Note: This article contains spoilers from “Your Friends & Neighbors” Season 1.
This is how it happens.
By the time viewers meet him in the first episode of “Your Friends & Neighbors,” Andrew “Coop” Cooper (Jon Hamm) has already been divorced by his wife Mel (Amanda Peet), whom he caught cheating on him with one of his closest friends, rich former NBA superstar Nick Brandes (Mark Tallman). Coop is living on his own in a much smaller house than Mel and their two kids, Tori (Isabel Gravitt) and Hunter (Donovan Colan). In the series’ opening scene, he chats up and later sleeps with Liv (Kitty Hawthorne), a lower-level colleague at his multimillion-dollar hedge fund investing firm.
Coop’s boss, Jack Bailey (Corbin Bernsen), uses this information to fire Coop, claiming that Liv complained about him taking sexual advantage of her. Coop later learns that this is not true, but the damage is already done. He is unemployed with very little savings and no ability, thanks to his non-compete contract, to find similar work elsewhere. Coop is left desperate — to maintain the wealthy facade of his life and continue to pay partly for Mel, Tori and Hunter’s similarly expensive lifestyles. While at a party in his wealthy upstate community of Westmont Village, Coop impulsively steals a roll of cash from his neighbor and later returns to the house in the middle of the night, taking advantage of his neighbors’ careless lifestyle and their absence on vacation.
Coop starts routinely stealing expensive items from his neighbors’ homes and pawning them off for cash to Lu (Randy Danson), an unscrupulous pawnshop owner, all while letting his wayward sister Ali (Lena Hall) live with him. He maintains an on-again, off-again sexual relationship with Sam (Olivia Munn), a friend of Mel’s who is in the midst of going through a nasty divorce with her unfaithful soon-to-be-ex husband Paul (Jordan Gelber). Things take a turn for the worse, however, when Coop is caught trying to steal from Nick’s home by Elena (Aimee Carrero), his immigrant housekeeper, who talks him into letting her help him rob the homes of Westmont Village and split their illicitly earned funds.
Coop’s best friend and business manager, Barney Choi (Hoon Lee), starts to suspect his business dealings, while Coop continues to bite off more than he can chew. He decides to break into Sam’s house while she is away in Boston with her kids, only to slip and fall in a puddle of blood left behind by the dead body of Paul, Sam’s estranged husband. Coop cleans up the mess he made — falling into Sam’s pool along the way — and goes back home. When an inquisitive detective (Sandrine Holt) notices Coop’s attempt to clean up, she begins to investigate Paul’s death as a murder.
Anxious for a bigger score, Coop talks Lu into introducing him to an underground art dealer (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) to whom he can sell a stolen painting. The criminal does not take kindly to Coop stopping him from groping Elena, though, and he and his henchmen later interrupt a joint outing between Coop and Barney’s families by beating both men to a pulp in the street in front of their screaming, horrified loved ones.
When bloody evidence tying him to Paul’s death is found in his garbage and the murder weapon is surprisingly found in Coop’s car, he is arrested for Paul’s murder in front of his entire neighborhood. His relationship with Sam becomes public knowledge, prompting a violent confrontation in a coffee shop between her and Mel, which ends with Mel telling Sam she slept with Coop during a visit to Princeton and then punching her in the face. In response, Nick leaves Mel, who is put on leave from her job as a therapist, while Coop and Nick reconnect for the first time since the former’s discovery of the latter’s affair.
Intent on clearing his name, Coop searches Sam’s house with the help of Elena and discovers a suicide note written by Paul. Confronting Sam, Coop learns that Paul called Sam the night of his death, begging her to take him back before shooting himself with the same gun that was found in Coop’s car. Desperate to keep his suicide a secret and, therefore, still collect the money from Paul’s life insurance policy, Sam drove home and snuck into her house, restaging her husband’s death as a murder before Coop broke into it later that very same night. She then planted the gun in Coop’s car in order to frame him.
The truth is revealed. Sam is arrested and Coop’s name is cleared.
In the aftermath of his exoneration, Coop is offered a job back at his old firm by Jack and a promoted Liv. While Coop accepts the offer at first, he ultimately stands Jack and Liv up at a meeting. He uses his knowledge of Jack’s schedule to break into his former boss’ home and steal a priceless painting. “Your Friends & Neighbors” Season 1 then ends with Coop seemingly turning his back on his old, surprisingly fragile life once and for all in favor of his new life moonlighting as an unseen, unnoticed burglar.
Unfortunately for Coop, there is nothing more complicated than crime, and the arrival of a new face (James Marsden’s Owen Ashe) in “Your Friends & Neighbors” Season 2 seems set to be the catalyst for even more chaos and lies moving forward. You will have to tune in to the Apple TV series’ new episodes, though, if you want to see exactly what new turns Coop’s life takes next.
“Your Friends & Neighbors” Season 2 premieres Friday, April 3 on Apple TV.
