Modes of Manhood, 2026: Jinx, Coop and Pete

This is not going to be a rant about that current media fixation, The Manosphere.

Well okay, there is one named subject above whose Venn diagram shows the locus where Cosplay Warfighter meets both Piss Artist and Attempting-Manly Douche.

You already have guessed which name that is. 

More generally though, a certified pop culture icon takes his (or her, or their) place in the  showbiz ranks—or as the star fictional performer on a show--when their nickname becomes a familiar call sign. (As aviators call their monikers). The monosyllables in the above cases may be simply short for a surname, as with Jon Hamm’s Andrew Cooper in “Your Friends and Neighbors” (of which Season Two airs the sixth of eight episodes on Friday 5/8 on Apple TV+). He's known to his wealthy suburban cohort, especially his pack of slightly subordinate bro's, as Coop.

Another, in the person of Nick Offerman’s struggling father figure in  “Margo Has Money Troubles”—also on Apple, with the sixth of eight episodes airing 5/6)– has a moniker linked to his pro-wrestler days: Jinx. (Offerman has attributed the name to his pro wrestling pro character 's way of “casting his glamor” to disable opponents.)

The third has been anointed by his first name ever since the President made him the cabinet’s key Warrior Boy, while spouting off about who might be the prime mover towards the hapless war they started with strikes on Iran, “Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up.” This was it:

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWRNfZqChru/

 So, let’s let Mr. Hegseth exit in the clown car and we shall delve into the other two. 

As played in “Your Friends and Neighbors” by Hamm, ` we first see Coop as a recently ousted hedge fund overachiever manque'. He garnered wealth, and the lifestyle that goes with it, during his once-happy years as the coolest dude in a New York suburban enclave that’s New Rochelle in all but name. His moniker is used by one and save his sister Ali, who calls him Andy.  If that infantilizes him—and also her—it also calls up an innocence that is forever lost. This we learned—and here commence light spoilers for both seasons-- with a dead body as receipt in the opening minutes of Season 1, Episode 1.

As he navigates uneasily through the 19 episodes of the still-unspooling span of two seasons, Coop is indeed cooped up, so to speak; first by a criminal investigation, and subsequently, as the episodes roll out, by the compounding threat that a whole growing array of his nefarious doings will come to light.

Also, Coop’s head is a mess, and his lower back is challenged by even a simple thing like helping lug a fatally damaged body. 

No, not that first body as cited above. Nominally a comedy, “Your Friends” often tracks as rather ominous dramedy. It isn’t bloodless, though the storytelling has roots in the suburban novels of Cheever and Updike. In addition to a casual critique of materialism among the elites, there’s deep midlife-crisis tension driving the menfolk.  Those who were once capitalist princes are now, to quote one of the richest of them who thereby supplies an episode title) "Halfway to Invisible."

Along with Coop’s saga, the dread undergirding the show’s unfolding character conflicts is very much about aging. One could write a longer take than this to give full measure to the also intriguing pangs, neuroses and household tragedies of the series’ strong female contingent another time for that, perhaps. 

Each of show runner Jonathan Tropper’s six novels have been adapted or acquired by various studios, and just as Faulkner had his own storybook county in Mississippi, Tropper has Westchester: His stories "were about families and men in this world screwing up their lives.” 

There’s an unmistakable congruence to the writer’s longtime residency in New Rochelle in his  2003 novel “This Is Where I Leave You.”  It was adapted for a 2014 film by Shawn Levy, with Jason Bateman as central character Judd. (Opposite Tina Fey playing Judd’s sister.) It's one of the earlier explorations of Bateman’s angst-whisperer blue period that includes “Ozark” and raked up the heights—or perhaps we should say depths—of suburban anomie with this year’s “DTF St. Louis”.)

As Tropper has described the course of his authorial fixations into the present series, limning this world of screw-ups fulfilled a plan: "I had always intended to come back to this for a TV treatment.”

There are some who find Coop to be the redux version of “Mad Men’s Don Draper,  who spoke in parables rather the sardomic pushback Coop favors. The late innings of the show’s criminal arc require certain clean-ups, albeit in a stately mansion, that echo the Scoresesan exigencies of not just mad men but made men.

