HIGH-LIFE LOWLIFE

“Your Friends and Neighbors,” on Apple TV+.

- INKOO KANG

The first episode of the new Apple TV+ drama “Your Friends and Neighbors” takes pains to explain how one can rake in master-of-the-universe money yet never feel financially secure. Jon Hamm stars as Andrew Cooper, known as Coop, a hedge-fund guy who finds that alimony, child support, a mortgage, an apartment rental, and private-school tuition are draining his bank accounts faster than he can replenish them.

And that’s before he loses his job. After he’s unceremoniously ousted by his firm and contractually barred from similar employment for two years, each new expense feels like a punch to the gut. Dropping off his teenage son at the home of his ex-wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), Coop learns that he’s on the hook for a new drum set (nearly eighteen hundred dollars) for the boy and three sessions of a skin treatment (forty-five hundred) for their daughter.

A neighbor signs Coop up for two tables at a cancer benefit (thirty grand apiece). Coop could say no. Instead, he decides to maintain his lifestyle by stealing from his social circle, figuring everyone has too much to miss what he refers to as “piles of forgotten wealth just lying around in drawers where they were doing no one any good.”