In 2015, in the finale of the iconic series Mad Men, Jon Hamm playing the adman Don Draper has an epiphany on a mountain top retreat and it is suggested that is where he comes up with the legendary 1971 Coca Cola ad which speaks of a kinder, gentler world. The chorus of the ad, sung by a multi ethnic crowd, is meaningful: "I'd like to buy the world a home/And furnish it with love/Grow apple trees and honey bees/And snow white turtle doves."
Mad Men was based at a time (1960 to 1970) when America was a confident Cold War power. It thought Communism was dying, Nazism was dead and white upper class men were ruling the nation. The freedom offered to women by the Second World War had long since vanished and Stepford Wives were slowly suffocating on their supposed privilege. The hope of a multicultural world offered by John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King was alive, but still to come to fruition.
Cut to 2026, the second season of Your Friends & Neighbours on Apple TV, starring an older, even more cynical financial analyst turned suburban cat burglar, Andrew Cooper aka Coop, and the hollowness of capitalism stands exposed. As WB Yeats said in 1919, things fall apart/the centre does not hold/mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. American capitalism has been shown up by a 10,000-year-old civilisation with raw courage. The world is in ferment, and everything stands transformed, touched by darkness and desolation.
Its effects are felt most by men and women like Coop and his ex wife Mel who thought they had worked hard to rise to the top of the food chain, even if they hadn't begun from a life of privilege, to build a better life for their children. When we first meet Coop, he has been fired from his well paying job for allegedly sleeping with a co-worker, he is involved in a messy divorce, he has lost his home and family, and ends up getting arrested and charged with manslaughter.
What is interesting that though like all fairytales, he is acquitted and handed his job back, but he refuses, choosing to continue with his burglaries, of friends and neighbours in his posh neighbourhood, where "there are piles of forgotten wealth lying in forgotten drawers". There are expensive watches, rose gold pens, gold bracelets, even first editions of books, in quantities that are hard to miss.
Spoiler alert. One of the things Coop picks up from a new neighbour is a first edition of Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, which is a perfect commentary on the world as it is now. Wharton, a sharp observer and insider in early 20th century New York society, offered a stinging critique of the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, through the story of Lily Bart, a socialite who falls on bad times, much like Coop, whose descent into ignominy is quick.
The strongest denunciation of the supposedly compassionate capitalism that her parents represented comes from Coop's daughter, a bright young woman who gets into her parents' alma mater Princeton but turns it down (spoiler alert). What she, a legacy kid whose father has been a donor to Princeton to ensure admission for his progeny, says to an admissions board member, is a masterclass in sociological analysis of where we are right now: "You all torched the planet in the name of capitalism and now rather than try to undo the damage or feed the hungry or house the homeless, you're giving millions to 300-year-old institutions riddled with systemic racism, anti-semitism, and sexism in order to ensure that yet another generation of privileged rich kids will continue to hoard the lion's share of the planet in what's left of the planet's remaining resources, while the unwashed masses go to war over the scraps."
Sometimes fiction does show a mirror to us, to what we have done to ourselves, and to what we have become.