Note: This story contains spoilers from “Your Friends & Neighbors” Season 1, Episode 9.
“Your Friends & Neighbors” begins with its protagonist, fledgling robber Andrew “Coop” Cooper (Jon Hamm), waking up in a pool of blood next to a dead body. In the Season 1 finale, which premiered Friday on Apple TV+, viewers find out how that body got there and how Paul Levitt (Jordan Gelber) ended up dead in the first place. Paul, it turns out, killed himself in a last-ditch attempt to win back his estranged wife, Sam (Olivia Munn).
Realizing that Paul’s suicide would render his life insurance policy null and void, Sam covertly covered up all signs that her philandering husband’s death was self-inflicted. While she was not happy about it, Sam was more than willing to let Coop take the fall for it, too, if that was what it took to ensure a financially secure future for herself and her kids. Unfortunately for her, Coop figured out what Sam did with the help of his partner-in-crime, Elena (Aimee Carrero), and he lands the evidence he needs to clear his name.
This resolution is not exactly what “Your Friends & Neighbors” creator and showrunner Jonathan Tropper had in mind when he originally wrote the show’s prologue. “Eight or nine weeks into the writer’s room, we changed the murderer,” Tropper told TheWrap. “We changed how that dead body got there.”
“I’d gone away from the [themes] in favor of [a] procedural [twist]. So we rewound a little bit and said, ‘What’s this show really about? And how does that lead to this murder?’ We reconsidered it, and I think what we have now is something that’s much more appropriate for this neighborhood and this lifestyle and value system,” Tropper explained. “In a place where nobody is really who they seem to be, it would make sense that a murder isn’t necessarily a murder.”
Anatomy of a not-quite-murder
Munn found it easy to tap into Sam’s desperation, having herself experienced a “very middle class upbringing” as part of a military family. “I remember at 16, I moved from Japan to Oklahoma City, and I went to this school where we had to use my cousin’s address because she [lived] in a wealthier neighborhood,” Munn recalled. “The feeling I had was invisibility.”
Munn believes Sam’s greatest mistake is thinking money will solve her problems. “[Sam] looks at money as her ticket to a better life,” the actress observed. “She laid the groundwork to implode without even realizing it.” Having taught herself how to fit within a community of inherited wealth, Sam had no interest in letting all of her hard work go to waste.
“As her life starts to crumble around her, that middle class survival [instinct] kicks [in],” Munn told TheWrap. “It was fun to play someone who had no limits to where she would go to maintain her wealth and her power and her social status.”
Munn was not the only “Your Friends & Neighbors” cast member who enjoyed bringing the season’s climactic twist to life. “I found it satisfying,” Hamm admitted. “When you set up a whodunnit, you actually have to find out who done it and, hopefully, it makes sense and works from a narrative standpoint and is satisfying from an audience standpoint. All of those things [here] worked for me.”
At the end of the “Your Friends & Neighbors” finale, Hamm’s Coop clears his name, sets his relationships with some of his family members (partly) right again and even gets to name his price when his former boss (Corbin Bernsen) comes to him begging him to take his old job back. Coop seemingly accepts the job offer — only to actually use his scheduled meeting with Bernsen’s Jack as the perfect opportunity to rob his old employer’s house.
“I knew that last scene from the minute I wrote the pilot,” Tropper said. “The impulse probably all of us would [feel] would be to take the job back. It’s like, ‘I won. They came begging. I wrote a new deal. I had this little crazy adventure in the interim, and now I’m ready to go back and take what’s mine.’ But to me the lesson Coop is learning is, ‘I can’t ever trust the machine again.’ “
Coop’s complicated future
Tropper acknowledged there is “an element of wish fulfillment” in Coop’s decision. “The goal of this [show] is that it’s about a man who’s being liberated from the script he’s been following his whole life. If, in the end, the victory was, ‘I got my job back,’ I think it would be a Pyrrhic victory,” the showrunner elaborated. “The real victory is being liberated from this system, and that’s what I think, over the course of a number of seasons, we want to do.”
Hamm and Tropper see the season’s conclusion the same way. “I do think that ship [of hedge fund work] has sailed for him. I think he has found himself sort of weirdly empowered to be the master of his own domain, so to speak — not to use that ‘Seinfeld’ reference lightly,” Hamm added. “Coop realizes that he is in charge of his own destiny.”
Just because Coop has embraced his criminal lifestyle does not mean it will be smooth sailing for him moving forward. Tropper told TheWrap that things, in fact, are only going to become more complicated for the character in Season 2. “What Coop is doing isn’t particularly sustainable. You can’t pay college tuition with bags of cash,” Tropper teased. “The more Coop does what he’s doing, the more he’s exposed to a different element who might be a little better at this than him or more dangerous than he is.”
His path, Tropper says, will lead Coop back to the very world he wants to escape. “Part of [his journey] is going to force Coop into contact with the old hedge fund world again,” Tropper revealed. “But not in a way that you would expect.”
“Your Friends & Neighbors” Season 1 is now streaming on Apple TV+.
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