Is Jon Hamm’s latest show Your Friends & Neighbors a big luxury watch ad?

NEW YORK – It appeared as if Jon Hamm was, once again, selling something.

The star of award-winning period series Mad Men (2007 to 2015) – who has lent his assertive baritone to Mercedes-Benz advertisements, an American Airlines spot and a Super Bowl intro – was back on television enumerating the merits of an expensive wristwatch.

Only this time, it was not for an ad. It was a scene from the first episode of Your Friends & Neighbors, a soft satire of the financially fortunate streaming on Apple TV+.

“The Patek Philippe Nautilus sealed 18-karat white-gold blue sunburst dial, water-resistant up to 30 metres,” Hamm intoned in voice-over, as graphics whizzed across the screen noting the watch’s 2.3mm thickness and other wonky specs. Up flashed the price of this timepiece: US$70,110 (S$91,618) at retail, but around US$169,000 on the resale market.

In the crime drama’s first episode, Hamm’s Andrew Cooper, a hedge fund titan who goes by the nickname Coop, finds himself unceremoniously out of a job. With a shrivelling bank account and a money-burning lifestyle, he turns to robbing his well-off neighbours.

His first target is the Patek. As Coop pulls the watch from a cubbyhole of similar timepieces, he treats viewers to a data-dense recap of what makes the watch so special – and, by extension, so worth stealing.

“Like the ads say, you never actually own a Patek Philippe,” Hamm says in character. “You merely look after it for the next generation.”

The scene is a point of no return for Coop, but its ad-like approach made some viewers assume it was a paid-for cameo for the Swiss luxury watch brand.

“The amount of screen time the Patek watch gets, plus the special sequence, make it likely that this is an active product placement,” said Mr Remmert van Braam, who runs Watch-ID.com, a website which catalogues watches worn on movies and TV shows.

The watchmaker, however, said it did not know it would be receiving the Jon Hamm treatment in the show.

“As part of our global brand strategy, we do not lend timepieces for product placements as we remain focused on the watch-making field,” a representative from Patek Philippe said.

Hamm is a pitchman whom audiences are used to hearing during breaks for the long-running game show Jeopardy! (1964 to present), but his biggest role, the one he may always live in the shadow of, was as top ad man Don Draper in Mad Men.

Your Friends & Neighbors is trading on, and perhaps subverting, people’s familiarity with or even their trust in the 54-year-old American actor.

Hamm – an executive producer on the series – is not writing the marketing copy this time, he is dispensing it. He even drew his own connection between the characters, saying in an interview with The New York Times: “Don was a seller, and Coop is a buyer.”

And boy, is he. Coop drives a Maserati that, he notes in voiceover, cost US$200,000. He refuses to drink anything other than 25-year-old Scotch, ordering it by the age, and talks about wearing his best suit to a job interview.

In the second episode, Coop steals a Richard Mille Felipe Massa watch from a neighbour. It receives a similar treatment to that of the Patek, with specs ticking by on-screen as Hamm’s character notes its signature rose-gold and titanium skeleton and flyback function and price that is upwards of US$225,000. His neighbour, he concludes, has not worn it in years, so he may have forgotten he owns it.

A representative from Richard Mille said the Swiss luxury watchmaker had similarly not been informed that the watch would be appearing in the show.

According to the prop masters, the breakout infomercial sequences are a feature of the series and, in later episodes, will not be limited to watches. The result is that Your Friends & Neighbors is often a show that quite literally fetishises wealth, like a streaming TV version of the elitist American luxury lifestyle periodical The Robb Report.

The voice-of-god pseudo-ads also help viewers sympathise with a financier like Coop, so caught up in the game of coveting his neighbour’s wristwatches. As he continues filching from his friends (“Keeping up with the Joneses” giving way to “Keep stealing from the Joneses”), the flashing karat counts and big-dollar figures seem to say, “Well, wouldn’t you want this too?”

In an interview from the front seat of a car, during a break in the filming of the show’s second season, Ryan Gargiulo and Jackie Wertz, the husband-and-wife prop masters, explained that some watches in Your Friends & Neighbors were specified in the script, while others were selected with their input.

Gargiulo said he and Wertz “did about 10 weeks of research and we went around to different bars frequented by these big investment firms”. There, they clocked that financiers walk around with US$80,000 hunks of gold strapped to their wrists.

The prop masters borrowed the watches used on the show from authorised vendors who charged “between 5 and 10 per cent of the value” for a one-day shoot, Gargiulo said. “It saves us US$180,000 and we don’t have to try to resell it at the end of the job,” he added.

“It’s like a free commercial for the brand,” Gargiulo said of the unofficial watch placements. He said he could not speculate on how they might react.

“I just hope they’re not upset with us,” he said. NYTIMES