaudy and excessive. It’s as though the lens somehow captures the truth behind the sparkle. At others, it seems the most obvious sort of wealth porn, gliding through giant well-appointed kitchens before lingering on a wine fridge so large a linebacker could comfortably stand within it. One thing the show does consistently, to its credit, is show how empty and sterile the “homes” of the rich are. By contrast, Coop’s more modest rental home feels like a place where someone eats, watches TV, and sleeps. It isn’t even messy. It just isn’t manicured within an inch of its metaphorical life.

The tension between the show’s disgust with the rich and their trappings and its continued lust for it gives off a certain electricity. What’s unclear in the seven episodes screened for critics (of a nine-episode season) is how successfully Your Friends & Neighbors can maintain that friction before bringing it to a head. Put another way, the series needs to choose a side—and likely soon—or risk losing its grasp.

This writer hopes the show can come to an understanding around its central tension in part because it will hopefully make room for several intriguing but underserved subplots. Peet’s turn gives a human face to someone who could’ve easily existed as nothing more than an evil cheater. Her self-destructive behaviors deserve a deeper dive than the show has yet to find the time to give them. Olivia Munn, as Samantha Levitt, gives probably her best performance to date. For an elder millennial, it’s odd to see one of the turn-of-the-century internet’s favorite sex symbols portrayed as the wife cast aside for a younger woman. However, that extratextual detail gives the part a resonance, one that Munn smartly mines for added depth.

The strongest of these subplots, however, belong to Coop’s sister Ali (Lena Hall), a talented singer derailed by mental illness and an apparent obsession with an ex, and Elena Benavides (Aimee Carrero), a young housekeeper who throws in with Coop to rescue her immigrant relatives from mounting debt. Both storylines suggest that, as bad as trying to stay on the inside may feel, being forced to live on the outside is far worse. While financial excess is everywhere in Your Friends & Neighbors, Ali and Elena remind the viewer the cost of it. More significantly, it shows how often those with exploit those without, be it physically, emotionally, or sexually, with nary a second thought.

Taken in total, the small events and background details of Your Friends & Neighbors tend to be the more intriguing and satisfying elements. Coop’s descent into criminality quickly starts to feel repetitive. The even greater crime he soon finds himself wrapped up in feels more like needless complication than mounting pressure. However, the detours into his daughter’s college search, his ex’s compulsion to overturn her own life, or Samantha’s attempts to come to terms with going from the trophy wife to yesterday’s news kept this critic invested.

Your Friends & Neighbors drops off a casserole at AppleTV+ on April 11.

Your Friends & Neighbors Trailer: