Summary
Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2 presents one of the finest depictions of a funeral ever in “For Everything Else, There Was Bowling”, a funny, sad, chaotic, and disorienting process of grief and discovery.
As someone who has been to their fair share of funerals and is trying to arrange one as I type this, I think I have a pretty good feel for the process. This is why I feel comfortable saying that “For Everything Else, There Was Bowling” is one of the finest depictions of a funeral ever committed to film. It’s all here: the empty platitudes, the tiny manifestations of grief, the inevitable embarrassing argument, and the small, snatched moments of reflection and pain. It’s the best episode of Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2 by a margin, and one of my favourite episodes of the year.
I wasn’t expecting that, either. The death of Coop’s father, Ron, came extremely suddenly. We barely knew him as a character, though he seemed like a bottomless font of sage wisdom, so the idea of pausing the overarching plot to spend an entire hour mourning his demise seemed misguided on paper. But Episode 6 is remarkable. It’s threaded with many of the ongoing character dynamics – Coop and Mel’s “not like a divorced couple” relationship, Ali’s complicated dynamic with her mother, Marley, Mel’s falling out with Tori, and Coop’s tense financial partnership with Ashe – but also stands on its own terms, with its own revelations, some of which are big enough to rattle Coop’s entire worldview.
It’s a tremendous example of craft, too. The camera moves like an attendee, roaming first the funeral and then the wake like a nosy guest trying to catch every snippet of gossip. Every well-wishing handshake is presented in extreme, canted close-up, before moving onto the next room, the next thing, the next person. It’s a bit disorienting, as funerals tend to be, hard to tell what’s sincerity and what’s performance, hard to settle on where we should be and whose overheard conversations we should be privy to. It doesn’t help that Coop keeps seeing Ron himself in imagined attendance, either.
Coop’s understanding – or lack thereof – of his father gives the episode some shape. What he’s reckoning with is his long-held belief that Ron settled for less when he could have had more, that he postponed happiness for security. Gradually, he realises that his father was happy and connected and satisfied in a way that he never knew, and that he always privately feared Coop would never be. The stylish gimmick that Your Friends & Neighbors often deploys to explain the value of items Coop is planning to steal is once again reworked here, this time to eviscerate a pair of expensive cufflinks that Coop bought Ron as a present. They never left the box, not out of ingratitude, but because Coop bought a modest man a lavish gift he should have known he’d never have a use for.
Ali is struggling too, but in a different way. I never picked up on it before, mostly because I was lavishing Ron with praise on the few occasions we met him, but Marley is kind of awful. Her relationship with Ali is particularly fraught, full of judgment and condescension, which prevents Ali from grieving the way she needs to. Her temporary escape to smoke weed upstairs ends up being an impromptu therapy session for Mel and Tori, who both do the same and finally make some progress in their testy relationship. But she’s eventually forced to return to the fray, where the sudden arrival of Bruce, thoughtlessly invited by Marley, tips her over the edge.
And yet at the very end, Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2, Episode 6 even subverts this dynamic. Once everyone has trickled out, the appearances have been (largely) kept up, and the petty grievances have been laid to rest with Ron, Ali finds Marley sobbing herself to sleep and crawls in bed next to her, holding her like a child as she weeps.
Coop, meanwhile, makes a more startling discovery. With his patience wearing thin on account of Marley instructing Ashe to take down the giant TV we saw Ron hanging in the previous episode, and having to reckon with his own inadequacies after finding the cufflinks, he takes Ron’s old bowling ball to a nearby alley, where he finds a woman he had seen at the funeral earlier sitting alone. Coop joins her. Her name is Elaine. She and Ron were on the same bowling team, and when the team was shuttered, they kept meeting. They were having a modest, quiet little affair, having carved out their own little lane of freedom and happiness, unbeknownst to anyone.
The revelation cheers Coop. Ron didn’t settle for misery. He found a way to have his cake and eat it, to keep his life and family under one roof while also finding an outlet for the frustrations and disappointments that might have threatened his happiness. Elaine’s appearance isn’t designed to scandalise Ron’s life, only to remind Coop that he never quite knew the extent of it, that his fears of eventually becoming his father needn’t have been so pronounced. As it turns out, he was a more complicated man than anyone realised, with his own foibles and secrets, but who loved his family and his life, even the parts of it he retained for himself. He was, crucially, content. And isn’t that what we all aspire to?
