What to stream this week: A new Jon Hamm show, plus five more to add to your list

This week’s picks include John Hamm’s first lead role since the end of Mad Men, an Arctic Circle comedy, the return of Hacks and a Steven Soderbergh medical drama.

Your Friends and Neighbours ★★★★ (Apple TV+)

Jon Hamm’s leading man looks, which Mad Men weaponised for his portrayal of the iconic Don Draper, have just started to fade. It’s perfect timing. In this knotty, expansive drama about holding on by any means, Hamm has greying hair and hints of a gut.

John Hamm plays Andrew Cooper, who starts robbing the rich when he’s fired from his Wall Street job.Credit:

It’s just right for Andrew “Coop” Cooper, a 48-year-old Wall Street go-getter who, having already untethered from his wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), and two teenage children, falls into bed with a junior staffer at his company and gets fired.

No career, no home, and too many bills. It’s a cost-of-living crisis 1 per cent-style – $30,000 for a charity dinner ticket suddenly hits hard. Nonetheless, creator Jonathan Tropper (Banshee) and Hamm soon have you invested in Coop’s comeback. First, they make the secretly broke protagonist look anew at the excess he blindly pursued in the wealthy upstate New York enclave of Westmont Village. Coop realises he was racing to accumulate status instead of satisfaction. Second, to make ends meet he starts to steal from neighbourhood mansions.

“I’m not a thief,” Coop insists to the unimpressed Bronx fence he sells stolen $200,000 watches to, and the show explores every side of the assertion, starting with the ease with which Coop’s entitlement goes from living a privileged life to justifying thieving from his social circle. He is regretful, hopeful and dismissive; too proud to let anyone know he got canned, except for his friend and business manager Barney Choi (Hoon Lee), and too used to getting his way to fully think through his risky career pivot.

Amanda Peet plays Andrew Cooper’s wife, Mel, who begins to question her life of excess in Your Friends and Neighbours. Credit:

Your Friends and Neighbours is less of a crime procedural and more of a panoramic study. The anthropological detail comes with a satiric sneer – “I’ve been one of those assholes,” Coop says in voiceover, watching his rich pals – and the plot unfolds the supporting cast with surprising detail. Mel starts to look anew at Coop as his surreptitious new circumstances alter his outlook, but the man she left her husband for, Coop’s former friend and retired professional athlete Nick Brandes (Mark Tallman), is never merely a cliche.

As Coop’s needs grow, including supporting a younger sister recovering from a mental breakdown, musician Ali (Lena Hall), the stakes get bigger and his eyes get opened. Coop realises he’s not the only local leading a dual life, while he gets called on his still hefty privilege by Elena (Aimee Carrero), one of the legion of unseen domestic staff that keep their wealthy employers insulated. All these entanglements are thoughtful and fuse-shortening, with Hamm giving an exemplary lead performance. Sticky fingers, sticky show.

North of North ★★★½ (Netflix)

Blithe but always with a defining (and very cold) sense of place, this Arctic Circle comedy is a new destination for a familiar format. In the tiny Inuit town of Ice Cove, wife and mother Siaja (Anna Lambe) is tired of playing second fiddle to her popular husband, pilot Ting (Kelly William), after getting married straight out of high school. She’s lost her friends, sense of purpose and her spark. One public blow-up and Siaja’s ready to start over.

The Canadian show’s creators, Inuit filmmakers Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnacquq-Baril, have referenced some successful shows in Siaja’s attempts at a glow up. Think Parks and Recreation, Reservation Dogs, Northern Exposure and Sex and the City – the latter comes through in the heroine’s often awkward pursuit of romance in a small town with a limited dating pool. That Siaja’s mother, the now sober and single Neevee (Maika Harper), does better than her is a typical rom-com burn.

Anna Lambe as Siaja in North of North.

Indigenous politics are salted through in subtle ways, including the performative behaviour of the town’s white manager, Helen (24’s Mary Lyn Rajskub), but North of North is most at ease with scoring gentle comic points from Ice Cove’s eccentricities (the town dump is a major social hub) and Saija’s nervy attempts to change lanes. There are no systemic failings, just a deep affection for Siaja and everyone who gently sets her straight.

G20 ★★★ (Amazon Prime Video)

President Danielle Sutton (Viola Davis) in G20.

Kudos to Viola Davis, an Academy Award-winner with the age and stature to play a concerned cabinet member watching from the situation room as the President of the United States dispatches terrorists. Instead, in this middling Die Hard variant, she plays the ass-kicking President.

A decorated former Marine, Davis’s Danielle Sutton has to fight her way through crypto bro extremists when they crash the G20 summit in South Africa to keep global markets and her family safe. It’s silly, but Davis is persuasive, even with so-so action choreography.

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found ★★★½ (DocPlay)

Photographer Ernest Cole is the subject of the documentary Ernest Cole: Lost and Found.

Ernest Cole was the Black South African photographer who helped alert the world to the cruel subjugation of apartheid: his 1967 book House of Bondage was an unflinching depiction of the brutal inequality in his homeland. The book’s success made Cole famous but also an exile. His telling work and what it cost him are at the centre of this first-rate documentary from Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro), which charts Cole’s difficult journey. In America, Cole struggled creatively and commercially. His eye for discrimination worried editors who’d celebrated his South African images.

The Knick ★★★★ (Max)

Clive Owen in The Knick.

If you’ve started clicking through the catalogue on Max to find a catch-up show, give serious consideration to this 2014 period medical drama from Steven Soderbergh. In typical style, the prolific filmmaker served as cinematographer and director on every episode over two seasons, exquisitely capturing the conflicts and breakthroughs that flowed through a New York hospital at the start of the 20th century.

Clive Owen and Andre Holland play the lead doctors, literally trying to figure out how to keep patients alive while seeking to guarantee the hospital’s financial future through bloody, conflicted events.

Hacks (season 4) ★★★★ (Stan*)

Ava (Hannah Einbinder) and Deborah (Jean Smart) return for the fourth season of Hacks.Credit: Stan

It’s getting harder with each season of this outstanding comedy to find a fresh dynamic between veteran comic Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her ambitious young writer Ava Daniels. A new setting does the trick here: the season moves from stand-up stages to the late-night talk show that Deborah is hosting, after long hungering for the job. That Ava forced her way on board as head writer lets their adversarial co-dependency kick off again, while setting up another eventual reconciliation between the two. The writing and performances remain exemplary, yet there’s also a hint of repetition.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.

*Stan is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead.