<em>Your Friends and Neighbors</em> Season 1 Finale Recap
This story contains spoilers for the Your Friends and Neighbors season 1 finale.
Here's one simple thing I love about Your Friends and Neighbors: It doesn't take itself too seriously. Over the course of this season's nine episodes, Coop (Jon Hamm) navigated the fallout of his exceptionally messy divorce, earned the hatred of both his children, and briefly landed in a jail cell! (Coop, if you're serious about having a good night of sleep at a jail cell, I'm about to call my local precinct for a bed.) So, you'd think that if the universe offered the man his life back on a silver platter, he'd take it.
>Wrong. In the final moment of the season 1 finale, which aired on Apple TV+ this Friday, Coop masterminds his way out of life in prison just to find himself stealing from his friends and neighbors once again. Sam (Olivia Munn) is arrested for attempting to frame Coop for the murder of her husband. Then, Coop is promptly offered his old job, embraced by his fair-weathered community of one-percenters, and hey, his kiddos may even sort of like him again. But sometime this weekend, after you've watched the finale, you may find yourself like Coop: drinking a $35,000 whisky and wondering if everything just went wrong. Why? Because the final scenes of Your Friends and Neighbors season finale see Coop flat-out embrace the chaos. He intimidates the rival tennis parent into not sending her daughter to Princeton (therefore securing his daughter a spot on the college squad). Then, he not only spurns his old boss's invitation to join him on a very-important business trip, but he also pulls up to the man's house to steal his coveted Francis Bacon painting.You're surely thinking: Did Coop learn nothing?! Counterpoint: He's actually learned everything. For starters, he must keep stealing. Not just because this is an exceptionally entertaining TV show—Coop going back to the black market is this show embracing what makes it fun—but because, as Your Friends and Neighbors's creator told me, Coop has seen the Matrix. Now, he can't go back to his old life. "We wanted to see that there's been an evolution for Coop," creator Jonathan Tropper told me earlier this week. "All this time he spent breaking into houses, breaking the law, breaking the social contract, have actually emboldened him and given him an edge that might actually serve him well."
Allow me to reintroduce TV’s latest, greatest antihero: Andrew "Coop" Cooper.
He added: "For better or worse, he's now operating on a level that no one else in his neighborhood operates. And that's going to give him some advantage—and also, you know, presumably get him in more trouble."
This is how you craft a perfect TV antihero. All of the names you know by heart—Tony Soprano, Walter White, and yes, Don Draper (also Hamm)—are legends because they pulled at your heartstrings while still slinging meth and knocking the gabagool out of any schmuck who looks at them wrong. We feel for Coop because the guy is charismatic, but also because the root of his life's struggle is painfully relatable. He made a few selfish choices along the way, and now he's not sure who the hell he even is anymore. Ultimately, his decision puts him at odds with the family he loves so dang much.
"One of the things I wanted to focus on in the finale that really bleeds into season 2 is the notion that at the end, this show is about the Cooper family," Tropper added. "They're starting to fracture and scatter. And his desire in holding on to his own status has to merge with his desire to sort of shore up the holes and knit his family back together in some way. That certainly becomes a significant component of his awakening."
Why do we love Coop? In part, because—despite his many flaws—the guy loves his family.
In the finale, Coop inches closer to becoming a real father to his children again—and Tropper brilliantly makes sure to not skip through this part. The first thirty minutes of the finale show quiet time amidst the Cooper clan, as they reckon with the possibility that their flawed patriarch is going to jail. Thankfully, Coop—who is a criminal, lest you forget, and therefore thinks like one—manages to get in the head of the person who framed him for the murder of Paul Levitt: Sam. Turns out, Paul committed suicide. Sam realizes that his cause of death would lead to significantly less money in her pocket. So, she shoots up his corpse, makes the scene look like that of a murder, and tosses the gun in Cooper's perpetually open trunk. Sam even has a somewhat hilarious villain-explains-the-entire-master-plan moment as she takes away narration duties from Coop.
Tropper said something interesting about this, too: "What we're conveying is that Coop's not the only one struggling to hold on to what's his... By shifting points of view and giving her that narration, we were able to suddenly change the lens of the story for a little bit and realize this could be her story, too."
So, what's next? James Marsden, baby! The Paradise actor will join Hamm in season 2 of Your Friends and Neighbors, and I hope he's every bit Coop's antagonist. Season 1 dangled quite a few TBDs on the table, after all. With the implication that Coop will dive right back into his life of crime (won't the man run out of houses to steal from?!), you have to wonder if he's not yet escaped the ire of art dealer Christian Tómasson (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson )—a storyline that would certainly bring Elena (Aimee Carrero) back into the picture. Meanwhile, Tori (Isabel Gravitt) will head to Princeton, Ali (Lena Hall) will enjoy the aftermath of sticking it to her ex, and Mel seems primed for more soul-searching.
For now, I'm just happy that Hamm is firmly back behind the wheel of a great TV antihero. I'll take whatever's on my bar shelf—what's that, a Domaine d'Auvenay Chevalier-Montrachet Grand Cru?—and cheers to that.
esquire
