The penultimate episode of Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2 seemed to put a violent end to Owen Ashe (James Marsden), but as it turned out in Friday’s (June 5) finale, there was still more to come from the character. Warning: The following post contains spoilers for Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2 Episode 10, “The Night of the Hunter.”
The finale began with Coop (Jon Hamm), Barney (Hoon Lee), and Nick (Mark Tallman) deciding what to do after Ashe’s apparently fatal fall. Though Nick was eager to call the police — since they didn’t actually kill Ashe, and even if they did, it would’ve been in self-defense since he was shooting at them — Coop and Barney talked him out of it. Instead, they’d make him disappear and clear the entire house of any trace of their chaotic battle with Ashe. They were almost on the home stretch when Sam (Olivia Munn) showed up and saw them carting Ashe’s lifeless body to his car. After the initial shock wore off, fearing she would be implicated in another death, she advised Coop to hide the body beneath where a pool was about to be constructed in one of her clients’ yards.
That wasn’t the end of their troubles, though. En route to dispose of Ashe, he suddenly sprang back to life and started viciously attacking them all from the backseat, causing his own SUV to careen into a lake. This time, he didn’t make it out alive, and the trio decided to continue the cover-up — by placing his body in the driver’s seat to make it look like an accident … if the body was ever even discovered.
Weeks later, people still had big questions about what became of Ashe, and of the three who knew, Nick had the hardest time keeping the shared secret of his true fate. His anger with Coop and Barney culminated in a clubhouse brawl on Father’s Day that left Grace (Eunice Bae) so suspicious of Barney that she kicked him out of the house.
Elsewhere in the finale, Elena (Aimee Carrero) was left in a terrible position with her loan shark after her brother’s disappearance; Ali (Lena Hall) decided to move on for a new life of her own outside of Coop’s oversight; Tori (Isabel Gravitt) began to regret giving up on college; Mel (Amanda Peet) began to write something new after getting advice to tell her side of the story with Coop and failing to get the truth out of him; Coop was not-so-kindly instructed not to move Ashe’s money back to his estate; and a fisherman in the lake caught a snag that’s probably the evidence they’d buried in the water.
To break down the consequential finale and find out what’s ahead in the already-in-production third season of Your Friends & Neighbors, TV Insider caught up with creator and executive producer Jonathan Tropper.
This is a really fun season, especially the finale. The thing with Ashe, it seems like he’s dead, and then you guys bring him back, only to kill him again. Can you talk about just doing that whiplash moment and just making so much fun of such a physical comedy situation?
Jonathan Tropper: One of the things, from the minute I started this show, was to never treat it like a dramatic thriller. The comedy is coming from the fact that Coop and company are so out of their element, and the idea being this is a guy who was the master of the universe for 20 years and thinks he has achieved a very high level of competency, but as soon as he gets into areas outside of his lane, he becomes fairly incompetent. So, these three guys, together, three super successful, intelligent guys, set on them like a bunch of idiots, because they just don’t know what they’re doing. There’s an inherent comedy of that, and we want to play to that, and to me, that’s much more entertaining, and in a way, true to these characters, than turning this into a thriller. So, we really did look for ways to make it gripping, unpredictable, exciting, have real consequences, but also find the comedy in it.
Was there ever any thought for you of having James Marsden stick around for another season, or was he always going to die as soon as he came?
It was designed as a one-season arc, and honestly, I’m not sure we would have landed an actor like Marsden if it was a multiple-season arc. I think sometimes the way you can attract certain people is they know it’s one and done, so they could go do all their other stuff. But, in our minds, it was always — we don’t want any season to feel like the season before it, so to have Marsden for two seasons, I think the seasons would start to blend together.
In Dead to Me, his character was killed off and then came back as a twin, so, we won’t be seeing that.
No.
The death seems to have really affected Nick the most. Do you think he’s the only one that’s really struggling with it, though?
No. I think it’s manifesting in different ways for each of them, and that’s something we actually explore in the first half of Season 3. But for Nick, who has basically lived a blessed life — the fun of Nick’s character has always been that he didn’t come with all of the bourgeois baggage that our other characters come with. He did it all himself. He was an incredible success, and he has nothing but happiness from that. So, for him, for something to go wrong, and for him to suddenly be in this kind of trouble and experiencing this stress, is something that he’s never experienced in his life. So, it’s going to rock him the hardest. He’s lived a much simpler life than these guys because he’s never been bound by all of the complicated bourgeois aspirations they were all raised with. He was a success story, and he’s always lived a happier, more carefree life than them. So, this is really tough for him.
Apple TV
One of the things that I really enjoyed about the season as a whole was the narrative of grief. Halfway through the season, Episode 6 with Coop’s dad was a standout because it was just so well done and was emotionally evocative…. How fun was that for you, as the creator, to explore that deeper side to him?
