‘Your Friends and Neighbors’ is back for Season 2 — and the stakes have been raised for just about all of the characters.
Starring Jon Hamm, Olivia Munn, Amanda Peet, Hoon Lee and Mark Tallman, the series was created, written, produced and directed by screenwriter/novelist Jonathan Tropper. Now in its sophomore go-around, the hit series from Apple TV has also added James Marsden as Owen Ashe into the mix, a foil for Hamm’s central character, Coop. The new addition also comes with a slew of fresh dynamics, settings and obstacles, which Tropper says will help bring the story to higher heights without changing the formula that made it so successful in the first place.
“I think mostly what I think about is: What worked? And what's the franchise of the show that fans will want to come back to? And at the same time, how do we give them that without doing the same season again? How do we evolve the show without throwing out the thing that people love and the thing that really works? So it's protecting the franchise of the show while you're coming up with a way to make it feel very different,” explains Tropper.
In Season 1, we see Coop lose everything from his wife to his job, which catapults him into a life of crime, stealing from his wealthy neighbors, some of whom happen to be his friends. And although a series of events ultimately put him at the center of a murder investigation, he’s evaded trouble from the law — for now.
Audiences really get into the inner workings of his character through the use of a voiceover — something Tropper says was inspired by some of his favorite noir films (a la Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade), and that will continue in Season 2. Both Tropper and Hamm spent a lot of time developing that voice to be a tool for the story, rather than an added element to guide audiences.
“It's all about using that voiceover to almost be another character,” says Tropper. “Because the Coop you're watching on screen is going through it. The Coop who's doing the voiceover is clearly some Coop from the future who's telling you the story and has achieved a level of wisdom and perspective that present-Coop doesn't have. So what's great is when the voiceover is really effective — what it's doing is somehow underscoring the fact that the Coop you're watching on the show has not figured it out yet... So I think in a way, the voiceover subverts the character.”
The setting of ‘Your Friends and Neighbors’ is still centrally focused on the affluent neighborhood of Westmont Village (inspired and shot in the Westchester suburbs that Tropper himself lived in for years). But the storyline has also now expanded past the glitzy zip code for this second season.
“I never want to really leave the neighborhood because I think the neighborhood is the franchise. But the reality of these people is they wouldn't be there all year—people go to the Hamptons, people go to Aspen, people go to Europe. And so we wanted to start really showing other sides of this existence,” continues Tropper. “And so in step two, we do. We definitely did some international travel, we did some local travel, but we wanted to just keep building the world without leaving the neighborhood for too long, but make it more visually interesting and also more thematically interesting.”
And the dynamics between characters? They are also growing along with the setting, and some sparks will fly beyond just Coop — although his new lease on life certainly shows him holding a metaphorical matchbook next to a flame of loose ends from Season 1.
“I think Mel (Peet) is on a really crazy journey. And in Season 1, she was really the stable one while Coop's life was falling apart. And now we're watching Mel spin out and Mel is dealing with confronting middle age in a way and she's dealing with menopause and the fact that her kids will be moving out soon. She doesn't have her job anymore and it's leading her to sort of lash out in very strange and unpredictable ways,” finishes Tropper.
“And then Coop — Coop has sort of doubled down on this life of crime. But he still doesn't fully understand that he's not a master criminal... he gets himself into the kind of trouble that I don't think anyone could predict in the first episode. It’s a much bigger mess than he was in Season 1.”
‘Your Friends & Neighbors’ Season 2 will debut on April 3 on Apple TV.
