Your Friends and Neighbors (series): It looks promising.. has great pacing

I don't know exactly what you would call this show but it is basically a story involving a ton of people, but the interactions are only narrated by one person. Although the topic matter shares nothing in common, this is something exhibited in Dexter pretty well. There are a ton of pieces to the puzzle, but we, the audience are only privy to the thought process of the one main character.

Your Friends and Neighbors does the same thing with Jon Hamm's character "Coop."

Coop is a very successful businessman who has recently had the rug pulled out from under him with a divorce happening and his long-time job screwing him out of his position and with it, the ability to make a living and continue the lavish lifestyle that he has grown accustomed to. his now ex-wife is a somewhat reasonable person but she too has grown accustomed to a certain lavish lifestyle and now she continues to live it with Coop being required to pay for it with alimony and child support.

He keeps his attitude in check for the most part, but the stark realization that his financial world is a very big part of his existence and without his well-paying job his investments are going to dry up really fast if he cannot put something together very quickly to keep the money coming in.

His internal struggle isn't something that he tells many people about though, and he is obsessed with appearances and pretends to everyone as though he is absolutely minted with money even though the reverse is the case. Since nobody will hire him since his firm has connections across the board, this becomes increasingly difficult for him to pretend that the exorbitant lifestyle that he leads is something that he can still maintain. Every trip to the country club, every benefit dinner that he has to pay 10,000 dollars to participate in, every time his kids need thousands for a field trip at school, all of this grinds at his sense of worth and stresses him out because only he and his accountant are aware of what the real financial story actually is.

So far I have only watched 2 episodes but I can tell already that I really appreciate the writers on this show. They are able to speed things along with internal dialogue (Coop's) that tells what is going on in a fast-forward sort of way, they also utilize montages and speed explanations that remind me of the sort of storytelling that is so wonderfully executed in the hands of masters like Guy Ritchie, who by the way has absolutely nothing to do with this show.

Another thing that I like about this show is that while it isn't targeting anyone in real life in particular, it is exposing the rather shady, dirty, and selfish lives of the true masters of the world. Landman did this with the oil industry, and Your Friends and Neighbors is doing it with venture capital, and industry that so few of us actually know anything about but have probably heard of.

To me this series also showcases the extreme lengths that some people will go to in order to horde their wealth, and how absolutely massive amounts of money and "stuff" are in their possession and they think nothing of it. They are, as a group, so detached from the normal worries that the everyday working man actually has so they supplement their stress with things that I think most people wish was a worry of theirs.

Should I watch it?

There are a lot of good series to choose from right now, especially if you are far behind and don't watch hours of TV a day like I do. That being said, I feel as though this series keeps things moving so quickly that you can actually follow it rather effortlessly. The writing and set pieces are done extremely well in this one so that we don't get too bogged down in a bunch of filler and "side quests" and instead there is a very linear and fast paced sense to this show despite the fact that there isn't any actual action in the traditional sense. This is something that is so rare these days as I feel as many series are aiming for a certain amount of episodes without considering whether or not they actually have enough material for those episodes.

I think this show is going to appeal to most people, unless of course English is not your first language. On a side note another reason why this show appealed to me is because me and Jon Hamm are roughly the same age and I am in better shape than he is... hehe