“It says something interesting about our cultural moment,” declares The New York Times, that the lead of the rom-com Materialists (2025), an online matchmaker, tells her rich love interest, who works in finance, exactly how much she makes. “Concrete numbers are startling, even distracting,” the article adds, and “it’s both bracing and thoroughly of-the-moment for a movie to name salary numbers.” This “grounds the characters in our reality,” and the film feels “so very 2025” in part because “it’s become harder and more expensive to get by since the 1990s,” and “we live in a world where young women talk openly on social media platforms about how to get men to send you money, how to find a sugar daddy.”
Those terms are pretty broad, but mainstream amusements have indeed been indexing salaries, prices, and other pecuniary markers of class in a seemingly new way, as if to ground themselves and their audiences in something stable. At the end of The White Lotus Season 3, Belinda Lindsey, another service professional, justifies taking a $5 million bribe by asking, “Can I just be rich for five fucking minutes?” Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald wondered how rich that would make her: “Five million is … not what it was a few years ago, season 2, let’s say.” The payoff will allow Belinda to stay rich for more than five minutes, figured at a million a minute, but maybe not by much. Her ask registers anxiety that “our reality” is fiscally volatile and inflationary, and the middle class has no hope of making it to the far shore on which the obscenely wealthy lounge. Except in filmed entertainments: in The White Lotus, viewers able to pay HBO $9.99/month (with ads) can vacation with the superrich and savor the drama’s withering satire as if it were a fine wine they couldn’t otherwise afford.
Something different is afoot in Apple’s Jon Hamm vehicle, Your Friends & Neighbors. Hamm plays Andrew Cooper, a divorced and recently fired hedge fund manager who burgles his rich Westchester neighbors so he can maintain a lavish lifestyle and stay close to his family. During his capers, he prices the luxury items with which he and his neighbors surround themselves. Subsequent episodes feature new products, only some of which he steals, like Patek Philippe watches, Richard Mille Felipe Massa automatic chronographs, Hermès bags, and the Rolls-Royce Spectre. Each is lovingly shot, its features and allure listed alongside current retail and resale prices.
“Like the ad says,” Cooper intones, “you never really own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation.” Surely these were paid spots, critics opined. They were not. In fact, Apple TV+ is the only major streamer with no ads. But that’s because the service is itself a sophisticated marketing machine.
Like so many TV+ shows, Your Friends exists to create and sell Apple’s luxury brand, which in this case means naming and pricing the luxury goods in whose midst the drama places us. These should be your friends and neighbors, because this is your natural habitat—Apple’s zip code, in effect. Cooper’s name evokes Don Draper’s firm, Sterling Cooper, in Mad Men. But it also evokes Cupertino, the location of Apple’s headquarters, and at its rotten core Your Friends exemplifies Apple’s efforts not just to upsell its aspirational customers but subtly to change their sense of what good TV is and does. Because at bottom, TV+ indexes the quality and prestige of its typically very expensive offerings to the dollar amounts spent in and on them.
Quantity, Not Quality
Critics have cycled through different names for the ambitious television that first appeared on HBO at the end of the last millennium. Used to identify upmarket target demographics on behalf of advertisers as far back as the 1970s, “quality TV” appealed in the early 2000s, in part because it named ostensibly intrinsic attributes that made a new generation of cable comedies and dramas objectively better than previous TV. The widespread recognition of those attributes contributed, in turn, to the emergence in the aughts and teens of “prestige TV”: a term that denoted an achieved status shift. A new kind of TV had escaped the confines of the merely popular and become more generally esteemed.
“Prestige TV” acquired popularity in the buildup to what, in 2015, FX CEO John Landgraf called “peak TV.” Landgraf referred to neither quality nor prestige, but rather to the outsized role that TV generally had come to assume across Hollywood, as one after another studio rushed to emulate earlier darlings. “Peak” suggested a bubble about to burst. “There’s simply too much television,” Landgraf said, “a huge oversupply.”
Flash forward 10 years. The bubble has burst in the wake of the Writers Guild of America strike and the contraction of legacy media companies, which have scaled back production significantly, faced with the reality that they cannot compete with Netflix.
