Presumably, somewhere there exists a group of people trying to come up with an elevator pitch equal to the famous/infamous “The Sopranos in Middle-earth” that got Game of Thrones the go-ahead. In the never-ending battle to stand out from the vast, teeming crowd of expensive, star-studded prestige TV shows, everyone’s trying to come up with the logline to convince people that theirs is special. So the people behind Your Friends And Neighbors must have thought they hit the jackpot because its title really might as well be “Don Draper Breaks Bad”.

Jon Hamm stars as Andrew “Coop” Cooper, a recently-divorced hedge fund manager who gets abruptly fired from his extravagantly well-paid job. Quickly finding himself unemployable for the foreseeable future, he sets about trying to make ends meet any way he can – and settles on breaking into the houses of his also very well-paid friends and neighbours, stealing their valuables and fencing them.

For better or worse, it’s hard not to think of Mad Men when Jon Hamm’s the star, and this show does little to try and make you think of something else. His character’s very name conjures up the memory of Sterling Cooper, the ad agency from the show that made him a star, and the fabulously wealthy, 1% milieu he inhabits is essentially the 2020s version of Draper’s social circle. So we have elements of one of the most influential and well-regarded TV series about Difficult Male Antiheroes, and the reasoning seems to have been that instant success would be guaranteed if they just combined them with elements of another legendary show. And so Coop turns to extra-legal means to pay his bills, tries to keep secrets from his family and friends, and even picks up a much younger, more streetwise partner-in-crime to help him learn the ropes.

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You can see why, on paper, this all sounds very appealing. In the same way that “The Sopranos in Middle-earth” must have had investors’ eyes turning into dollar signs, combining Mad Men and Breaking Bad must have seemed like a brilliant idea. The trouble is, rather than making this show stand out from the pack, it makes it blend in. We’ve seen many TV series covering similar stories and themes, to the point where the Difficult Male Antihero is practically a cliche. We’re hopelessly spoiled for choice when it comes to this kind of TV, and you really do need that je ne sais quoi that puts your show above the others. Your Friends And Neighbors doesn’t have it.

To be clear, it isn’t remotely bad. In fact, it’s really rather good on the whole. There are frustrations with the plot, with seemingly-important threads being dropped early on and very little being wrapped up to save for the next season, but there’s lots to like nonetheless. The performances are great, particularly Hamm’s and Olivia Munn’s as Coop’s secret mistress. The dialogue is punchy and memorable; it’s shot really well and has top-drawer production values. It has a nice level of disdain for these repulsively rich one-percenters, and a late-season episode that dispenses with the main plot altogether to follow Coop and his ex-wife (Amanda Peet) taking their daughter to see a potential college is actually quite lovely.

The problem is, much of the previous paragraph applies to basically every splashy, prestigious TV show these days, and so while there’s little to really complain about here, there’s little that makes it truly sing either. We’re drowning in this kind of thing at the moment, and fundamentally, we’ve seen it all before.