Jon Hamm is keeping up with the Joneses in Your Friends and Neighbours

Don Draper would’ve made a meal of marketing to a man like Andy Cooper and his people in streaming series Your Friends and Neighbours.

Having “conquered” the definition of “success”, they want for nothing, so they’ll substitute real meaning with stuff - “Scotch, cigars, smoked meats and custom golf clubs,” along with exorbitant country club memberships, Maseratis and $32,000 bottles of Montrechet Grands Crus.

Are these people happy? Clearly not, but they can pretend they are, as long as they can surround themselves with more things. As Coop says in voiceover, these accoutrement are fuelled by “entire industries of to cash in on the quiet desperation of rich, middle-aged men”.

The residents of the wealthy enclave north of New York City might seem to have it all – the ludicrously large mansions, domestic staff, designer threads and Philippe Patek watches that cost three times more than an average Australian worker’s full-time salary.

Coop (Jon Hamm) was one of them. But he’s having a bad time. He’s recently divorced, after discovering his wife Mel (Amanda Peet) in bed with his good friend, a former NBA player (Mark Tallman), whom she is now dating, while he’s renting a smaller bungalow nearby.

A successful hedge fund manager, his boss fires him based on a technicality and uses the opportunity to keep his portfolio and enforce a two-year non-solicit clause which makes Coop un-hireable.

Afflicted with a serious case of keeping up with the Joneses (which is both the show’s theme song and the name of a 2016 Hamm movie), he resorts to petty crime, stealing from his community, one Swiss watch, Cartier bangle or Roy Lichtenstein painting at a time.

Created by Jonathan Topper, Your Friends and Neighbours delights in judging its characters’ conspicuous consumption, making a point about their excessive lifestyles and emotional malaise, where the threat of school expulsions can be ameliorated with a $240,000 donation or high-tech toilets go for $30,000.

It’s not meant to make you envious or trigger any kind of aspiration. But it can be a lot, especially in those first couple of episodes when you’re not sure why you should care if any of these privileged fools are deserving of empathy.

But then as the series settles in (seven out of nine episodes were made available for review), the show becomes much more compelling. Part of that is the casting, with Hamm, Peet, Lena Hall as Coop’s sister Ali, Olivia Munn who plays his secret new girlfriend Sam, and Hoon Lee who plays his business manager and friend Barney, so very, very watchable.

Hamm, since his breakout in Mad Men, has proven adept at embodying complexity in characters who aren’t always sympathetic, and that goes for Don Draper as much as it does for his recent villainous turns in Fargo and Morning Wars.

There’s a version of Coop that could’ve been insufferable, but Hamm renders him interesting, as we watch the disintegration of a man who thought he knew what success meant but when the scaffolds are kicked out from under him, he realises they were always rickety.

His Maserati doesn’t make him happy and he derives little pleasure from mingling with his friends. It’s a ritual to save face, to maintain a status that someone else decided was the goal.

Most of the peripheral characters aren’t that well shaded but Peet’s Mel and Lee’s Barney are similarly going through a “is this all there is” moment.

For Mel, no table adorned with birthday gifts from Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Bergdorf Goodman is going to make her happy, not as much as a brown paper bag full of lollies that recall her university days. For Barney, the pressures of an escalating home renovation and the shaming from his even-wealthier in-laws leads to despondency.

Your Friends and Neighbours persuasively sell you on “mo money mo problems” while the risks for Coop’s new persona as a gentleman thief ramp up as the cops start to close in, especially after he stumbles into a murder scene.

The series has already been renewed for a second season, months before the premiere, so Apple clearly has some confidence in it, and it’s well-placed. If you’re patient enough to get past the shakier first two chapters, Your Friends and Neighbours is more than its shiny trappings.

Your Friends and Neighbours is on Apple TV+ on April 11