And even Netflix itself has stepped back from prestige TV. By sheer volume, it offers as much smart fare as boutique outlets like FX or HBO. And the streamer committed early on to recognizable TV prestige in House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, for example (thank you, Cindy Holland). But once Stranger Things concludes, it will have few multiyear dramas that resemble the black-market melodramas that previously defined ambitious TV. Content chief Bela Bajaria came close to acknowledging this pivot away from ostensibly fancy fare and toward what she famously called “gourmet cheeseburgers” when she claimed recently, “Nobody knows what ‘prestige TV’ actually is.”
Netflix serves up good and bad shows and doesn’t want to signal their relative merits. It lets a hundred flowers bloom and arranges them with taste algorithms that care not a whit about status. A related story might be told about Amazon, which has been embracing “middle-aged guys with guns TV.” Bosch, Reacher, Hunters, Jack Ryan, Cross, and The Terminal List sport “difficult men,” but the similarities to earlier prestige programming stop there.
Like so many TV+ shows, “Your Friends” exists to create and sell Apple’s luxury brand, which in this case means naming and pricing the luxury goods in whose midst the drama places us.
Apple TV+ is an entirely different matter. Many have anointed it “the New HBO,” and it’s easy to see why. Cupertino’s long-standing commitment to luxury all but requires emulating HBO. Since its 2019 launch, TV+ has done this in large part by lavishing money on A-list Hollywood talent. But Apple shows are not really like HBO’s.
TV+ shows better exemplify what James Poniewozik calls “Mid TV,” “good-enough new shows that resemble great old ones.” That bland if expensive type “goes down easy,” Poniewozik says, and is “fine.” Indeed, with few exceptions, Apple shows are … fine. The comedies are on the whole better than the dramas, which buckle under the weight of their prestige ambitions. The dramas want to be taken seriously but almost always play it safe, politically and aesthetically: their edges are polished down with an engineer’s eye, in the service of compatibility with the larger Apple ecosystem.
But TV+ shows aren’t simply unsuccessful facsimiles of older ones. Nor are they incidentally expensive. Yearly TV+ losses of about $1 billion prop up Apple’s prestige play, by testifying to the company’s willingness to pay for quality—which it measures in turn in dollars spent and dollars shown. Apple’s “Price-Tag TV,” to propose a new entrant to the TV name game, is expensive programming about folks who like expensive things, made for viewers who either can’t see or don’t care about the difference between good and expensive. Price-Tag TV is a lazy watch for the affluent and self-satisfied.
The Cupertino (Zip) Code
“The Apple logo,” Scott Galloway notes, “is the global badge of wealth, education, and Western values.” But “Apple did not start as a luxury brand,” he notes. “It was the best house in a shitty neighborhood, tech hardware. A world of cables, geekware, acronyms, and low margins.” Tech was low-rent and ugly (remember cyberpunk?) before Steve Jobs and Jony Ive proved the Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iWatch could signify luxury.
But maintaining the brand’s allure after Jobs’s death and Ive’s departure has been tricky. This is especially true since Apple products have become only more expensive versions of all but identical alternatives. Cupertino sells $1,000+ phones to those who might have near equivalents available almost for free but value the company’s elegantly stylized appeal.
TV+ is a platform for advertising Apple products and, more broadly, part of a push into rent-bearing services that offset shrinking margins in Apple’s device business. I’ve elaborated on those functions and others. But at bottom, TV+ is a luxury brand factory. It is like the Mural of Souls in the TV+ SF drama Foundation: moving images that decorate the most exclusive of walls. Apple understands the good life and wants to share it with us. Indeed, it is already sharing it with us, by way of its devices.
