From The Playlist’s review of last year’s “Corner Office”:
Because it’s so drab and one-note, “Corner Office” leaves the viewer with lots of time to contemplate the Hamm Conundrum. To wit: in Jon Hamm, we have an actor who seems genetically engineered for movie stardom, a chiseled slab of masculinity who wears a suit like he was born to it, and is a magnificent actor, plus possesses an admirable refusal to take himself too seriously. He seems born of another era, a time when icons like Mitchum and Wayne and Brando filled our screens, which is part of why he was so perfect for “Mad Men.” And perhaps that’s why he has yet to find a single feature film that suits his skills; as my friend, the film critic Sean Burns told me, he’s a man, and now they make movies about boys.
So perhaps that’s why, its many other virtues notwithstanding, it’s so depressing to see Hamm as the sputtering bureaucrat, a role that any one of a hundred other actors could’ve played, in “Top Gun: Maverick,” a movie about a (59-year-old) boy, and that’s certainly why it’s so depressing to see him succumbing to the temptation of actorly dowdiness in “Corner Office.”
Honestly, he strikes me more like someone whose true passion is comedy, but he’s stuck in a leading man’s body. He seems to have spent a fair bit of time post Mad Men doing plenty of comedic (or less serious) roles or bits. I’m just happy that he’s still getting opportunities and wasn’t so typecast after Mad Men that he wasn’t getting a shot at much else.
I wonder if that comment would be different if the show was Severance instead of Corner Office. Adam Scott is great in that role, but a big part of it’s success is also the team around the show. And that’s not easy to come by.