Apple TV’s Your Friends & Neighbors is essentially two shows in one.
There’s a crime story about a disgraced hedge fund manager from Westchester, New York, who develops a taste for robbing his rich neighbors. Then there’s drama about the hardships and dissatisfactions of middle age, no matter how comfortable it’s made by obscene wealth.
In its second season, Jonathan Tropper’s series (streaming Apr. 3) struggles to strike a consistent balance between its intertwined parts, resulting in a return engagement that’s frequently captivating if ultimately too strained and schizophrenic to fully justify its continued existence.
Having cleared his name after being framed for killing former lover Sam’s (Olivia Munn) husband, Andrew “Coop” Cooper (Jon Hamm) has grown close enough to his ex-wife Mel (Amanda Peet) to vacation with her and their teen kids Hunter (Donovan Colan) and Tori (Isabel Gravitt).
Nonetheless, paradise is elusive, as Tori blows up any blossoming domestic bliss by announcing that she won’t be attending Princeton. This petulant rejection of her parents’ expectations naturally concerns and infuriates them both, especially Mel, whose anger is compounded by perimenopause that’s left her sexually dry, excessively sweaty, and perpetually furious.
Mel’s malaise is compounded by a neighbor’s dog that won’t stop defecating in her yard. Coop, free from the stink of his past scandal, is on cruise control, with a fake business (complete with an office) serving as a cover for the ill-gotten gains he earns from stealing his community mates’ valuables with the assistance of housekeeper Elena (Aimee Carrero).
Still, despite his reasonably tranquil situation, Coop is wrestling with control issues, not only when it comes to his thievery, but with regards to his relatives—in particular Tori and his historically unstable sister Ali (Lena Hall), whose decision to take a music-teacher job at Hunter’s prep school is a step toward independence.
Coop’s even-keeled circumstances are upended by the arrival in town of Owen Ashe (James Marsden), a charming, ultra-affluent stranger with a mysterious shipping empire who immediately inserts himself into the middle of the local drama. As his daughter Delilah (Erin Robinson) strikes up a romance with Hunter, Owen takes a shine to Sam and swiftly gets her back in the good graces of her peers—save, that is, for bitter Mel.
With a brash cockiness and big smile that suggest malevolence, Marsden is the fly in Your Friends & Neighbors’ ointment, and if he resonates as a creaky plot device designed to create new problems for Coop, the actor’s vivid performance helps make that reality tolerable.
Your Friends & Neighbors quickly entangles Coop and Owen via a blackmail scheme perpetrated by the latter that mucks up Coop’s breaking-and-entering vocation and, consequently, his and Elena’s livelihood. It also makes a mess of things with Coop’s business manager and best friend Barney Choi (Hoon Lee) and ex-NBA great Nick Brandes (Mark Tallman), who are working to transform budding TV-personality Nick’s gyms into a franchise.
Thus, Tropper once again mires Coop in criminal trouble, although this time around it feels rather contrived, and lacking the urgency that would make one think Coop was in actual do-or-die danger.
Far better are the numerous passages in which Your Friends & Neighbors sets aside its genre-y concerns to depict Coop and Mel’s personal and familial ups-and-downs. Middle age can be brutal, and Tropper confronts it head-on, not simply via Mel’s unpleasant physical changes but Coop’s bad back, the duo’s impending empty-nest syndromes, their fears about how to parent kids on the cusp of adulthood, and the gnawing sense that perhaps life’s peaks have already been scaled.
Additionally, the specter of death hovers over the action, and eventually intrudes upon it, leading to a grief-stricken stand-alone episode that is the series’ finest to date.
Tropper knows this subject matter well, and that’s both the greatest strength and biggest weakness of Your Friends & Neighbors, which—to a greater extent than during its initial run—can’t seem to figure out which show it wants to be.
Its character-driven material is far more insightful, heartfelt, and genuine than its law-skirting shenanigans are exciting, and therefore it’s no surprise that it often takes precedence. The byproduct of this state of affairs, however, is that the proceedings are uneven to a degree that implies Tropper is more interested in Coop and company’s relatable challenges than in his burglary exploits.
Hamm and Peet are so good as the wayward Coop and Mel—both of whom are caught between warring desires complicated by their shady activities—that Your Friends & Neighbors thrives whenever they’re together. The same holds true of every scene with the sarcastic, deep-voiced Barney, who (now grappling with his wife’s unexpected pregnancy and unpleasant in-laws) remains the show’s charismatic scene-stealer.
Others, alas, are either relegated to the proverbial bench (see: Nick, Ali) or given implausible storylines (Sam) in order to basically reset things to before the first season’s events. More frustrating, there’s nothing particularly unexpected or novel about Owen’s less-than-savory nature, and the means by which he manipulates (and inadvertently screws) Coop and his friends is depressingly ho-hum.
Swanky cars, opulent mansions, helicopter trips to the Hamptons, and commercial-style rundowns of the ritzy items Coop pilfers allow Your Friends & Neighbors to wallow in the very lap of luxury, which its protagonist, in narration, censures as superficial, cutthroat, and unsatisfying. Yet even that have-it-both-ways tack is overly familiar, and the fact that Coop carries out merely a few burglaries in 10 episodes is an indication that the showrunner recognizes the short half-life of his series’ central conceit.
Tropper’s empathetic portrait of his characters’ pushing-50 issues compensates for his apparent disinterest in Coop’s criminal proclivities. And the depth of those chapters, when coupled with Hamm’s turn—equal parts suave and flustered, confident and lost—bolsters Your Friends & Neighbors through its digressions and downswings.
However, as with a finale that peters out rather than ending with a bang, the show never devises a natural and vibrant way to extend its premise, leaving it to flip-flop between being an astute saga about growing old and an increasingly stale rich-guys-in-jeopardy black comedy—only one of which really deserves a third season.