Gorgeous homes and affluent families litter the TV+ canon, in Shrinking, The Studio, Presumed Innocent, Disclaimer, The Buccaneers, Palm Royale, The Last Thing He Told Me, and Bad Sisters, to name a few. That’s a significantly higher ratio of affluence relative to Apple’s limited library than on other streamers. More revealing are TV+ shows celebrating luxury brands and goods: Loot, in which a newly minted billionaire makes much of her La DoubleJ and Alexander McQueen outfits (while using Apple devices); Drops of God, about French and Japanese vintners graced with an ability to taste the origins of fine wines; The New Look, about the wartime adventures of Christian Dior and Coco Chanel; and Carême, about the adventures of the world’s first celebrity chef—in Napoleon’s court. These shows offer vicarious access to a world of luxury in which they often place Apple products.
That access does not always require luxury goods. In Apple TV’s The Studio, Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) is told by his “corporate overlord” (Bryan Cranston) to produce a “huge, four-quadrant” movie about “the legacy brand” Kool-Aid. Inspired by Barbie, Remick wants a “fancy,” “auteur-driven, Oscar-winning” film. So when Martin Scorsese pitches a film to Remick about the Jamestown massacre, eager for Remick’s $250 million budget, he titles his project Kool-Aid. Yet Remick rejects it, going instead with a down-market pitch in which “Kool-Aid man”—a “logo in a world of logos”—drinks at the local bar with Jello, Chef Boyardee, and Velveeta. Still, Remick/Rogen has to tell Scorsese that the studio is going in a different direction. And when he does (at Charlize Theron’s house), the director spits, “You’re just another run-of-the-mill faceless, talentless, spineless suit. … give me back my movie, and let me go sell it to fucking Apple, which I should have done in the first place.” The message is simple: Apple is where you go (where you already have gone) to escape cheap brands and logos.
Your Friends & Neighbors commits to that message with glee, while signaling its prestige-worthy seriousness. This mishmash of Mad Men and Breaking Bad embroils Cooper in a recognizable secret second life. But in Apple’s version of prestige TV, the lead is not morally gray tending to black. Cooper’s crime is simply not spending more time with family. And in Your Friends, Don Draper gets his family back.
The drama announces its prestige ambitions almost line by line, but clumsily. It begins with Cooper waking up in a palatial home next to a dead body and then stumbling into a pool. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says as he sinks slowly, in a voiceover that sets up an extended flashback. “The pool is a metaphor.” Cooper then tells us he “wasn’t generally the kind of guy who did a lot of introspection” before confessing, “at that moment, I couldn’t help but catch a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eye of the swirling hot mess of my life and wonder how the hell everything could go so wrong so fast.”
Had we known anything at all about Cooper’s predicament before the delivery of these lines, we might have thought his fall into the pool (rather than just “the pool”) a metaphor for, say, drowning in life obligations that keep him from family. But the metaphor’s precise tenor doesn’t matter; rather, the line announces the show’s half-assed relation to the sophistication to which it will pretend. Two episodes later, as Cooper watches his drunk wealth manager disgorge an evening’s worth of very old scotch, the voiceover offers this: “If you’re in the market for metaphors, look no further than a man vomiting into a $30,000 toilet that isn’t connected to any plumbing. Though, once you get into a certain frame of mind, everything in this town is a fucking metaphor.”
A metaphor for what, exactly? No matter: Your Friends is in the market less for specific metaphors than for the market niche they secure. We can imagine Eddy Cue, head of Apple’s Services Division, which oversees TV+, asking for the show to make ample use of the word “metaphor”—because reminding viewers they’re consuming metaphors, rather than simply affluence, might elevate this breathtakingly vapid drama. Perhaps then we might confuse the show with The White Lotus.
The season’s last episode takes this empty pretense to embarrassing lows. Cooper is having a panic attack as he struggles to prove his innocence in the face of a murder charge. His voiceover intones, “Jay McInerney wrote, ‘everything becomes symbol and irony when you’ve been betrayed,’ and if it was symbolism you were after, there I was breaking into the house of my former lover to find a phone that was almost certainly not there in a desperate bid at a redemption I wasn’t sure I deserved.” Duly impressed by the sound of these words, the episode titles itself “Everything becomes symbol and irony.” But we search in vain for either.
Later, Cooper says that in his town, “nothing is as it seems.” But everything here and in this show is exactly as it seems—which is also to say, everything here costs exactly what it costs. And in the drama’s purely quantitative logic, metaphor for metaphor’s sake is all but indistinguishable from price for price’s sake. Each refers mainly to itself.
