Jon Hamm wears a Fossil Aeroflite

On a suburban living-room couch, Tim Jones leans back beside his wife Natalie and lets the conversation run, and the watch on his left wrist sits exactly where a relaxed man rests his hand on his knee. It is a plain dark-dial three-hander on a brown leather strap, the kind of watch nobody at a cul-de-sac barbecue would look at twice. That is the whole idea. Tim, played by Jon Hamm, and Natalie, played by Gal Gadot, are covert operatives who have moved in next to Zach Galifianakis and Isla Fisher's ordinary couple, and Greg Mottola's 2016 comedy plays the gap between suburban mundanity and the tradecraft underneath it for laughs. A spy pretending to be a normal neighbor needs a normal neighbor's watch.

The watch is a Fossil Aeroflite. On screen it reads as a polished round steel case with a dark dial, applied hour markers, a single crown at three o'clock, and a date window, with no chronograph subdials and no pushers. It is a quartz three-hand watch with a date, not a chronograph. The Aeroflite line takes its cues from mid-century aviation instruments, clean and high-contrast and built to be read at a glance, in a 44mm steel case. It retailed for around a hundred dollars, which is the quiet joke of the costume. You do not wear a five-figure watch to a neighborhood cookout when the entire point is to disappear into the neighborhood. Mottola made Superbad and Adventureland before this, and he understands that the most convincing thing about Tim Jones is how thoroughly forgettable his wrist looks.