‘Your Friends and Neighbors' Season 2 Will Explore Mel's Darker Side and How Far Coop Will Take His Criminal Lifestyle: ‘We're Not Going Down the Walter White Road'
Heading into the finale, Coop (as brilliantly played by Jon Hamm) woke up in a pool of blood next to the lifeless body of his neighbor, Paul — who was also the estranged husband of Coop's frequent booty call, Sam (Olivia Munn) — and was contemplating taking a plea deal even though he proclaimed his innocence. Heart-to-heart talks with his kids and his ex, Mel (Amanda Peet), kick up the tears and anxiety. Terrified of losing him, a shouting match erupts.
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Meanwhile, evidence shows that two of the three gunshots to Paul's body happened after he was already dead. Coop realizes that Sam has been using a burner phone, prompting him and Elena (Aimee Carrero) to search Sam's mansion for it. They not only find that but also proof that Paul killed himself and that Sam framed Coop so she could collect Paul's sizeable life insurance.
Munn tells Variety that a little voice in Sam's head kept reminding her that she managed to climb the social mountain to establish herself as a prestigious figure in high society, which enabled her to give her kids a childhood that she never had. A fact of life she won't compromise.
'She created a life that she deeply craved, and I think always has feared losing,' Munn says. 'Being around people who put so much value on the external, that kind of value system really sticks to you and, before you know it, you are thinking that same way, walking that same way, judging other people by their shoes, their purse, their car, their zip code.'
But she had real feelings for Coop — or so we were led to believe — and yet she framed him for murder? 'Yeah, she had a failed relationship with Coop, but he is a father, he is a son, he is a friend,' Munn says. 'He did not commit murder, and yet she was OK with setting him up that way. It's like, what is happening in [her] psyche? I do not believe Sam is a bad person at all. So why would she be so OK with that?'
She rationalizes it this way: 'Some people are trying to always look for survival and any moment that is offered where you're like, 'For me to be able to feed my children, pay the utility bills, buy new clothes for school…' You're always keeping your eyes open at anything that could be useful to your family's survival.'
Ultimately, Coop is cleared, and Sam is cuffed and taken away by the police. But because she hadn't claimed Paul's life insurance money just yet, she can't be charged with fraud. Her only certain punishment will be from those in her community that shun her.
'The joy of Season 2 is we can explore Sam independent of Coop and give her a new storyline,' Tropper says. 'What she's done is something far more opaque and far more complicated to process. And it's not just complicated for her to process, it's complicated for the neighborhood to process. For her, a lot of Season 2 is, a kind of awakening of, 'It's not yours if you can't keep it.' … And so it's how does she deal with the public scrutiny? How does she deal with reinventing herself in this community? And how does she deal with the emotional fallout of what she's been through?'
Munn says the biggest lesson that Mel has learned is not to depend on anybody other than herself. 'Don't put the weight of your happiness into somebody else's hands,' she says. 'If she wants to be in this world, this society, it has to be on her terms and on her own two feet. … I want her to have realized that this path that she went on may have gotten her what she wanted for a period of her life, but if she wants to truly maintain it, she has to do it on her own.'
Judging by this season's ending, has Coop learned nothing about right and wrong… and about how his frequently reckless decisions have a ripple effect on those around him?
'Oh, the opposite,' Tropper insists. 'He learned something really vital because, when I started writing [the first season], that I wanted Coop to be presented with the keys to his old life back at the end. And after everything he's been through, he's sitting in his old boss' office being offered back everything he's lost, and the last few months could literally just be a bad fever dream. Now, he can have his office back and his wealth and his status, and his future and his financial security. He's being offered all of it. I think in that moment, he's actually planning to take it. And in that moment, what you can see is this is a guy who has been shaped by his experience to the point where he's a much tougher negotiator. You could almost see that the things he's learned being a little bit of a criminal, have made him better at what he does out in the financial world.'
But for Tropper, he questions when, exactly, was the epiphany for Coop when he decided that he doesn't want to ever go back to being that person he was as a hedge fund manager. 'To me, that is his real evolution in the season: Has he been woken up? And even though what he's doing may not be sustainable, he knows that to go back to where he was would be to put trust in the system that he now knows can't be trusted, and he can't trust himself in that system to be the person that he feels he should be. Really just to wake him up to the notion that he's been sleepwalking for the last 10 or 20 years. No matter what else happens, he's not gonna go back to sleep.'
And therein lies the endless opportunities to explore for Season 2, which became a reality before Season 1 even premiered. What can we expect?
'Coop is never gonna become a criminal kingpin. We're not going down the Walter White Road,' Tropper says, referring to Bryan Cranston's drug lord on 'Breaking Bad.' 'So, it's never gonna be about building a big criminal enterprise. But what it is about is the risk and reward ratio, what it takes both to make him feel alive and to do what at least he tells himself in his mind, what's the exit strategy? Right now, we've only caught him after a season at the point where he's figured out what he's not gonna be, but I don't think he's yet figured out what it is he is going to be.'
Both women in Coop's life, Mel and Sam, are also heading into Season 2 at a crosswords. There have been sprinklings of a dark side of Mel, whether it be keying a car, beating the living daylights out of Sam in a self-defense class or even petty theft of a jar of jam. And with her relationship with Nick on the fritz at the end of the first season, there is a lot to explore.
'Basically, everyone is confronting their great emptiness,' Tropper explains. 'But the emptiness in Mel is leading to anger and rage and lashing out that she hasn't reckoned with yet. And for us, Season 2 is gonna be to really dig into that reckoning.'
'There is a weirdly dark part of Mel — stealing and some of the self-destructive behavior,' says Peet, whose character lost her job as a therapist because of that side of her personality. 'She's not the most stable therapist in the world. I think probably she is really afraid to face the music in her own life. I feel like she's kind of blindly going forth without that much intentionality or self-reflection.'
At its core, Peet think it comes down to Mel's unresolved feelings for Coop. 'I think she can't stand the fact that she's still in love with him. She's running away from reality —her own dissatisfaction with what happened in her marriage and her dissatisfaction from Nick.' And 'what is lurking under the placid suburban dream' and what is ultimately going to happen to her and Coop is what intrigues Peet the most about the upcoming season.
'I'm very curious what Jonathan [Tropper] is going to do with those two,' she says. 'The other thing that's interesting is, she has her own kind of dark and transgressive instincts. I think that it would be interesting for us to see more of that. … just like shoplifting at age 50. It's a very weird part of her that, if he wanted to go down that road a little bit more, I would be excited.'
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