Your Friends & Neighbors: Definitely Worth Getting to Know

Just saw the finale -- the 9th episode -- of the first season of Your Friends & Neighbors on Apple TV+.  I'm saying first season because Apple renewed it for a second season before the first season begun.  A smart move because Your Friends & Neighbors, billed as a comedy-drama, but more a drama with some comical touches about some of the ethical profundities of life -- at least life in the New York City area -- is a tour-de-force of a series in a multiplicity of ways.

Here are some of those (in general non-spoiler) ways:

1. It's easily Jon Hamm's best role and performance since Mad Men.  Indeed, Hamm is so natural and energized in the lead role -- Andrew Cooper aka Coop -- that it could be Coop could equal or even exceed Don Draper.  Time will tell.

2. The rest of the acting is top-notch.  Amanda Peet as Coop's former wife, Olivia Munn as his sometimes lover, even Corbin Bernsen as, well, Coop's despicable boss, a minor role, are all memorable. So are Isabel Gravitt and Donovan Colan as Coop's kids.

3. The essence of the plot:  Coop is fired from his high-stakes financially wheeling-and-dealing job.  He takes up stealing -- literally stealing -- from his neighbors to stay afloat.  As a result of which, he ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time, looking guilty for a murder he didn't commit.  Along the way, we meet bevy of compelling characters including his fence; an unlikely but effective partner-in-crime; and a sister with a pretty good voice and some impressive songs (Lena Hall plays Coop's sister, and actually wrote and sings an original song as well as singing the covers -- a nice touch).

I have no idea if the depiction of this upper crust in Your Friends & Neighbors is accurate (I live in the greater New York area, but as a professor I'm not really privy to what goes on in boardrooms and the like).  But that doesn't really matter.   Your Friends & Neighbors is not a documentary, not even a docu-drama.  It's a work of fiction, in which it splendidly succeeds.

Fatal Attraction (2023, the TV series), Season One: Welcome to the Jung-le

Fatal Attraction -- the new 2023 series -- finished its 8-episode first season on Paramount on Sunday.  Yes, it's the same story as the 1987 pathbreaking movie, retold and refigured in all kinds of significant and even profound ways, which I think largely succeeded.

[And there will be spoilers ahead ... ]

First, I saw and much enjoyed the 1987 movie, though I don't recall many of the important details.  The TV series is half a retelling of that story, and half a narrative that takes place 15 years in the future, when Dan Gallagher is released from prison after serving his time for killing Alexandra.  As we soon learn, though, he lied when he told he the parole board that he understood the evil he had done in murdering Alex -- he lied to get his freedom, which he intends to use to prove his innocence and find out who really did do the murder.

So that's a pretty strong set-up for a new take on this story, and it's enhanced with an increasing focus on Ellen (Dan and his wife's Beth's daughter), 15 years older, now in college, and immersed in the cognitive joys of discovering the theories of Carl Jung, second only to Freud as the inventor of modern psychology.  Jung has popped up in all kinds of places in our popular culture, but none as explicitly and effectively as with Ellen, who is attracted to Jung's concept of the shadow, and in the final stunner of the TV series becomes an embodiment of the concept, as her shadow takes her over and she becomes the new Alex. 

But who killed the original Alex?  The answer gives us the other shocker of the TV series.  The killer is indeed not Dan, and nor is it Beth, who did the deed in the movie.  I was thinking throughout the series that the killer might be Mike, but it turns out to be Arthur, friend of the Gallaghers, whose wife is dying of cancer, and who will later become Beth's partner.    I thought this worked -- his wife dying was a plausible foundation for taking such a drastic action -- but it was the weakest part of the new story.  First, too much time was devoted to Arthur before he killed Alex, so much, indeed, that I began to suspect that he was going to be the killer, or why spend so much time on him?  And, unless I missed it, I didn't see any foretelling of Arthur's propensity for violence earlier in the series.

But, all in all, I found the TV series daring and intelligent, and well worth viewing.  The acting was superb, with  Joshua Jackson as Dan, Lizzy Caplan as Alex, Amanda Peet as Beth, and Alyssa Jirrels as Ellen especially outstanding.  And hats off to showrunner Alexandra Cunningham (see Jackie Strause's interview with her in the Hollywood Reporter).

Whether there will be a second season is unknown at this point.  I certainly hope there is.  Indeed, Ellen's story itself could well take more than one season to be properly told.

Dirty John Season 2: Betty: Truth Stranger than Fiction but Not Quite as Compelling

My wife and I just finished binging Dirty John Season 2: Betty on the USA Network.  It was a powerful season, brilliantly acted by Amanda Peet in the title role, but not as good as the first season.

The first season told the story of John Meehan (hence Dirty John), who actually was a character far more familiar to television drama than Betty Broderick.  John is a sweet-talking con-man killer, who ensnares Debra, superbly played by Connie Britton, who has delivered masterful performances in at least two other television series, Friday Night Lights and Nashville.  Britton on the screen, as well as Eric Bana as John, as well as the mounting, almost excruciating tension of whether Debra will realize what John is, and escape with her life, was an irresistible combination.

The acting was equally strong in the second season.  I already mentioned Peet as Betty, and Christian Slater was equally effective as her husband Dan.  But the story of Betty, a woman so devoted to Dan that, when he leaves her to be with and eventually marry Linda, Betty eventually kills them, is bizarre more than frightening, a study of a woman scorned becoming a woman insane, to the point of acting against her own self-interests, since by killing Dan and Linda, she loses any chance to be with her four kids whom she very much loves. 

I know that this a true story, with the typical docudrama  proviso that a few characters and scenes have been changed.  And they say the truth can be stranger than fiction, which is true enough.  But that doesn't mean such stranger truth can make for as gripping a story as an outright fiction, or, in this case of the second season of Dirty John, as gripping a story as the stranger truth of the first season.

But the second season was enjoyable and nonetheless worth viewing, if only for the sterling performances of the leads, especially Amanda Peet.

See also: Dirty John 1.1: Hunter and Hunted ... Dirty John 1.2: Motives and Plans ... Dirty John 1.4: The Forgiveness Gene ... Dirty John 1.5: John's Family ... Dirty John 1.6: Getting Wise ... Dirty John Season One Finale: Truth Stranger than Fiction