The Hit Apple TV+ Series That Stephen King Called 'Deliriously Nasty'

This article contains a discussion of suicide.

Put that Rolex back where it came from. Spoilers for season 1 of "Friends and Neighbors" lie ahead!

Legendary horror writer Stephen King has many delightful qualities as a public figure, but perhaps his best is that he genuinely enjoys pop culture and consumes it just like the rest of us. (How he also has time to write as much as he does is a mystery to me, but hey — good for him!) On the social media platform Bluesky, King weighed in on a recent Apple TV+ series with a pretty positive verdict: "Deliriously nasty. It's like a John D. MacDonald novel from 1962 with a lot more sex and no good guy. Enjoyable."

The series in question is "Your Friends and Neighbors," which premiered on the streamer in April 2025 and stars "Mad Men" veteran Jon Hamm as Andrew Cooper, a finance guy usually called "Coop" who, in the first episode, gets fired over a fling with a subordinate employee and doesn't know how to keep his expensive life afloat. Unbeknownst to his ex-wife Mel (Amanda Peet), kids Tori and Hunter (Isabel Marie Gravitt and Donovan Colan), and his on-again off-again flame Samantha Levitt (Olivia Munn), Coop starts quietly stealing cash and expensive items from his friends and neighbors (cue the "Leo pointing meme"). As the season continues, Coop struggles to balance his new life as a petty thief with his rich, comfortable suburban lifestyle ... and when he ends up forming an alliance with one of the family's maids, Elena (Aimee Carrero), he gets in over his head. (To be clear, the series "Your Friends and Neighbors" is not related to Neil LaBute's movie of the same name.)

Clearly, King loved "Your Friends and Neighbors," which concluded its nine-episode first season on May 30. So what did critics think of creator Jonathan Tropper's new drama, which scored a season 2 renewal before the first even premiered?

"Your Friends and Neighbors" isn't a flawless series, and the Rotten Tomatoes critical consensus reflects that, calling it an "acidly witty riff on breaking bad," and saying that the show's "class commentary occasionally stumbles but has an endlessly watchable avatar in star Jon Hamm." Still, the series scored an overall rating of 81%, so individual critics clearly thought highly of the series.

Still, the critics did single Hamm out as the series' bright spot (and, as someone who watched the entire first season, I'd agree with that and also offer up some praise for Olivia Munn's excellent supporting turn). "As a supposedly successful man undergoing a spiritual crisis, Hamm is back in Don Draper territory," Robert Lloyd wrote in his review for the Los Angeles Times. Aramide Tinubu agreed in her Variety review, saying, "Hamm is fantastic as a man reflecting on his imploded sense of self." John Powers actually wrote, for NPR, that he thinks this is Hamm's best turn so far, which is shocking when you consider what a great performance he delivers throughout "Mad Men." "It's a perfect role for Hamm, who carries with him our memories of Don Draper's dark-souled charisma, then takes this sort of character in a new direction — funnier, sadder and more sympathetic," Powers opined. "He's never been better."

Not all critics felt good about "Your Friends and Neighbors," though. "This series is 'occasionally' a lot of things, including a disappointingly predictable entry in the always robust Middle-Aged White Guy Dabbles in Crime genre and an inconsistently soft critique of that same genre, but consistently none," Daniel Fienberg wrote in The Hollywood Reporter. Ben Travers expressed a similar sentiment in IndieWire, writing, "'Your Friends and Neighbors' isn't a let-down because it falls short of greatness. It's a let-down because it doesn't try that hard to be great."

At the end of season 1 of "Your Friends and Neighbors," something unexpected happens. After Coop is accused of murdering Sam's ex-husband — only to learn that the guy died by suicide and Sam faked a crime scene so she could secure the life insurance payout — he gets a call from his old boss at the capital firm, Jack Bailey (a sneering Corbin Bernsen). They need him to secure an account in Switzerland, so Coop, cleared of any murder charges, agrees to return if he gets a huge stake in the company. Instead of flying to Switzerland with Jack, though, Coop breaks into his house and steals a piece of art, so we're clearly going to watch him get deeper into his criminal lifestyle in the next season.

"He learned something really vital, because, when I started writing [the first season], I wanted Coop to be presented with the keys to his old life back at the end," creator and showrunner Jonathan Tropper said in a post-finale interview in Variety. He continued:

"And after everything he's been through, he's sitting in his old boss' office being offered back everything he's lost, and the last few months could literally just be a bad fever dream. Now, he can have his office back and his wealth and his status, and his future and his financial security. He's being offered all of it. I think in that moment, he's actually planning to take it. And in that moment, what you can see is this is a guy who has been shaped by his experience to the point where he's a much tougher negotiator. You could almost see that the things he's learned being a little bit of a criminal, have made him better at what he does out in the financial world."

Still, Tropper was careful to say that Coop won't "break bad," so to speak. "Coop is never gonna become a criminal kingpin. We're not going down the Walter White road," he said in the interview. "So, it's never gonna be about building a big criminal enterprise. But what it is about is the risk and reward ratio, what it takes both to make him feel alive and to do what at least he tells himself in his mind — what's the exit strategy? Right now, we've only caught him after a season at the point where he's figured out what he's not gonna be, but I don't think he's yet figured out what it is he is going to be."

"Your Friends and Neighbors" is available to stream on Apple TV+ now, and there's no premiere date set for season 2 just yet.

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