Summary
Your Friends & Neighbors boasts the same slick style and charismatic energy in Season 2, with “We’re Here Until We’re Not” being a reassuring hour designed to shake up the status quo a little without losing the show’s sense of self.
Your Friends & Neighbors returns for Season 2 with a reassuring premiere, since most of Episode 1, “We’re Here Until We’re Not”, is a reminder that no matter how much things have changed on the surface, they’re still going to remain more or less the same. It’s the secret to a great sequel season, making sure things evolve without losing the show’s underpinning essential identity, and in a show like this that thrives on a certain sense of character and tone, it’s more important than ever.
But it’s obvious immediately. Part of the premiere is unavoidably establishing the new status quo, which is accomplished through a mixture of Coop’s narration and simple scenes that clarify where we’re at post-finale. For instance, it’s obvious from a family vacation that Coop and Mel are on better terms but aren’t back together, and are still nursing very confusing lingering feelings even though they’re still exploring the possibility of dating other people. Since Coop narrowly avoided spending the rest of his life in prison, now even the simple things, like time with his ex-wife, seem like a blessing.
Granted, Coop’s “simple things” remain pretty lavish, since even though he turned down a return to his old lucrative hedge fund job, he has kept himself flush with cash by continuing to steal luxury items from the homes of his rich neighbors, still with Elena as a partner, but now with a repaired network of contacts and fences to keep the wolves from the door. It’s a lucrative gig, and nobody suspects that Coop is up to anything; on the contrary, his social standing has actually improved.
Sam’s, though, has not. Remember, Sam staged her husband’s suicide as a murder, positioning Coop as the prime suspect, in order to cash in on his life insurance policy. She missed out on prison, just, but while she might have evaded true justice for a few large fines and community service orders, she’s also a social pariah. She’s trying to reinvent herself as a realtor, but nobody in town will give her a listing. Luckily for her, though, she’s still played by Olivia Munn, so the season’s new Jay Gatsby-style uber-rich party-boy newcomer, Owen Ashe, can’t help but take a look at her, and when he finds out the history of the house she’s selling, can’t resist a second.
Owen – who is played by James Marsden, who, between this, Paradise, and Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, is having a pretty amazing year – is clearly going to be important somehow, though it isn’t immediately clear how. He buys a $20 million house, so he’ll make a likely target for Coop, and he clearly has the hots for Sam, so that’ll cause some social issues. But at least in Your Friend & Neighbors Season 2, Episode 1, his primary purpose is to throw a massive party – again, the allusions to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel are not subtle – to bring all of the characters into uncomfortably close proximity.
The big change to the status quo in “We’re Here Until We’re Not” is that Coop’s best friend, Barney, finds out about his extracurricular activities. This isn’t for any special reason beyond Coop throwing out his back during his latest heist and needing an assist. Barney is initially appalled to discover that his friend is a secret criminal, or at least pretends to be, especially because he intuits pretty quickly that the near-fatal beating he suffered in Season 1 was on account of Coop’s hobby.
However, Barney has his own problems. His biggest one is his father-in-law, who is judgmental about his career managing the wealth of his various high-profile neighbours, and that judgment is beginning to affect Barney’s marriage. The offer to work with his father-in-law is there, but he’d much rather not take it. When Grace reveals that she’s pregnant, Barney needs another solution for a nest egg, and for that, unsurprisingly, he turns to Cooper.
Coop intuits that this is a bad idea on a pretty deep level, but he can’t turn his best bud down. While it might be bad for his criminal career, it’ll probably be pretty good for us, since Jon Hamm’s chemistry with Hoon Lee is very good, and there’s no doubt Barney will add something to Coop’s schemes. This is one of those shows that needs things to go wrong. They might as well be entertaining when they do.
And Another Thing…
A couple of other notes and observations from Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2, Episode 1 that wouldn’t fit into the recap proper:
- Tori’s going to Princeton on a tennis scholarship. As a legacy student, her acceptance is virtually guaranteed, so she uses her interview as an excuse to flaunt that and challenge the systemic privilege that underpins it. She has more than a touch of Coop in her.
- Mel offers Ali a music teacher job at Mayfield, which she’s initially reluctant to take. However, she manages to land an interview, despite Coop’s misgivings.
