Name: Emmy-Winner Jon Hamm Talks Creative Inception of ‘Your Friends & Neighbors’
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T16:47:20.000Z
Duration: 24 min 23 s
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Jon Hamster, welcome to the Awards Tour Podcast.

I kind of watched it over the past couple of days in a bit of a fever dream.

It's not like you haven't been on television.

We've actually seen you in a ton of stuff, Morning Show, Fargo.

But this, I feel, is a real Jon Ham number one on the call sheet type moment again.

So talk about coming to this project and why you wanted to play, Andrew, and then also be EP.

We were sort of sitting around wondering what the next thing to do would be and had finished Top Gun.

And Top Gun was sort of sitting in a can waiting for the world to open back up.

And we were all kind of in that weird mode of like, what's next?

And during that time, I had read some of Jonathan Trapper's incredible short stories and some of his writing.

And we both kind of fell into a little bit of a mutual admiration society and had a meeting.

And he said, I have this idea about this show, possibly.

And we thought, OK, well, that could be something interesting.

And people at Apple thought it could be something interesting as well.

It was simply an idea that sprang from his mind, kind of fully formed.

And I remember him sending me the pilot script.

And I thought, OK, well, if it stinks, then we just won't do it.

And I sent it to some, kind of slipped it to some friends and said, what do you think?

And they all were like, oh, yeah, I would watch this show tomorrow.

And then we got to sort of putting it together and finding Amanda and Olivia and everybody else in the show and thought, OK, this has a chance to be more than just the sum of its parts.

We can really kind of tell a story that is seemingly of the moment and kind of resonates on several different levels.

I will just go ahead and say, I'm sure Apple has said this already, but that show is one of the top shows at Rotten Tomatoes.

It seems like it was kind of like a little bit of a slow burn for folks to kind of find it.

But once it did, you could really feel people telling people, hey, you got to check out this show.

Did you feel that as somebody that was promoting and releasing it, how it kind of, it took a while to catch fire, but it definitely did?

I mean, I think there's no such thing as immediately catching fire these days.

There's so much stuff out there that it takes a while for anything to really find an audience or get a kind of critical mass of either critical attention or actual attention, anecdotally, however you want to put it.

But we did the first couple of days of press for the show, kind of press junkets kind of style.

And I was pretty impressed even back then with how at least the critics were responding to it.

And usually, you're never going to sit in a room and someone's going to go, I hate your show.

But people said such nice things, and we're really kind of on board for it.

Most of the critics were given seven out of the nine episodes.

And I think almost every one of them had watched all seven.

So that's meaningful in a lot of ways, because that means that, A, the narrative is working, and, B, that it's hooking people in the right way.

So then when it finally came out and people were really starting to talk about it, and I would run into people in New York City or just random people would go like, oh my God, I love your show, that felt really good, because also the way that they decided to not drop the whole season at once, but to drop it week by week, that built the anticipation for it so much more significantly.

And I think by the end of the run, we were consistently number one on Apple's website.

It was us in the studio kind of back to back.

I looked last night, we're number one on the platform.

You texted in Rogan to be like, I got you.

Like, this is like, you're my, I own you.

Well, in a lot of ways, it was really nice because we kind of piggybacked on each other and we're obviously such different, tonally different shows.

So there wasn't necessarily a lot of overlap in the, necessarily in the audience, although I've watched both of our shows and there's something to be said for that too.

And it was really great to have, in the old days you would say we have a strong lead in, right?

But this, having the studio drop on Wednesdays and then our show drop on Fridays was similarly cool.

People would come for their show and stay for our show and rinse repeat every week.

I mean, I wasn't one of those watching it live, but I caught on later than other folks, but I'm so glad that I did because I think

Coop is just such a, he's such an interesting character and where you go in the season.

I feel this show really is almost like three shows.

There's this murder mystery that we're put into at the beginning and then it becomes like

And then at the end, it's like, I don't know, a mad, mad, mad, mad world is everybody's losing their mind.

And we're trying to just see who's going to come out like alive at the end of it.

How much did they tell you as far as where the season was going to go as far as your art?

And what was the thing that you were most excited to get to do in the season?

It does hop genres quite a bit, which is I think kind of fun as a viewer.

You think you're in one show and then all of a sudden it's a family drama and you're like, here's a man trying to manage the craziness of his family and his sister who's struggling with mental health issues and his children who are struggling with being kids and his wife who's struggling, his ex-wife who's struggling with being his ex-wife.

There's so much of that stuff that is, yeah, that's non-genre related.

And then of course, you're layering into it this pretty severe, heavy stakes of him being wanted for murder, which he didn't do, that we come to find out.

And that element was, all of that was really fun to play.

Having that kind of tremendous, those super heavy life or death stakes.

And even in the last couple episodes where Coop is struggling about, should I take this plea bargain deal even though I know I didn't do it?

And having to kind of wrestle with that decision.

And there's a wonderful scene with me and Amanda Peep, his ex-wife, who's like, this is when you have to fight for your family.

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Emmy-Winner Jon Hamm Talks Creative Inception of ‘Your Friends & Neighbors’

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