‘Your Friends & Neighbors’ Creator Jonathan Tropper Crafts a Protagonist Underwater with a Wry Touch
Jonathan Tropper shares how tone and feeling inspire his characters, then their story.
Coop, the protagonist of the new AppleTV+ series Your Friends & Neighbors, is having one heck of a night. Played by Emmy winner Jon Hamm (Mad Men), he awakens wincing on a marble floor in a palatial suburban home, blood pooling beneath him. He feels around his head until noticing it’s from the dead man nearby.
Coop scrambles to his feet, gaining the presence of mind to clean up his shoe prints. But as he tries to leave through a back door without further chaos, security lights pop on, startling into tumbling into the swimming pool. “I know what you’re thinking: The pool is a metaphor,” his voiceover says.
It’s also cold, splashing him with a moment of clarity. “I couldn’t help but catch a fleeting glimpse out the corner of my eye of my swirling hot mess of a life,” Coop says.
Created by Jonathan Tropper (The Adam Project), Your Friends & Neighbors follows Coop, a fired hedge fund manager who burglarizes his neighbors to maintain his affluent lifestyle, only to discover their secrets. “What’s the worst that could happen?” he wonders as he eyes stuff they won’t miss, until skeletons pop up alongside the Louboutin clutches and Rolex watches.
“The whole thing is such a perfect allegory,” Tropper says. “He’s going in there to steal, but he’s also seeing behind the doors and realizing that no matter how well built these houses are, most of them are on a foundation that’s rotting.”
We’ve watched suburbanites reckon with midlife malaise before, but Your Friends & Neighbors earns nods from critics for its tone of crime drama, introspection, and wry humor. The show received an 80 percent “fresh” rating on RottenTomatoes.com. NPR praised Hamm for making this “self-described jerk … wiser and more self-aware as the episodes unfold,” with a “dark-souled charisma” that becomes “funnier, sadder and more sympathetic.”
Here, Tropper shares how tone and feeling inspire his characters, then their story.
Think American Beauty and The Ice Storm, But More Playful
Your Friends & Neighbors is the latest series for Tropper, who previously created the Cinemax crime series Banshee in 2013 and Warrior in 2019. In between, he’s written for the AppleTV+ series See and adapted his novel This Is Where I Leave You into a 2014 feature starring Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, and Jane Fonda.
The idea for Your Friends & Neighbors first occurred to him as a novel, having written others set in Westchester, N.Y., where he’s lived for fifteen years.
“It’s an area I know really well, and it’s a cast of characters I know pretty well,” he says. “I love movies like American Beauty and The Ice Storm, which is in Connecticut, but it’s sort of the same aesthetic. … I wanted to do something a little more playful, a little more fun, done with a bit of love, even while it’s also maybe being a little bit satirical.”
The pilot finds Coop underwater even before he lands in the pool. Divorced after eighteen years, he shares a teenage son and a teenage daughter with his ex-wife, Mel (Amanda Peet, Fatal Attraction), who remarried the ex-NBA star (Mark Tallman, First Wives Club) with whom she had an affair. Mel often asks for money for the kids, who want a new drum set or to visit the dermatologist. His musician sister, Ali (Lena Hall, Snowpiercer), has had a breakdown. He has an occasional fling with Samantha (Olivia Munn, Hit-Monkey), who’s in their social circle. Other friends and neighbors at get-togethers toast how cordial he and Mel seem to be while asking him to sponsor tables at events for $30,000 each.
“I wanted to tell this story about somebody who mistook the American Dream for a promise,” Tropper says, adding that after the pandemic, “a lot of us … who’d grown up basically believing in a certain level of stability and permanence in the world were rocked. We had many years of institutional belief that our systems could sustain us, and when they didn’t, when the curtain was pulled back, we realized how fragile the scaffolding that holds up our lives really is. I think none of us will ever feel the same sense of permanence again.”
Thematically, the show is about consumerism and capitalism, he says, “but it’s also about how so many of us follow the scripts we’re handed from a very young age, and we may get so busy striving that it may take us well into adulthood to realize that we were following the wrong script from the beginning.”
He thought about these sprawling, beautiful houses, “and the people who live in them, who seem to have it made and believe this is going to be their lives forever. But it really only takes one or two wrong turns for the whole thing to unravel.”
“Imagine What It Feels Like” Before Writing
With this broad idea in mind, Tropper focused on feeling. He wanted Your Friends & Neighbors to feel “poppier” than something gritty like Breaking Bad. Nailing the feeling is an exercise he does before each idea he starts or writing assignment he accepts.
“That’s very ambiguous and nebulous, but I think writers know what that means,” he says. “I immediately have a sense of what it’s going to feel like tonally: What are the kind of things we’re going to see? What’s the atmosphere? What’s the music? … If I can’t, like, close my eyes and imagine what it feels like, I know I probably shouldn’t pitch for it.”
Coop dry tone—he quips to a colleague, “I misplaced my wife and my inner monologue about the same time”—came about in early drafts “like method acting,” Tropper says. The voice sounded more like Hamm’s voice once Tropper successfully pitched the actor, also an executive producer.
“We talked about it a lot, and I had a good sense of his voice,” he says. “Once I knew he was interested, I was really channeling him to some degree while I wrote it.”
Coop maintains a bit of Tropper’s personality. Unlike some finance types who have a passionate interest in sports, Coop enjoys action movies of the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as Commando, along with classics such as Gilda, DOA, and The Sting, like his creator. Viewers can catch clips of Coop’s favorites in several scenes.
“I liked the idea of giving Coop this slightly more artful interior life,” