Your Friends & Neighbors gives a birds-eye view into a type of social mobility

You may be familiar with the term “downward social mobility.” It refers to the loss of income and/or wealth that can lead to a dramatic drop in a person or family’s social position, lifestyle, and most immediately, living situation. According to psychologists, it is not unusual for such an occurrence to induce physical, mental, and emotional imbalance in the person or family that experiences it.

Your Friends & Neighbors is an Apple TV+ series about a man who is blindsided by the sudden loss of his job.  Divorcé Andrew “Coop” Cooper ( Jon Hamm) has all the trappings of wealth: mansions, swimming pools, high-end cars, and upscale parties. In Coop’s case, all of this comes with the bonus of paying alimony, private school tuition for his two teens, and a mortgage on the mansion now occupied by his ex-wife Mel (Amanda Peete) and her live-in boyfriend Nick (Mark Tallman) — you know, the one Coop caught in bed with his then-wife.

Coop is well-liked by his friends and neighbors, and he is particularly close to his business manager Barney Choi (Hoon Lee), who never hesitates to speak truth to his client and close friend. Exemplary of their relationship is a scene where the two meet for lunch (at an upscale bar of course), and Coop tells Barney he was just fired. Barney’s expression quickly  changes from joy to serious as he sternly asks Coop, “Who did you f***?” You might remember Hoon Lee as Jobe from the long-running Banshee series on Cinemax. His character in Your Friends & Neighbors is equally steadfast and entertaining.

While Coop earned millions as a hedge fund manager, he is mildly concerned about how long he can sustain himself without income, though fairly confident that he has plenty in cash and investments. When Barney tells him that he will run out of money in six months, Coop is shocked. 

 As with those who make substantially less than Coop, the prospect of downward social mobility is frightening, especially when family not only depends on the support but expects that the money and other resources will always be there. We see this expectation play out when Mel casually tells Coop that she has hired a private tennis coach for their daughter. When he bristles at it, she asks in frustration, “What’s the problem? It’s just ten thousand dollars a month!”

Other effects of job loss are loneliness and shame, and this is particularly the case for men. Psychologists note that when men subscribe to the notion of being the family’s breadwinner, their identity is strongly tied to work, hence the shame in losing their jobs. Loneliness seeps in when they don’t share their job loss with close friends and those who rely on them. To Coop’s credit, he shared this with Barney. But family and other friends were left to wonder about his sudden aloofness, complaints about money, and altercations with long-time pals. 

During one of many pool parties at a neighbor’s mansion, Coop excuses himself to use the restroom and begins casually wandering throughout the house. Admiring trinkets, lifting his eyebrows at furniture, and pulling open the drawers of nightstands and chests, he nonchalantly takes an expensive watch and puts it in his pocket. Wait, what? Yes, that’s what I said. Indeed, this is so easy for Coop that he later absconds with another valuable item from a different neighbor’s house. And he does it again and again. It has been said that once someone crosses the line into deviant behavior without getting caught, the act becomes easier and easier for them to continue doing it. Coop’s stealing is an example of this.

I like this series not because it centers on a man once grounded and secure and now seemingly lost, but because it depicts the process of that destabilization. While we frequently throw around labels like “criminal” and “thief,” we rarely consider the individual’s circumstance nor psychological state that led to the behavior. Understanding these aspects of the person’s life experiences can potentially engender empathy for them rather than judgment and condemnation. This is not to confuse understanding with holding the person accountable for the actions. It is to suggest that forever relegating them to purgatory for uncharacteristic behavior is problematic. What is being depicted in this series is the direct link between the triggering event (job loss), the scary prospects of downward social mobility (along with its psychological effects), and their sometimes deviant manifestations. 

Interestingly, for people of lower socioeconomic status (SES) than Coop, the labels “criminal” and “thief” stick, and the individuals are then forever viewed with suspicion. This is the case even if the event occurred only once. It makes you wonder if (or when) Coop’s thievery is uncovered, will he be labeled in the same way and will these labels stick. We get a sense of the likelihood of this in the series when Coop is accused of a serious crime that is unrelated to his new extracurricular activity. How he recovers from this tells us a lot about differences in the perceptions of wealthy people versus those who are not. In any event, the truth is, we all lose our footing at times, and rarely does the decline from there happen overnight. In Coop’s case, he gradually becomes emboldened and moves on to brazen and arrogant.

In addition to depicting the process of downward social mobility and the wrong paths some take at the prospects of it, Your Friends & Neighbors confronts us with biases we might have about wealthy people, mainly that they are trouble-free and filled with choices. The characters in this series, though, are all carrying some kind of weight.

Despite Coop’s fairly good relationship with his ex-wife Mel, he has yet to put to rest the matter of her cheating on him. Barney, who is quite wealthy as well, worries about keeping money. He struggles to talk to his wife about her excessive spending on property enhancements that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Samantha Levitt (Olivia Munn) says she is happy to be divorced from her ex-husband but repeatedly gossips with her friends around the pool about his new, young girlfriend. And then there’s Nick, the retired NBA player who enjoys spending time with his friends and neighbors but behaves as if oblivious to the fact that he and Coop’s ex are a pair.

So, while some wealthy people really do have a lot of money, others not so much. Many in the latter group maintain a façade to keep up with the Joneses. And while most in the zip code are quirky and at times entitled and clueless, they carry a lot of baggage — kind of like the rest of us up and down the social hierarchy.