‘Your Friends & Neighbors’ Season 2, Episode 2 Recap – Coop’s Getting Sloppy

The best joke of Your Friends & Neighbors has always been the idea of stealing from people who’re so rich that they don’t even realise they’ve been robbed. What is quickly becoming the best idea of Season 2 is what that looks like logistically for the thieves. Coop is now defrauding his neighbors so efficiently that the proceeds are becoming untenable, so perhaps Barney is coming aboard at just the right time. Of course, Episode 2, “Lady Bits”, throws a few spanners in the works regardless.

Barney’s a bit more ambitious than Coop, too, and certainly more trusting of rich-person financial chicanery than Elena is. As things stand, Coop is stealing things his unwitting victims won’t miss, but Barney’s idea is to nab big-ticket items, fence them for enormous profit, and then wash the cash through a labyrinth of crypto wallets and dummy LLCs so the whole thing looks legitimate. Barney’s previous role as Coop’s financial manager wasn’t entirely different from this in the first place, and the veneer of legitimacy protects everyone. In theory, anyway.

Elena is sceptical, understandably, at least in part because Barney keeps referring to her as “Nick’s cleaner”, and Coop is trying to keep the peace while also juggling several different issues in his family life, which occupy a lot of the focus in this episode. Mel, for instance, is suffering from perimenopause, sweating her way through the night while trying – and failing – to write a book, and getting way ahead of herself regarding Tori’s inevitable acceptance into Princeton, confirmation of which is due any day now.

I mentioned this in the premiere recap, but it’s worth reiterating that Mel ordering a bunch of Princeton merch ahead of time and throwing Tori a surprise party to congratulate her on getting in, even though Tori has already rejected the offer, is very symptomatic of the kind of privilege that this show is skewering. You can even see the same idea in how Mel grapples with her perimenopause symptoms; all of the suggestions she’s given for dealing with it involve expensive treatments that just trip off the tongue for rich folk, but that most people would never have the luxury of even considering.

This is why Ashe’s arrival in town is a bigger deal than it seems. He’s rich on a different level than even these successful people. Hunter befriends his Wednesday Addams-esque daughter, Delilah, and Ashe swings by to pick them up in a Hummer stretch limo. He’s still trying to seduce Sam with a lavish bouquet of roses and won’t take no for an answer since he has enough money that he has never needed to. Eventually, she comes around, but mostly as a fashion statement when she finds out that she and Henry were frozen out by a neighbor who was throwing their kid a lavish birthday party. Social status is such valuable currency here that the kids are held to account for the sins of their parents.

Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2, Episode 2 provides what I think might be the rubric for the rest of the season, but it isn’t immediately clear. I’ve been wondering how Ashe might fit into the overall narrative, and given some of the events in “Lady Bits”, I’m starting to think he might end up becoming yet another conspirator. Given that Barney’s idea for washing the money clearly isn’t going to be tenable, Ashe, the nature of whose business is still very much inscrutable, might provide a valid way to launder the proceeds of Coop’s extracurricular activities. For his own share, of course.

This would tie in with the Gatsby parallels. It’d give Delilah more reason to be around Hunter more often and would also bring Sam back into Coop’s orbit. It’d also give Ashe something to do beyond being “local rich guy”, and James Marsden is bringing so much energy and charisma to this role that he’d feel terribly wasted if that were his only function.

The reason I’m saying this, by the way, is that towards the end of the episode, Coop breaks into Ashe’s home, knowing that he’s out with Delilah and Hunter, and steals an Edith Wharton first edition. Coop assumes that Ashe isn’t the kind of guy who’d keep track of his classic novels, and he’s probably right, but Elena’s assurances that he doesn’t yet have a security system installed turn out to be false. At the end of the hour, Ashe confronts Coop with footage of his break-in.

The other major development here is Tori having to reveal to her parents that she doesn’t want to go to college and follow the path they have proscriptively laid out for her, which I think is fair enough, but comes as something of a shock to Coop and, especially, Mel. The biggest takeaway from this scene is that Coop’s dad is an incredibly sage dude and definitely deserves more screentime. I’m not especially worried about Tori – though I do wonder if her aimlessness might, in some roundabout way, lead to her becoming involved in what is turning out to be the family business – but it seems very much like the focus of this season is going to be on Coop’s relationship with Ashe. And as far as I can tell, there’s nothing wrong with that.