Jon Hamm’s Coop is confronted with a dangerous new threat in the second season of Your Friends and Neighbors
If you thought things were knotty for Andrew “Coop” Cooper (Jon Hamm) in the first season of Your Friends & Neighbors, get ready for some real complications in the addictive series’ second season. The comedic crime drama started with former hedge-fund manager Coop laying in a pool of blood, leaving everyone wondering if in the middle of robbing his neighbours he had somehow also committed murder. But while Coop was cleared before season’s end, things were far from charmed in the upscale town of Westmont Village when we left off.
The relationship remains fraught between Coop and his former lover Samantha “Sam” Levitt (Olivia Munn), who after setting up Coop for the “murder” of her husband and suffering the legal consequences of trying to frame her husband’s suicide as something more sinister (in order to claim his life insurance) has become the social pariah of society. This includes alienating Coop’s ex-wife and Sam’s best friend Mel (Amanda Peet). “She has lost everything,” says Munn. “There’s no more money, there’s no more social status. Everyone hates her. But she’s determined to get back into the good graces of everyone. You really see someone who is dealing with immense shame and immense confidence at the same time — shame in what she’s done and confidence that she can totally get back to where she was.”
Coop, meanwhile, managed to exit the whole scenario relatively unscathed, yet decided that instead of jumping on the opportunity to rejoin the world of finance, he will continue to rob his wealthy friends of luxury items they’ll never realize are missing. “While he starts robbing houses out of desperation, what it becomes is a liberation for him,” says series creator Jonathan Tropper. “It’s a combination of lashing out at the system that didn’t work for him and, if he can manage to not get killed or go to jail, I think the end of this show has him freed from all the expectations he put on himself and from that script he’d been following. The choice at the end of season one was, ‘If I go back there, I’m just going to go back to sleepwalking through my life again.’ While robbing houses may not be a tenable career for the future, right now it’s keeping him from going back to that.”
That situation reaches a whole new level of invigorating when billionaire Owen Ashe, played by James Marsden, moves into town. “In season one, Coop himself was the disruptor, but in season two, we wanted to bring in a disruptor to Coop’s life,” says Tropper. “Owen Ashe is not just a disruptor for Coop, he’s a disruptor for the whole neighbourhood. Men want to be him, women want to be with him. He’s like this magnet that draws everybody in and then gradually the people who really get drawn in start getting burned.” Indeed, Ashe is someone who boisterously enjoys his wealth, but this no-holds-barred lifestyle comes with a dangerous edge. “He doesn’t see any contradiction between blackmailing someone and also wanting to be their friend,” says Tropper. “He thinks both things can exist at the same time because he’s missing a certain moral centre.”
For Marsden, playing the maniacally energetic character shaking up Westmont Village was a liberating experience. “I love it. I wish I was that guy that could just like, boom, make a decision and not care if it’s the right one or the wrong one,” he says. “I feel like I could use a little bit more of that in my life.” While the rest of the men in his age range are discussing various health concerns that are slowing them down, Ashe moves at the speed of light. “I feel like he’s a guy who doesn’t idle well,” says Marsden. “He’s one of those guys who just talk a mile a minute and are always interested to know someone’s story and what’s behind it. So, he moves into Westmont Village, buys this palatial estate, throws these big parties and wants to ingratiate himself to all the wealthy, cliquey, handbag-carrying, sports car-driving locals. He consumes energy and spits it back out in these elaborate ways.”
But for some, as in the first season, the series continues to contend with the realities of middle age. “We wanted to go a little darker with the things Coop’s confronting, whether it’s his own mortality, the physical or the psychic aches and pains of middle age,” says Tropper. “Everyone is feeling their age in a way.” This includes Mel, with whom Coop continues to have a relationship that audiences are rooting for to succeed. “After all the events of season one, they’re in a good place as far as co-parents and friends and the people who know each other best in this town,” says Tropper. “But you can see that there is an underlying strain between them because they clearly have a lot of unresolved issues.”
If Mel, in the past, was able to handle some of these frustrations with grace, perimenopause has shortened her fuse significantly. “She’s discovering how much rage she has,” says Peet. “Some of that is the fact that her cohorts have taken back in Sam, even though Sam framed Coop. She kind of loses her s***.” For the actress, who recently opened up in a New Yorker essay about the loss of her parents while going through breast cancer, being able to play a heightened version of the female middle-age experience was welcomed. “It’s really cathartic,” she says. “It’s all the conversations I’m having with my girlfriends and then I go to work and I get to explore a psychotic version of everything we feel.” For that she praises the series creator, who made a point of adding a bit of “The Mel Show” to the season. “To have a middle-aged male boss who wants to dig into this stuff just made me love him even more,” she says. “I don’t think he’s doing anyone a favour. He’s genuinely like, ‘What’s this like? How can I get in there and understand it?’ And he has a fun way of skewering things.”
All of this is caged in the kind of wealth most of us will never understand or experience. But that doesn’t mean that the experience of aging does not remain universal. “The wealth is a symptom,” says Tropper. “We’re exploring the choices you made years ago to go after this. This was the pot at the end of the rainbow, and then you get there and you realize ‘I’ve spent the better part of my life trying to achieve this, so how come I feel so empty?’ I think everyone in middle age feels this way, but when you surround it with the wealth, there’s a much clearer sense of causality. I think that tension and that contradiction is the same thing that makes the show popular, because people were supposed to be skewering the rich and at the same time are like, ‘Ooh, I wouldn’t mind driving that car.’ It’s that tension within all of us that makes this really interesting.”
Your Friends & Neighbors, new episodes streaming Fridays on Apple TV