Just a year after the first series, Your Friends & Neighbours returns to titillate and amuse us with the escapades of the moneyed but never satisfied burghers of Westmont Village. This mythical community somewhere in New York’s Hudson Valley has everything that money can buy, and probably a bit more, but does this make the locals happy and well-adjusted? Well obviously not.
Jon Hamm returns to reprise his role of Andrew “Coop” Cooper, the former Manhattan financier who was axed from his job and is now pursuing an imaginative new career in burglary, while trying to be a responsible father to teenagers Tori (Isabel Gravitt) and Hunter (Donovan Colan). As the first episode opens, Coop is on vacation in a Mexican beach resort with ex-wife Mel (Amanda Peet). The pair seem to have established a kind of provisional cease-fire, though emotional blow-ups may occur at any moment (pictured below, Amanda Peet, right, and Eunice Bae as Grace).
Creator Jonathan Tropper (who’s joined by a cluster of writers in creating these 10 new episodes) knew that the second season needed to find a new gear, and the cat is immediately put among the Westmont pigeons by the arrival of Owen Ashe, a man who has purportedly made a vast fortune with his import-export business. He breezes into town in his McLaren 750s ($300k-plus) to check out some properties, dismissing the first one as insultingly cheap before laying out $20m in cash for a much larger model, having barely bothered to set foot in the entrance hall. Ashe is played by James Marsden with an impeccable combination of arrogance, insouciance and a facade of exhaustingly relentless bonhomie. However, experience will show that when it comes to business, he has a licence to kill.
What makes the show so addictive is its skilfully-crafted balance between the narrative of Coop’s descent into well-heeled criminality, with the ever-present risk of discovery, at the same time that he’s finding himself drifting into 50-something middle age and the dwindling of his youthful energy and sense of infinite possibilities. Now he’s suddenly cursed with a bad back, which fatally scuppers one of his burglary expeditions (he was on the trail of an Étoile de Mont Blanc Joallière fountain pen worth $165,000). That episode led to him having to let his friend and business manager Barney (Hoon Lee) in on his murky secret, which will trigger a whole new set of obstacles. As the stakes grow larger, the downside risk keeps ballooning accordingly.
But on the upside, the rich cast of vivid, plausibly-drawn characters means there’s always another angle for the writers to explore. The story of Coop’s emotionally fragile sister Ali (Lena Hall) and how she becomes a music teacher at the upscale Mayfield school is a neat little fable of its own, while much wry comedy is wrung from contrasting scenes in the men’s and women’s saunas where the respective genders let it all, if you will, hang out. For instance, Mel’s discovery that she’s suddenly perimenopausal and risks suffering from “vaginal atrophy” is much more comical than it ought to be.
Meanwhile, Coop and Mel have to cope with daughter Tori’s conversion to extreme wokeness and rabid anti-capitalism, potentially demolishing their long-held ambition for her to go to Princeton. And son Hunter’s infatuation with Ashe’s coolly manipulative daughter Delilah (Erin Robinson) has got trouble written all over it. It’s a comedy of manners, but also a thriller, a melodrama and a morality tale. It can boast a terrific cast, but Hamm’s performance as Coop is surely his finest hour.
Ashe has a great line about him a couple of episodes in, when he tells him “you’ve got the whole suburban James Bond thing working.” Nailed it.
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