Summary
Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2 continues to put Coop through the wringer in “The Bread of Affliction”, both while he’s moonlighting and during the day, and the sense of everything going badly wrong continues to loom effectively.
The essential tension of Your Friends & Neighbors has always revolved around Coop potentially being caught moonlighting as a local thief. But Season 2 has done away with this pretty quickly. Coop has already been caught, and now, thanks to Ashe’s blackmail, being exposed as a thief is the least of his problems. In Episode 4, “The Bread of Affliction”, he’s also having to become a full-time daylight criminal as well.
I know what you’re thinking. Even the most legitimate version of hedge fund management is basically indistinguishable from outright criminality anyway, which is kind of the joke of the series. There’s a certain level of wealth that doesn’t suit any word you attach to it. Investing, managing, laundering – what’s the difference? The people who had money in the first place now have more of it, and the people who didn’t have any still don’t. These are the lifestyles of the rich, the richer, and the richest, unfolding a world away from anyone even resembling a normal human being, which is perhaps why Elena has been so sidelined in this season thus far.
But that doesn’t suffice as a legal defence for Coop, who evidently remains in dire straits. His life and family are falling apart around him. Mel’s so aggressively menopausal that her spat with her neighbor, Brie, has led to the noisy construction of a dividing wall, and Tori still can’t stand to be around, speak to, or even look at her mother. Lu knows that Coop trying to offload all the swanky gifts he has been given from schmoozed clients in the financial sector is basically a death knell to his side hustle. Hunter has now broken up with his girlfriend and is even cosier with Delilah. And Tori’s probably going to stop playing tennis.
One of the things that Your Friends & Neighbors is really good at, and that it hasn’t leaned on as much in Season 2 yet, is cramming all of the characters into close proximity on the pretext of social events so these various dynamics can all come to the fore. “The Bread of Affliction” returns to this tried and true narrative mechanism, though, to pretty entertaining effect. Passover seder is a nightmare, in the best way. Rumours of Coop’s giant investment are doing the rounds. Ashe turns up with Sam, Tori overhears Mel bitching about her to her friends, Ashe keeps quietly pushing Coop for updates about why he hasn’t yet gotten into the Excelsior fund, and Mel keeps drinking.
Here, Ashe and Sam’s relationship finally gets physical because Sam is riding a high from securing a real estate deal with her former frenemies, while Tori and Mel’s beef continues when the latter embarrasses herself by falling into a garden hedge after spilling wine down her front. It’s pretty funny, but it’s also kind of sad, since Mel is legitimately making a fool of herself. It’s very rare I side with the teenage character in this kind of dispute these days, but Tori’s right. Mel’s acting crazy.
Whether she’s acting crazier than Coop, though, is open for some debate. Mostly to keep Elena sweet, Coop tries to pull off another heist despite some lingering back issues, but Ashe even gets in the way of that, calling Coop in a frantic mood after hoovering up a few lines of coke and threatening to out him if he doesn’t turn up at his house in the next 15 minutes. I enjoyed seeing this more erratic side of Ashe, the slightly unhinged, chemically-enhanced version that I do suspect is probably closer to his real personality than the charismatic front he displays. He’s easy to like, but he’s also impossible to trust, which naturally creates more tension around Coop’s predicament.
And there’s no way out other than through, of course. Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2, Episode 4 makes it clear that Coop is stuck. Ashe is definitely capable of exposing him, so Coop has no choice but to pull all the strings he can to get $400 million of his money into the Excelsior fund. But even that doesn’t get him off the hook, since Ashe refuses to hand over the compromising footage. As long as Coop manages his account successfully, he’ll supposedly stay safe. But this isn’t a particularly compelling guarantee, not coming from a man who has been shot twice and wears the bullets on a necklace as a reminder that he can’t be killed.
If you thought Coop was already in deep, that was nothing compared to the inescapable pit he currently finds himself in. And we’re not even halfway through the season!
