It appeared as if Jon Hamm were, once again, selling us something.
Mr. Hamm, who has lent his assertive baritone to Mercedes-Benz ads, an American Airlines spot and a Super Bowl intro, was this time on television enumerating the merits of an expensive wristwatch. Only this time, it wasn’t for an ad. It was a scene from the first episode of “Your Friends & Neighbors,” by Apple TV+, a new soft satire of the financially fortunate.
“The Patek Philippe Nautilus sealed 18-karat white-gold blue sunburst dial, water-resistant up to 30 meters,” Mr. Hamm intoned in voice-over, as graphics whizzed across the screen noting the watch’s 2.3-millimeter thickness and other wonky specs. Up flashed the price of this timepiece: $70,110 at retail, but around $169,000 on the resale market.
In the show’s first episode, Andrew Cooper, a hedge fund titan who is played by Mr. Hamm and goes by the nickname Coop, finds himself unceremoniously out of a job. With a shriveling bank account and a money-burning lifestyle, he turns to robbing his well-off neighbors.
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,” Mr. 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 adlike approach made some viewers assume it was a paid-for cameo for the 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 Remmert van Braam, who runs Watch-ID.com, a website cataloging watches worn on movies and TV shows.
The watch brand, 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 watchmaking field,” a representative from Patek Philippe said.
Part of this is the Hamm of it all. Not only is he a pitchman that we’re used to hearing during “Jeopardy” breaks, but his biggest role, the one he may always live in the shadow of, was as an adman in the popular series “Mad Men.”
“Your Friends & Neighbors” is trading on, and perhaps subverting, our familiarity with or even our trust in the 54-year-old actor.
Mr. Hamm, an executive producer on the series, is not writing the marketing copy this time; he’s 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 voice-over, cost $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 neighbor. It receives a similar treatment to that of the Patek, with specs ticking by onscreen as Mr. Hamm’s character notes its “signature rose-gold and titanium skeleton and flyback function,” and price that is upward of $225,000. His neighbor, he concludes, hasn’t worn it in years, so “he may have already forgotten he owns it.” (Unmentioned in the show so far is that watches with valuations that high are also most often insured.)
A representative from Richard Mille said the company 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 won’t be limited to watches. The result is that “Your Friends & Neighbors” is often a show that quite literally fetishizes wealth, like a streaming TV version of the elitist periodical The Robb Report.
The voice-of-god pseudo-ads also help viewers sympathize with a financier like Coop, so caught up in the game of coveting his neighbor’s wristwatch. 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?”
According to dealers, these were appropriate watches for a show where characters wear their wealth with the modesty of a gilded Cybertruck.
“A Patek Philippe Nautilus and any Richard Mille are arguably the two most famous ‘rich guy’ watches on the planet,” said Eric Wind, a vintage-watch dealer in Palm Beach, Fla. They’re also logical for a burglary plotline, according to Mr. Wind. “They are both frequent targets of thieves in places like Paris and London,” he said.
Mr. van Braam said that he was more used to seeing shows use Rolexes as symbols of wealth, but to the supposedly in-the-know financier on “Your Friends & Neighbors,” that might have been too pedestrian.
“They needed a watch that even a wealthy person like Coop is a bit jealous of,” he said.
In an interview from the front seat of a car (alas, not a Maserati), 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.
Mr. Gargiulo said he and Ms. Wertz “did about 10 weeks of research and we went around to different bars by these big investment firms.” There, they clocked that financiers walk around with $80,000 hunks of gold strapped to their wrists.
The prop masters borrowed the watches used on the show from authorized vendors who charged “between 5 and 10 percent of the value” for a one-day shoot, Mr. Gargiulo said. “It saves us $180,000 and we don’t have to try to resell it at the end of the job,” he said.
“In my opinion, I think it’s like a free commercial for the brand,” Mr. Gargiulo said of the unofficial watch placements. He said he couldn’t speculate on how they might react.
“I just hope they’re not upset with us,” he said.
Jacob Gallagher is a Times reporter covering fashion and style.
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