Warning: This story has spoilers for the finale of Your Friends and Neighbors.
Andrew Cooper, a.k.a. Coop (Jon Hamm), had it all. The perfect wife, kids, and job. But at the beginning of Jonathan Tropper’s Your Friends and Neighbors, he’s fired from his job and divorced from his wife. His dream life is in tatters, and, unable to find another job and with mounting bills to pay, he does something unexpected: He turns to a life of crime, breaking into his friends’ and neighbors’ homes, stealing luxury items, and pawning them off to keep his life afloat.
The season finale of Your Friends and Neighbors, which streams May 30 on Apple TV+, finds Coop the talk of the town as he’s facing down allegations of murder. With Coop’s life in the balance, we spoke to the series creator and writer of the finale episode, Jonathan Tropper. Tropper, also a novelist and producer, broke down the key moments of the shocking finale and what we can expect in the second season.
At the start of Season 1’s final episode, Coop is at his wits’ end. His lawyer has no faith that he’ll be able to avoid jail time over the murder of Paul Levitt (Jordan Gelber), a crime he didn’t commit. But the overwhelming evidence (including the murder weapon found in Coop’s car) means he’s looking at an eight-year sentence, though he would get out in six. This resigns Coop to defeat, and he decides to spend what quality time he has with his kids. He gives his son his prized watch and spends an evening with his daughter watching movies (in a fun nod to Coop’s thievery, they watch The Sting).
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When Coop’s ex-wife Mel (Amanda Peet) sees her son with Coop’s watch, she realizes he’s expecting the worst. She arrives at Coop’s house and furiously pleads with him to fight back and not be defeated. “The tragedy of their divorce is that they still remain the person best equipped to talk to each other. There’s nobody in either of their lives who has replaced one of them as a confidant, an emotional support. You don’t stop being family just because you signed a piece of paper,” says Tropper. Mel pleads with Coop: “I’m begging you, don’t be the guy who gives up the exact moment you should be fighting with everything you have.” She kisses him passionately and leaves. “That’s the moment he needs to save his life,” adds Tropper.
A renewed Coop goes through the evidence with his lawyer and makes a surprising discovery: his number doesn’t appear anywhere in the phone of Paul’s wife, Sam (Olivia Munn), who was in the process of divorcing her husband. That’s strange, since she and Coop have been sleeping together and communicating frequently. That can only mean one thing: Sam has a second phone, which puts her alibi of being in Boston with her family in serious doubt. To prove there’s a second phone, Coop will have to find it. He calls in a favor from Elena (Aimee Carrero), a housekeeper and his partner in his thieving operation. Elena offers to help Sam clean, getting Coop in the house to look for the phone.
They don’t find it, but they find something considerably more damning: a suicide note from Paul. Turns out there was no murder, but Sam staged it as such, shooting Paul’s dead body twice and planting the gun in Coop’s car to frame him. For the first time in Your Friends & Neighbors, the perspective shifts from Coop to Sam, and Sam narrates the story of how she came to be in Westchester, and how the facade of her perfect life began to crumble.
It’s a scene that almost didn’t happen, and wasn’t in Tropper’s original script. Tropper showed the script to his producing partner Jamie Rosengard, who suggested they do a sudden perspective shift for Sam, giving her the same kind of narration Coop has delivered throughout the season. “It was one of those revelatory moments where we’re a season one show, and we’re allowed to make our own rules. Why not just completely shift points of view for a minute and really understand and sympathize with what she was going through?” Tropper says.
“You convince yourself you’re happy, like all your friends and neighbors seem to be,” Sam narrates. In many ways, that’s the functional thesis for the show. It’s a story of the lengths people go to succeed, and more importantly, to present the illusion of success. Sam is “an outsider who came in and joined this community, so she has a slightly fresher perspective than the people who grew up with a certain level of wealth,” says Tropper. “What everyone’s up against is that they spend all these years climbing the mountain, working those hours, sacrificing time with family, to get to the top of that mountain. To realize that you may have climbed the wrong mountain, or realize this may not be for you, that would be to say you’ve wasted all those years, and nobody is ready to face that.”
That leads to the desperation felt by Sam to stage her husband’s death because of his no-suicide insurance clause—the same kind of desperation felt by Coop, who began a life of crime after losing the job that defined his identity for so many years. It’s that revelation that “leads to all sorts of bad behavior in these communities,” Tropper says. Sam confesses everything to Coop, granting him his freedom and his family back.
Now it’s time for Coop to get his job back. His former company is in dire straits after letting him go, which opens the door for major negotiations. Jack (Corbin Bernsen) is furious that he has no choice but to accept Coop’s very demanding terms, under one condition: Coop joins him on a plane to Switzerland to help close some major business, which he agrees to. It’s remarkable to see Coop in a new light—it’s like a completely different version of the man we saw getting fired at the beginning of the season. “Breaking into houses and stealing has given him an edge he didn’t used to have. It has changed his way of dealing with people so that he can walk back in and do that negotiation. It’s not something he could have pulled off before he started robbing, and before he had hit rock bottom, explains Tropper.
But before Coop heads to Switzerland, he’s got a facade to rebuild, going to the Gutenberg Cancer Gala to keep up appearances. He shares a dance with Mel, and while the rekindling of their relationship is up in the air, they both decide to try single life for a while. “I think the tragedy and the beauty of their relationship is that they failed, and in a way that probably has damaged it too much to ever come back together,” says Tropper. But although they may not stay together, it’s far from the end of their relationship. “I don’t think many divorced couples are like this, but I think this is an aspirational divorced couple who’s somehow managing moments to find each other,” he adds.
Just as Coop is about to head off for Switzerland, he runs into Julia, one of the people he robbed. Julia acts happy to see him, but Coop knows Julia has been publicly saying how she thinks Coop did in fact commit murder. He doesn’t mince words and does something incredibly bold, threatening her over her daughter’s SAT scores, which were falsified. Julia can’t believe he knows about the scores—the only reason he does is because he broke into their home and saw the evidence. It’s an extremely risky play from Coop, but one thing is clear: this isn’t the man we once knew. “He’s never going to become a criminal kingpin. He’s not going to break bad. But he has been liberated from the rules of polite society, to some extent. As a result, he’s going to operate differently from now on, and that’s going to make him a much more interesting character to watch,” says Tropper.
Coop then heads off to Switzerland—except he doesn’t. Jack waits for him on the plane, and takes off without him: “That will undoubtedly be a fiasco,” Tropper says. Turns out Coop has another plan, returning to crime and stealing a painting from Jack’s house. While it may be shocking to see Coop return to art theft after it caused so many problems, Tropper sees things a little differently: “I’m not sure he’s stealing that painting for financial reasons. He’s taking something Jack loves, because he feels like now he knows how to and he wants his revenge. I think it’s more about taking it from Jack than actually selling.” The season ends with Coop driving away from Jack’s house, rejecting the office life and doubling down on crime.
With the show renewed for Season 2, Tropper teases what audiences can expect. ”It’s darker. It’s more intense. This continues to be a show about relationships more than anything, and I think we get to explore the Coop and Mel dynamic in a different way. We get to explore Coop’s feelings about being a parent. I think the Cooper family is always going to be at the center of this, and the trouble that they’re going through,” he says.
Interestingly, it may not just be Coop landing in hot water next season: “Coop’s not the only one who can get into trouble,” Tropper offers as a little hint of what’s to come: “Mel can get into trouble, too.”
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