Jon Hamm excels in Apple TV 's "emotionally real but absurdist" drama about a desperate corporate man who resorts to stealing from his neighbours.

Jon Hamm has his best role since Mad Men and brings all his sharp comic timing and dramatic nuance to it as Andrew Cooper, known as Coop, a hedge-fund manager who loses his job and manoeuvres to maintain his elaborate lifestyle and sense of himself. If you took Don Draper and dropped him into 2025 he might be Coop, a corporate man with a broken marriage and two teenaged children, a decent guy and a charmer with all-around bad judgement. Your Friends and Neighbors is emotionally real and affecting but also absurdist and funny, a rare combination.

The show begins with Coop waking up in a pool of blood next to a man's dead body in the foyer of a neighbour's mansion. He cleans up the blood – a bad move – and in one of the many mordant voiceovers that run through the series, looks back four months to reflect on "the swirling hot mess of my life". His worst choice is replacing his lost income by stealing loot from friends so rich they'll never miss it. The robberies are the comic vein in the story, but also a Trojan horse for its drama. Coop is hurt and distraught over the loss of his marriage, but that theme exists next to the caper-like thefts. The series is edgier and smarter than its entertaining surface suggests, as it deftly takes on issues of family, class privilege, vapid materialism and toxic masculinity.

Like most series, this could start a bit faster, as it sets up the life Coop is accustomed to in a suburban New York community of huge houses and country clubs, where $200,000 cars and $60,000 donations to charity are ordinary. That was his life until he found his wife Mel (Amanda Peet) in bed with his so-called friend, Nick (Mark Tallman), a former basketball star still in great shape. The divorce has sent Coop out of his expansive home into a smaller rental house nearby.

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