The Jon Hamm who portrayed Don Draper had his own dark history from combat in Korea, as we discovered in stages, but perhaps his signature use of his own inner life came when he shared, with a group of dour Hershey candy marketing execs, his memory of what a Snickers bar meant to the Pennsylvania orphan he was.

Not unlike the new uses Billy Wilder found for the until-then journeyman, often-comic lead actor Fred MacMurray in the Fifties with Double Indemnity and The Apartment, Hamm has found further depths to explore in the likes of “Fargo” (the nipple-ringed crackpot sheriff/politico of 2023’s Season 5.)

Even the skeptics who lump his Coop character in with certain “sad dad” and/or “rich people suck” streaming tropes find Hamm’s casting spot on. (Indeed, the show wasn’t mounted until Hamm chose to join as first on the call sheet and as also a key contributor to shaping it.)

Even in a mostly slighting review by Inkoo Kang in the New Yorker are cued to the leading man’s essence: “Hamm, who had trouble finding a new groove after “Mad Men,” is perfectly cast as Coop, who, like Don Draper, constantly looks both imperious and ill at ease. His performance is the show’s main asset.”

To address Coop’s nuanced take as a simultaneously sad dad and sucky rich person requires a look at the key interacting cast mates, male or female both. Amanda Peet as Coop’s once-delighted (and still sporadically delightful) ex is the  she's-got-has-anger-issues focal point, as we viewers shake our heads at the willfulness that accompanies her excruciatingly documented, menopausal mid-life crisis.

Even if you believe that licensed therapists themselves have a deep saturnine streak you wonder at her behavioral slip-up’s. (Let’s just say that for all the breezy and at times adulterous fornication, the show never goes wife-swap skeevy. Tropper has cited landmark deeper fare such film fare as American Beauty and The Ice Storm as models—but Coop and Mel stage their respective dalliances with  exactly the wrong frenemies’ spouses.) 

Coop’s business manager, from his earlier wealth-growing days on through what becomes a plunge into high-end burglary victimizing his peer group (see series title) is the fifty-ish Barney Choi, played to a grouchy but wry fare-thee-well by Hoon Lee.

If Hamm voices the downbeat sarcasm that animates various dialog scenes akin to Tropper’s several comic novels, Barney brings a ruder quippery that summons laughs. You may recall him as the smarty-pants, louche but marginally dangerous character Job in the HBO slugfest “Banshee”.  In that four-season run from 2103-2016, the comedic if dangerous Job cyber-hoodwinked the bad guys alongside the protagonist crook-turned-Robin Hood country sheriff figure Lucas.

Yes, Lucas is played by the same Antony Starr you may love as the Trumpian, satanic Homelander in “The Boys”. In “Banshee”,  Starr got beat up so hard and regularly that when I glimpsed him in a Venice grocery I had to bite my tongue lest I fan-boy into “Love your show, but dude, how many aspirin do you take every day?"  

In that series Lee Job went bout his tasks with a haughty elan that made you wonder just where the locus of the character’s sex-positivity might lie; curt and oh-honey cheeky, he would make such strategic observations as noting that even if there’s casual Friday, “There’s no `Sweatpants Monday'”. 

Fine performances abound--Corbin Bernsen as Coop's sometimes boss and prick-ish hedgie king is set up in the plot like an easy doll to knock down at the county fair, but with a species of fatalist wisdom.

Especially worth noting is sometime Broadway go-to Lena Hall (she won a Tony for her role “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”) as Cooper’s sister Ali. She convincingly walks a line of dark wittiness with worriment as she’s challenged by living with her bi-polar diagnosis and accompanying history. But what she does with her throwaway lines barely prepares you for her musical moments.  Choice needle drops in each episode tuck us into various moods, but we are  still barely prepared for the depth she serves up in Warren Zevon’s stirring, last-days farewell, “Keep Me in Your Heart”.

The show's theme is at once sorrowful and tiny-bubbles effervescent, a lullaby and a taunt:

Reviewers snowed under with what used to be peak TV’s rampant anomie often seek to alert us to what they consider tropes. Because Hamm as a damaged Master of the Universe has so long inhabited the glassy towers of Mad Ave or Wall Street he’s been slagged as potentially typecast—but he makes so much of his work devilishly entertaining. (At one stage of his immersion in hard-partying with his moneyed bros he comes her stinking of booze and coke-fueled sweat swivets, and son Hunter advises him he needs to bathe. “Good note,” the dapper one says with fond acceptance.)

