The <em>Your Friends and Neighbors</em> Creator Answers Your Burning Finale Questions

This story contains spoilers for the Your Friends and Neighbors season 1 finale.

A few months ago, I was in an ideas meeting with a few Esquire editors, and I wanted to show off the best damn minute of TV I had seen to that point. I deployed a clip from a new Apple TV+ show—the Jon Hamm–starring Your Friends and Neighbors—where the lead, Coop (Hamm) takes a minute to appreciate a bottle of wine before stealing it. If you're reading this, I assume you know what I mean: the delightfully bizarre, fourth-wall-breaking moments where Coop launches through every single detail of a coveted luxury item—which, in this case, is a velvety Domaine d'Auvenay Chevalier-Montrachet Grand Cru.

The whole room was cracking up. Is this satire? Jon Hamm Jon Hamming? My new favorite show? Fast-forward to now—as of this Friday, the Your Friends and Neighbors finale is streaming—and the answer is absolutely all three.

Your Friends and Neighbors stars Hamm in peak form as Andrew "Coop" Cooper, whose ultra-privileged life unravels after a predictably messy divorce. He's also lost his job, as well as access to more cash than he'd like to admit in front of the happy-hour crowds at his snooty suburban community. The fix? Coop resorts to stealing from his neighbors and selling their goods on the black market. Hammian antics, trials and tribulations of the 1 percent, and career performances from the likes of Amanda Peet (who plays Coop's ex-wife, Mel) and Olivia Munn (as Coop's new flame, Sam) ensue.

If you want to know how well Your Friends and Neighbors has played for an audience hungry for an all-too-rare original story that toes humor, drama, and heart exceptionally well, there's this: Apple TV+ renewed the series for season 2 before the first season even premiered. Its success is in large part thanks to longtime novelist and TV writer Jonathan Tropper (See, Warrior) who created the series. "It was a rare experience for me where I went in with an idea that wasn't based on IP," Tropper told me earlier this week over Zoom. "I've done a whole bunch of TV shows and I've been happy with all of them. But this one felt like from inception, through production, through the way it was received, that there were no compromises and we never wavered on what the show is."

With the finale making the rounds in the gated community that is the streaming-verse, I called up Tropper to break down the episode. Below, we talk about Coop's evolution, Sam's villainous twist, and Your Friends and Neighbors season 2's new addition: James Marsden.

"A good piece of where we started for season 2 is thinking about how this is a guy who loves his family," Tropper teases of the future of the Cooper clan.

ESQUIRE: At first, I fell in love with the show because of Coop's scenes where he goes full Good Will Hunting on luxury items. In your writers room, do you have a name for it?

JONATHAN TROPPER: We do. And you're gonna laugh. I wanted to infuse the show with a number of devices. One was his separate voice-over. And because the show is about conspicuous consumerism and late-stage capitalism, I did want to sort of shine a light on marketing. So what I call them in the writers room are QPBs, which stands for Quick Product Blurbs. It was to do something really fun, quick, and graphic oriented that broke the fourth wall just a little bit to shine a light on the marketing of these things. That was in there from the very beginning.

I leave the QPBs actually wanting the thing myself.

That's the whole tension that the show is mining, which is that we can recognize that we're skewering this—and at the same time, we want it. We're all victims of the marketing. We've been marketed to our whole lives. And so even while we recognize the hole in the value system, it's still aspirational. The friction that makes the show interesting is that this guy has been spurned by the world he thought he wanted, but he's not going off and finding a new world. He's seeing it for what it is, but he still wants back in. You see the Matrix, but you still want to opt into it.

We have plenty of "Eat the Rich"–style class satires on TV. But what I appreciate about Your Friends and Neighbors is that it is self-aware. It does roast these people, but it has a lot of heart.

I'm thinking of it more along the lines of—not that I'm comparing myself to this—the novels of Henry James or Jane Austen. Which were largely satirical, right? But they were representing the troubles and foibles of a certain class of people. There's something interesting about this world that goes beyond the wealth, and it has to do with what the wealth creates: a real guilt-and-shame community and this fishbowl they all live in.

I wanted to make the characters sympathetic for a few reasons. First of all, for people to keep coming back, they have to care about the characters. If you do a movie for an hour and a half where the characters are reprehensible, and it's funny and witty, you stick with it. But if you're coming week after week, you have to care about these characters and you have to be invested in them. And the other thing is, everyone in these societies, they're not monolithic and they're not homogeneous. And so within this society you have different levels of wealth and also people who perhaps aren't wealthy but are struggling to be in this world. What the show's trying to do is a very comprehensive examination of "the 1 percenters" but in a way that really humanizes them.

