Spoiler Alert: This story contains spoilers for the Your Friends & Neighbors season 2 finale, “The Night of the Hunter,” now streaming on Apple TV.
Your Friends & Neighbors now has one less neighbor.
In the lead-up to the Season 2 finale, shady billionaire Owen Ash, played by James Marsden, trips and falls in his home shortly after shooting drugs and chasing Coop (Jon Hamm), Barney (Hung Lee) and Nick (Mark Tolman) with a loaded gun. When Coop refuses to invest and help launder dirty money, Ash goes berserk, a decision that leads to him being kidnapped and held captive by mysterious henchmen. (It is still not clear whose subordinate he is.)
The three friends declare Ash dead and put him in an Escalade, planning to bury the body to avoid the police. Authorities believe Ash fled the Village of Westmont and is considered missing. However, during a night drive, Ash suddenly wakes up and a huge scuffle breaks out in the car, causing Nick to veer off the road and drive his car into a lake. Only three people emerge from the water: Coop, Barney, and Nick.
This is sure to be the central conflict that drives Season 3, with Coop echoing the words of Benjamin Franklin. “Even if two people die, three people may keep the secret.” Samantha (Olivia Munn) also knows that Ash is dead. Elena (Amy Carrero) is opening the doors of Westmont Village to shady characters, putting Coop’s business at risk. And Mel (Amanda Peet) has some kind of mysterious revelation that will be revealed in upcoming episodes.
Below, Hamm and Your Friends & Neighbors creator Jonathan Tropper break down the Season 2 finale and explain how it will affect Season 3, which is currently in production.
This show makes being rich seem pretty miserable. Is Coop happy? Where can we find him at the end of the season compared to the beginning?
Jon Hamm: Given what happened with his relationship with Ash and how it unraveled, he’s not very happy by the end of the season. When it comes to the big point of wealth and happiness and whether one necessarily follows the other, I think there’s a bit of a genre in shows about the unlucky rich, whether it’s our show or “Succession” or “The White Lotus.” There’s a bit of a tendency to see people who seemingly have everything except what makes them truly happy. Coop knows he’s looking for something that will make him happy, but he doesn’t think he’s quite found it yet. He realizes that all this gilded nonsense won’t necessarily get him there.
Jonathan Tropper: At the beginning of the show, he wakes up to the matrix of his life. Now, Coop is violently attacking the boundaries and structure of his life, but that doesn’t mean he knows what he wants yet. He has just realized that he is not where he wants to be, so an overall sense of dissatisfaction is the driving force behind much of his behavior. The anger and frustration comes from the idea that every time he takes decisive steps to fix or improve what he’s done, some amount of emotion will eventually blow up in his face.
At the end of the first season, he returned to his old job and had the opportunity to be accepted into the world of high finance again. What does it say about him that he wants to operate on the periphery? Would he be happier now if he had gone back to his old life?
Tropper: I don’t think so. It was the beginning of liberation. He even admits at the end of season 2 that if he had gone back, it would have been the same as falling asleep again. he woke up. That doesn’t mean everything is great, but it does mean he’ll never be the same again.
Hamm: The exit was right there, but the exit couldn’t save him from anything. It brought him back to something he knew he couldn’t satisfy before. So I think the rest of the show is not going to tell Jonathan how to write, but how he solves that central conundrum.
Have you calculated how much money Coop makes from theft?
Tropper: We do that calculation to make sure he has money in his pocket and can pay his bills and write alimony checks, but also to make sure we’re never too far ahead of his life’s expenses.
Will we ever find out exactly who kidnapped Coop? Was it the Cricket Birch people?
Tropper: We’ll get more clarity on that in season three.
Ash’s death solves some things, but complicates others. How involved are the main characters and how will season 3 be set?
Hamm: I say this toward the end of the season. “Even if two people die, three people can keep the secret.” It seems like a no-brainer to just keep quiet, but going back to Edgar Allan Poe and The Tell-Tale Heart, keeping secrets and keeping the past buried is a tried-and-true suspense-oriented trope used in storytelling. Here, this “Tell-Tale Heart” beats in a steady rhythm beneath the floorboards, serving as a great reminder that there’s a darkness creeping up from behind Coop that needs to be dealt with.
Mr. Tropper: That influence must continue to grow and expand. Coop cannot continue this and return to the same baseline. Now that his friends are starting to get involved, more and more people will start feeling the effects of his decisions.
So far, his family has been somewhat protected from the effects of his misdeeds. Are certain characters off limits?
Tropper: Of course, I don’t think anyone is off limits.
Why was it important for Season 2 to delve deeper into Elena’s story?