Peet’s Mel, for her part, struggles to notch parenting victories as regards alienated daughter Tori, and we vainly try to relate to the tragedy of turning down acceptance at Princeton, but for scene after scene it’s a thankless arc. Even Mel’s attempted sexual liaisons seem doomed, and you don’t have to root for Coop’s half-stumbling conquests to find him more puppy-ish than lecherous even as his ex-wife suffers her loneliness.

It may seem societally short-sighted to applaud Hamm’s characterization for its charm and swagger even as we forgive his hyper-peccadilloes; but of the three brohams  cited above, perhaps he’s the one who most accurately depicts the mid-life state of play in a world where suburbia is rife with (er, generally) non-lethal malfeasance, even as  the actual madness lies just down the road in Washington, D.C. 

In “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” Nick Offerman’s Jinx tis fresh out of rehab as the tries to redeem the life he torched in becoming an estranged dad to Elle Fanning’s Margo and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Shayanne. He hopes, even as he gives us cause to doubt, that he can become the charm for both of them of them, and for Margo’s baby son Bodhi. 

 What he does possess is a humanity he instinctively drills down to when someone needs a hug. Or, and we find ourselves wishes for this, an extraordinarily firm handshake. 

Said L.A.  Times reviewer Robert Lloyd of the show, “It’s as sweet as can be. The show is positive about just about everything: motherhood, daughterhood, professional wrestling, second chances, sex work, cosplaying and the way art shows up in strange places.”

The world of entertainment has been considerably enriched, it has to be said, by the many works of David E, Kelley on (mostly) small screens and occasionally larger ones. (Thus latter in the case of 1996’s To Gillian On Her 37^th Birthday, which he adapted and co-produced as starring wife Michelle Pfeiffer. Here they collaborate for the first time since. If “Margo” is on a much different wavelength than say, Pfeiffer’s ever-so watchable pointillist performance as complex grande dame in 2021’s indie French Exit,  and if in the early stages of postulating the excesses of Shayanne she  snacks on the set dressing a little bit,  she has a variety of now-acerbic, no-touching scenes with Fanning. 

It’s hard to hand the win for this lightly intoxicating box of ornaments to anyon  but Fanning, boldly thirst-trapping hordes of incels with the very physique that she maternally gives over to breast-feeding Bodhi.  Novelist Rufi Thorpe has a natural way of teeing up wisecracking folks living through real-people crises. When we see that Margo lives up a discouragingly steep staircase in a discouragingly typical low-rent Orange County apartment, one feels glad to be well away from the those sucky rich people.  As Nick Hornsby stated in his June 2024 New York Times review of Thorpe’s much-celebrated source novel, “Thorpe is very good on delivering the suffocating beat-by-beat impossibility of Margo’s situation: the panic, the squalor, the despair, the puke.”

Further, Hornby notes, “Jinx turns out to be a loving, competent grandfather …” As Kelley observed to the Los Angeles Times, “This family had a very dysfunctional way of loving, but they loved just the same, in a very ferocious way.”

As we know from Offerman’s comic zenith as the ever-disgruntled boss man Ron Swanson in “Parks and Recreation,” or as he dove deep into empathetic instincts when paired with another male survivor in “The Last of Us,”  Offerman is a resourceful scene partner, and can draw us in on his solo brooding as well. As Thorpe said after viewing the show, “He just has that ability to be hypermasculine and believably bounce a baby and cook a lasagna from scratch.”

In summation: if the makers of “Your Friends and Neighbors” are to be celebrated for capturing our sense of how wrong it can go for the one percenters, and Sneaky Pete Hegseth is to be reviled for his part if the ruination of America by the executive branch, perhaps the class sensitivity of “Margo Has Money Troubles” is best acknowledged by Nick Hornsby’s review of the novel: One of the things that interest the author is class: Well-meaning moneyed people (the least sympathetic people in the book, incidentally) keep making helpful suggestions for Margo’s betterment — college! viticulture! But when you are 20 and you have a baby and no money, how many options are available to you? “