"By shifting points of view and giving her that narration," Tropper says of the Sam heel turn, "we were able to suddenly change the lens of the story for a little bit and realize this could be her story too."

Where do we leave Coop as a father by the end of season 1?

One of the goals of this journey for Coop is waking him up. There's the fun way we're waking him up, which is the social contract. But the other way we're waking him up is the realization that in the 20-some-odd years he spent accumulating and striving, he did all the right things, but he wasn't present. And his family has suffered for that. Certainly his marriage fell apart for that.

A good piece of where we started for season 2 is thinking about how this is a guy who loves his family. And while he's becoming conscious of certain mistakes he's made, one of them has to be he took his eye off that particular ball. Which doesn't mean it's really easy to put your eye back on that ball. But 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. 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.

I have to add: Coop's children must be one of the first non-cringe portrayals of Gen Z teenagers on TV.

It really helps to cast good actors. One of the dangers when you're casting people this age is you get the broadcast network or CW version of these kids, which is just the way young actors are kind of coming up. A lot of young actors don't know the difference between prestige TV and broadcast, or young-adult versus adult TV. So you need to cast kids who are going to perform in an adult show and not take it down to a young-adult level. And there's a level of minimalism we were looking for with both actors.

It's really amazing to see Donovan [Colan], who's fifteen, and Isabel [Gravitt], who's now twenty-one—that even at their young ages, they really are minimalist actors in a great way. And they don't bring a sort of textbook angst to their roles, but play them like humans. The other step is to just write them like characters and not like teenagers. Certainly I have younger people in the writers room who can bring some authenticity to it. But at the same time, we're less focused on making sure they use all the right buzzwords and more about the fact that we're treating them like humans.

Right. You don't see the text bubbles on the screen whenever they're on their phones.

We're pretty careful about that.

Let's talk about Sam's heel turn—where she takes the reins as the narrator for a moment.

It's funny. When I originally wrote the finale, I didn't give her that narration, and I felt something was missing. I shared the script with Jamie Rosengard, who's a writing producer on the show, and she suggested we try that. At first, I was a little resistant to give that narration to someone else, but I realized the genius of it. What we're conveying is that Coop's not the only one struggling to hold on to what's his.

We've seen all season what Coop's been willing to do, but we've never asked ourselves, What are other people in the neighborhood doing to hold on? 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. We could have done nine episodes of Sam Levitt's character doing the same thing in this terrible marriage with a guy who is her key to this community.

Your Friends and Neighbors starring Olivia Munn would probably work just as well, with Hamm in the Sam role.

The beauty of [the show] is that we have three lead actors, right? Obviously, it's Hamm's show, but we can go off any time we want and spend time with Amanda or Olivia, and people will feel it's their show too.

At the end of the episode, we see Coop return to his heisting ways. What should we take from that closing shot?

We wanted to see that there's been an evolution for Coop. 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.

So the first step of that is the assumption that he's going to take that job back. That will solve all his problems, but he can’t take the job back because he's seen the Matrix. He's terrified to go back and become that guy again. He's now a slightly tougher, harder-edged version of himself when it comes to negotiation and when it comes to dealing with adversaries and enemies. And so there's revenge on the man who fucked him over. That revenge comes in the form of sending him off to get his balls cut off by the Swiss, because he's not showing up with him.

And then it comes from: While you're out, I'm going to take the thing you love. Maybe I'll just burn it. That's the same thing you see at the gala when he extorts one of his neighbors into not sending her kid to Princeton. He's become a different person. For better or worse, he's now operating on a level that no one else in his neighborhood operates on. And that's going to give him some advantage—and also, you know, presumably get him in more trouble.

"The friction that makes the show interesting is that this guy has been spurned by the world he thought he wanted, but he's not going off and finding a new world," Tropper says. "He's seeing it for what it is, but he still wants back in."

My only gripe with the finale is that we never see James Marsden.

Well, to be honest, when we were finishing that, we hadn't yet sat down and thought about what we're doing for season 2. But you'll see plenty of him in season 2.

We interviewed him for Paradise—the era he's in right now is really cool.

I was so bummed, because I thought Paradise was great, and we had basically based the character on hoping we could get James Marsden. And then Paradise came out. Luckily for us, we closed his deal right before that show came out, [otherwise] we never would have gotten him.

What do you make of the show's success so far?

One of the reasons the show's been as successful as it's been is because it has really stayed the thing it's supposed to be. We haven't tried to get too cerebral. We've kept it entertaining on purpose. We wanted it to have a heart, but we also wanted it to say something about where we are as a country right now and without ever speechifying or being didactic about it. It's a little bit of a Rorschach, right?