Tropper: Coop feels a different sense of responsibility towards her. Because she doesn’t have his privileges or safety net. At the same time, as her partner in this adventure, he now seems to be leaving her hanging. Her actions at the end were him leaving her hanging, which is going to cause problems down the line, so I think they’re pretty tied together. It feels like she has less room for error than he does.
Hamm: Obviously, Coop needs her and her access and her information to facilitate their efforts, but they’re also very aware that there’s a difference between how she’s perceived in the world and how she’s perceived in the world. There may be a certain amount of guilt in bringing her into this, and even if it goes sideways, she may understand that wealthy white men can get out of trouble much more easily than new citizens living hand-to-mouth, and all the other factors that set the immigrant class behind the eight-ball.
Coop is not a wrecking ball. He doesn’t approach these things thinking, “Let’s just let the chips fall where they may. If it doesn’t work out, we’re in trouble.” A true criminal would do that. In that sense, Coop is a little more responsible.
He seemed a little more reckless this season. He once committed a robbery right out of the front door, and even after being caught by Ash, he continues to rob houses without wearing a mask. Why isn’t he more careful?
Tropper: He’ll never be a sophisticated professional thief, right? This is what he inevitably does. And even if that necessity is somewhat clouded in his mind, why he has to do this, or why he has to do this in the first place, still leans into the idea that he feels pretty safe in this area. He feels pretty secure in what he’s doing, and he knows that people in this area are very comfortable here and the crime rate is very low, so they probably don’t have the protection they need.
What people forget is that most of his robberies were never even on anyone’s radar. Most of the time, what he brought out, people don’t even know he brought up yet. Therefore, it is not as if the town suddenly issues an alarm or worries about an increase in robberies. Most of the time, people are not aware that they are being robbed. This is the whole point of accumulated wealth just sitting in people’s drawers. That’s what he expects. That’s where his sense of security comes from. But there’s always the risk that security can become complacent, and as in Ash’s case, that complacency can sometimes get him into trouble.
Tell me about filming the car fight scene when Ash suddenly comes back to life.
Hamm: From a storytelling perspective, it’s very exciting. It’s a jump scare. It’s something fun. Ash was active with drugs in his system, and for some reason, he probably wasn’t as fully recovered as everyone thought. Therefore, his resurrection at that moment was surprising to everyone. Oddly enough, I was reminded of the scene in Tommy Boy where there was a dead deer in the back of a car. Too many limbs and sharp angles in too small a space, making it difficult to manage.
In fact, it was a very choreographed and very difficult sequence to film. We needed to make sure everyone was safe and everything was carefully managed. Obviously we filmed it in a parked car with a green screen and all that.
Tropper: We always look for every opportunity to remember that these are not trained professional criminals. There’s an incompetence on their part, and the idea that they thought they were mistakenly responsible for Ash’s death and miraculously wasn’t – they just somehow messed it up again speaks to that level of incompetence that is almost inevitable. To me, that’s what happens when you take three men from this background and try to have them operate on the criminal side of things. They just aren’t equipped for that and that’s something we always want to keep in mind.
What should we learn from the final scene with Mel? She had a kind of epiphany.
Tropper: She’s not going to turn a blind eye to this anymore. She can now intuitively understand that there’s a lot she doesn’t know, and because of her connection to Coop – as co-parents and because there’s still a lot of emotion there – she’s determined to find out what’s going on. She has no idea it could be this extreme.
Are there any hints or Easter eggs of any kind this season that people don’t quite understand yet? Are there any indications of where the story is going?
Tropper: There’s a phrase that gets used a lot in both seasons. “This is what happens.” It means more than people realize. There’s also a line where he thinks about his father, and Coop says in voiceover, “I need to right my ship.” Because his father lived a simple life bound by a moral compass, and Coop is worried about losing that. In a very modest way, this fits into Coop’s mission statement for the rest of the series. His main motivation is to right his ship.
John, I heard you rewatched “Mad Men” recently?
Ham: Not completed. My wife and I started watching it a few months ago and I think we’re about halfway through season 3 now. Very enlightening.
Now that you have some distance from the show and the character, do you have any new insights about Don Draper?
Hamm: I don’t think we’ve really gained any new insight. I’ll tell you, watching it again in some sort of binge-like format is a very different experience than watching it during the only other time I’ve seen it. It’s interesting to understand all of that story in such a compressed time because it was so meticulously and specifically explained when it aired.
So my wife and I did a three-and-a-half year shoot in about two weeks, which was pretty weird. I found myself remembering how long that period was, how much happened during the season, and everything that was going on in our lives at the time. Other than that, I didn’t really have any new inspiration other than the fact that I really like this show. I realized once again how wonderful everyone on the show is. It was a lot of fun.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
