Summary
Your Friends & Neighbors works great in Episode 3 precisely because of how bad all of its characters are at doing any of the things they’re trying to do.
If you can’t eat the rich, you might as well steal from them. This is the point that Your Friends & Neighbors is making, more or less. Episode 3, “Theoretical Herpes”, provides a gendered divide for the cast but unites them all in the same vacuous, petty, self-serving ecosystem, where dudes who think they’ve got a pretty good thing with their wives don’t realize she’s sleeping with someone else while they’re marvelling at a thirty grand toilet that isn’t plumbed in. A missing Rolex is the least of anyone’s problems. Maybe Coop has it right.
But it doesn’t help that he’s not very good at crime. This is also the point. Petty theft appeals to Coop because these people have more than they could ever possibly need and are unlikely to notice anything missing, and he has a few scores to settle beyond that. But his only success thus far has become a police matter, and in this episode, he fails at robbing two houses that were supposed to be completely empty. The second one is Nick’s, and “Theoretical Herpes” ends with the distinctive crunch-crunch of a shotgun being racked as Coop is about to swipe his prized NBA Championship ring.
You can understand why Coop would rob Nick more than you can understand why he’d attend a party he was throwing. But at the risk of repeating myself, perhaps this is also the point. What else do rich middle-aged men have to do than hang around at each other’s houses, complain about their wives, and show off their material possessions? This speaks to the essential contradiction at the heart of Your Friends & Neighbors, the thing that basically doomed Coop before he even started. The community most readily available to rob is the one he can’t stand to be ostracised from.
And Nick’s a bad target anyway. It’s too obvious. Coop famously hates Nick. Pinching a couple of watches from people with substantial collections is easy; even the police can’t be bothered to investigate it properly. But stealing a championship ring from your mortal enemy, the man who is sleeping with your wife, would be suspicious even if Coop wasn’t caught in the act. Now that he has been, he’s going to have a hard time talking his way out of it. And he isn’t even very good at that.
Jon Hamm and Amanda Peet in Your Friends & Neighbors | Image via Apple TV+
Everyone in Your Friends & Neighbors Episode 3 is useless. While the men are all getting drunk at Nick’s house, the women gather for a self-defence lesson that nobody takes seriously. They’re all high on pot brownies, being berated about how easily they might be sexually assaulted. The climax is a very high Mel and Sam having a limp fight and rolling around on the floor. Mel doesn’t seem to know that Sam is sleeping with Coop and might not care even if she did, but it goes unsaid for now, even if all the tension in these scenes comes from us knowing that detail and wondering if Sam will reveal it.
What Mel says about Coop’s general lack of emotional availability resonates with Sam, though we don’t see her interact with Coop in the episode. We do see Mel approach him, though. Coop’s hostility means the exchange turns into an argument, but I don’t reckon she was intending that initially. There’s still something there, and if that something manifests into a reconciliation of any sort, it’ll cause all kinds of problems for Coop, Mel, Nick, and Sam. Which is good for us, I suppose. Less so for any of them.
I personally think Ali is the most interesting character in “Theoretical Herpes”, because she’s the only one who isn’t technically a part of the gang (you can include Lu in this as well, who turns up at Coop’s house here to reveal that her running his plates at the end of the premiere was just her making sure he wasn’t a cop.) Ali can relate to Coop’s kids, especially his son, Hunter, on a more human level than he can. When Hunter takes some mushrooms at a party his band is playing at, he suffers a moment of crushing social embarrassment just when it seems like he’s making strides. It’s Ali he turns to. And it’s Ali who reassures him that everyone at the party will be too stoned to care anyway, which she ends up being right about. Hunter still has the chance of being seen for who he is. His dad, on the other hand – I’m not so sure.
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