The first movie I ever did was … about mourning that was based on one of my books. It was called This Is Where I Leave You, and it was about a family coming together in grief and finding both the drama and the comedy, the humor, and the pathos of grief. And so I was really eager to revisit it, and we really committed ourselves in Season 2 to really leaning into the fact that this is a show about middle age, and it’s about people who have crested and are now on the other side of that, and it’s about aging, and it’s about the emotional and psychic scars of getting older, and part of that is losing a parent, and part of that is recognizing your own mortality, so, whether it’s Mel’s perimenopause plotline, or whether it’s Coop losing his father, or Barney starting to have marital problems, we really wanted to lean into all of the messiness of middle age. So, yeah, to put the whole family together and what this death means to each of them, and what this death means specifically to Coop, I think it forces him to come (A) to contemplate his own mortality, and (B) to think about how much less time there is to get it right.
Coop’s ghost dad, those moments where he was processing things with the help of his father, is that something that is just for this season, or do you think that’s something that may continue on?
No, I think that’s a stylistic flourish for this season. I mean, we’re just not that kind of show long-term, and I think that something like that gets old really quickly. Coop is given to these occasional momentary visions of his past life and the life he lost, but I think having a ghost dad around, that’d start to get old.
I also enjoyed the up-and-down relationship of Coop and Mel this season as coparents. There was so much respect and kindness shared with them, especially with the grief. How fun was it to kind of like bring them back together, tear them back apart? And is there any chance they are the endgame?
Maybe. I don’t know. The frustration about Coop and Mel is how they keep just missing each other. They had one really bad year or two that led to a divorce, but then when you see them interacting now, it’s easy to think, “Well, if they could just get rid of that, they could end up being [happy].” They still seem very well suited for each other. There seems to be so much affection there, so, it’s kind of more tragic that they’re not a family because they still view each other as family. And in this town full of really complicated relationships, theirs is still in some ways the most organic relationship for each of them. So, I think we like exploring sort of the tragedy of that, and at the same time, the comedy of it.
Mel gives Coop an intriguing offer when she tells him she’s willing to let go of this lavish life if he just tells her the truth. Do you think that’s something that he’s going to be tempted by?
I think the idea there is how tempting it is and his complete inability to actually take her up by that. He’s tied himself into such a knot of lies that even if he wanted to, he couldn’t tell the truth now, and I think having someone who’s ready to hear it and would probably, as a coparent and then as your ex-lover, work with you every step of the way, and still being unable to come clean. I think that’s just it’s a dramatization of just how deep in it he is.
Mel was asked to write about her Coop story. At the very end of the finale, we see her write one line. Is she about to do that?
Yeah, I’m shooting Season 3 now, so I’m trying to just avoid spoilers, but yeah, it’s clear Mel is no longer going to just sit back and wonder. I think she wants to get to the bottom of things, and in Season 3, that’s going to create complications for Coop and herself and the family.
The finale also leaves Barney in a bad way, getting fired by Nick and then getting kicked out by his wife. Do you think that’s going to draw him more into the crime world or push him away from it?
I really don’t want to give away any spoilers, but I think he’s going to be at loose ends, and I think when you’re desperate and lonely and at loose ends and feeling your life crumble, much like Coop was at the beginning of Season 1, you’re apt to make some bad decisions.
Apple TV
Is Sam coming back [after she seemed ready to leave], or is she gonna leave for Season 3?
Sam is back… It’s really hard to leave.
I was gonna say, it seems like she would get stuck back in the vortex anyway, somehow.
Yes.
The scene of the fisherman, has he discovered Ashe in that moment?
I mean, why else would we show it? Yeah, obviously, we’re telling you that that lake isn’t as secure a place as maybe they think it is.
We know that Michelle Monaghan is joining Season 3. What can you tease about that character?
I’m probably not going to say anything, but I’m actually on the way to go direct some scenes with her, and we were all incredibly excited that she is now part of the show. I don’t want to really talk about her role, but yeah.
Is there anything you can say about what the money is going to do? Because we saw that Ashe’s money was coming back to Coop, is there anything you can say about what that’s going to do?
I’ll just say that that money, the source of that money, is more complicated than Coop was led to believe, and that’s going to cause him some significant problems in Season 3.
Nice. Is there anything else you can tease about Season 3, and what you set up here with the finale?
No, I think I just gave the biggest tease I’ve given yet about it, but the notion is just that when we did Season 1, we didn’t know if we’d get a Season 2. When we were doing Season 2, we were pretty confident we were going to get a Season 3, so Season 3 is really a direct continuation of Season 2. Season 1 ended in a way that could have been the end of the show, if we wanted it to be. In Season 2, we leave a bunch of things hanging, and so Season 3 picks up very soon after Season 2 ends.
You said that you don’t like the seasons to be the same, so if you were describing the tone of Season 1 versus Season 2, how would you describe the tone of Season 3?
I think tonally, they’re all of a piece…. There’s a franchise there that I think people want to come back for, so tonally, they’re the same. I think the stakes continue to get higher, and the consequences have to get more extreme because you can’t keep doing this… Once Coop just made this choice in Season 1, it was like he dropped a pebble in the pond, and the ripples started, and you can’t stop those ripples. So, I think every season, the consequences are like a snowball rolling down the hill, and they have to just keep getting bigger, and mistakes have to get higher.
Your Friends & Neighbors, Season 3, TBA, Apple TV
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