“What might be called use value in the reception of cultural assets,” Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer noted in 1944, “is being replaced by exchange value.” As they saw it, “those who spent their money in the nineteenth or the early twentieth century to see a play or to go to a concert respected the performance as much as the money they spent.” But in the 1940s culture industry, “Everything has value only insofar as it can be exchanged.” This means, as Adorno explained elsewhere, that the consumer at a Toscanini concert, for example, is “really worshipping the money that he himself has paid for the ticket.”
TV+ indexes the quality and prestige of its typically very expensive offerings to the dollar amounts spent in and on them.
That misguided worship reflected the industrial massification of culture but still traded on atavistic forms of cultural deference and pretense: Toscanini performing “classical music,” for example, or Hollywood’s “connoisseurship by enhanced prestige,” which offers film “enjoyment” as a way of “being there and being in the know.” A similar dynamic now obtains with Apple, whose luxury connoisseurship rehearses prestige TV as an empty formalism, in a mechanical reduction of TV quality to quantity.
Your Friends is a derivative instrument, for example, that trades on a prestige underlier. Asked by The New York Times if the drama’s “themes, style and wardrobe” were nods to Mad Men, Hamm replied, “There’s something to be said for that,” before adding, “There’s also something to be said for subverting that.” A fluff piece that features images of Hamm in an array of sharp outfits, the Times article obliges: it declares Your Friends “a critique of conspicuous consumption.” But it’s easier to say “there’s something to be said” than to say it. And ultimately, this show is less a critique than a market hedge.
Witness creator Jonathan Tropper struggling to clarify his Robin Hood-but-not-really premise, “the real danger in acquiring wealth is there’s nothing evil about wealth, per se: The danger is the amount of time and effort you spend acquiring it,” a handy credo with which to secure the moral superiority of the hedge fund manager over the wage worker. But make no mistake, Cooper is just a regular guy. He was rich and now isn’t, but has always been an everyman, if only because he’s had bills to pay. He has “relatable” characteristics, says Hamm. “Not everybody is worrying about how they’re gonna pay their $300,000 mortgage or fix their $200,000 car. But other than the mathematics of scale, I think those are problems that people have.” The right “mathematics of scale” reveals that the billionaire’s broken Maserati and the wage worker’s mortgage are simply the same problem at different price points.
Your Friends seems to attract fuzzy math (and thought). Ross Douthat proclaimed it “a useful balm for the resentments of people who assume that they’d definitely be happier with $10 million in the bank.” That is tone deaf: Cooper robs his neighbors because he wants to stay their neighbor, and we tag happily along as he acquiesces to community mores, snorting premium coke, downing top-shelf scotch, and bedding beautiful divorcées. He’s aloof but not disdainful while enjoying these decadent delights—which allows us to enjoy the ride while feeling superior to it. But more relevant is Douthat’s joking pitch to his New York Times editors: bankroll six months of research in a similar community at $20 million. Tropper might appreciate this neat bit of arbitrage, in which six months at $20 million simulates life with $10 million saved. But what’s ultimately most striking is the casting about for the right number, as if the whole point of the show (and Douthat’s column) were correctly to price the lifestyle on display.
It’s easy enough to imagine a version of Your Friends that provokes critical engagement rather than number crunching. Bret Easton Ellis has written it, in fact, and Your Friends references American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, another financier besotted with luxury. Bateman frequently recounts the cost of his upmarket brands: a $4,000 Gianfranco Ferré trench coat, a $3,500 Durgin Gorham tea set, a $20,000 watch, etc. But his torture and serial murder metaphorize the brutal operations of finance capitalism—and Your Friends is not that kind of metaphor. It instead assures us, like a good Visa commercial, that the best things in life are priceless—when you’ve paid top dollar for everything else. When Cooper’s ex-wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), surveys a table littered with gifts, she spies a crumpled brown bag from Andrew; he’s given her Atomic Fireballs, and she tears up remembering sharing them. This is one of many shoutouts to Mad Men’s “The Wheel,” and we understand that, though swaddled in lavish trappings, Mel values family most of all. Your Friends surrounds Apple’s viewers with luxury goods too, so they can wear them lightly, confident the brands do not define them.
They Come in Different Colors
Apple shows come off the assembly line in batches, clustered around similar themes and plot points and differentiated just enough to appeal to distinct segments of Apple’s broadly affluent demographic. An Owen Wilson vehicle that premiered days after the finale of Your Friends, Stick also features a once-at-the-top-of-his-game-but-now-out-of-work sad dude separated from his wife, but still in love with her. He must rekindle his joy before they (maybe) reunite.
It’s better than Your Friends, and thankfully devoid of the drama’s pretentions, but also uses its sad dude to guide us through a world of wealth and privilege, in this case country clubs and golf tournaments. His name, appropriately enough, is Pryce, which leads him to joke “the Pryce is right,” for example, when tutoring his links protégé.
The similarities are more striking between Your Friends and Government Cheese, which dropped days after and ran alongside the Hamm vehicle throughout the spring. A David Oyelowo comedy about an African American engineer released from prison and struggling to reunite with his family in the 1969 San Fernando Valley, this show seems different, not least because Oyelowo’s quirky but tonally adroit comedy—which disappeared almost immediately from critical conversation—is easily one of the best shows Apple has made thus far.
But both Your Friends and Government Cheese are about a husband resorting to thievery to reunite with an estranged family, made up of a wife who loves him but will no longer tolerate his emotional absence and two kids, one initially hostile and one warm, the latter of whom is applying for college. The husbands’ names gesture to each other: “Hampton” Chambers to a zip code like Coop’s, and “Coop” to Hampton’s prison confinement. The eventual return of each husband “saves” each wife from an interracial romance: Mel gives up the African American Nick Brandes to return to Coop and Astoria Chambers will stop dating her white boyfriend to return to Hampton.
More strikingly, Government Cheese pauses to call attention, again, to metaphor. Astoria is getting high watching TV and contemplating her life. The happy wife in a coffee commercial comes to life and explicates: “Coffee is a metaphor. … The coffee is a metaphor for taking care of your husband.” Apple exec Eddy Cue is surely mollified, and not just because he loves metaphor. These intralibrary patterns—and Apple’s self-reference generally—elevate the TV+ brand over the show proper, making the C-suite the author of note, or even the origin of something like providential design.
Astoria climbs to her roof and, having decided that she will pursue her career rather than wait on Hampton, jumps off—into the pool below. She emerges beaming, converted to her new life. Hampton himself experienced a life-altering submersion in the previous episode: fishing, he’s dragged underwater by a giant catfish. We see him slowly sinking, like Coop. And here is the conversion metaphor for which Your Friends was groping. Swallowed by the catfish, Hampton is a penitent Jonah. He pledges himself to a more righteous path and is spit out.
Luxury began with theology, Scott Galloway reminds us. “For millennia, we’ve knelt in churches, mosques, and temples, looked around and thought, ‘There is no way human hands could have created … this alchemy of sound, art, and architecture without divine inspiration.’” Over time, we came to associate “the combined aesthetic overwhelm from superior artisanship with the presence of God.”
Apple devices aim for that overwhelm, and—as if compelled by some version of it—TV+ characters are forever falling or walking into deep waters: on Lisey’s Story, Surface, Lady in the Lake, Adventure, Fountain of Youth, Government Cheese, and Your Friends, for example. Taken together, these diverse brand baptisms respond to the upbeat messages in Ted Lasso, Shrinking, The Big Door Prize, and Lessons in Chemistry, each of which exhorts us to “Believe!”—as Lasso puts it—less in any god than in ourselves, and the infinite promise of our beautiful, upwardly mobile lives.
Upgrade yourself by waking to the adventure of self-discovery. What else are you going to do, having acquired more wealth in less time?
This article was commissioned by Sarah Kessler.
Featured image: Jon Hamm and Hoon Lee in Your Friends & Neighbors (2025). IMDb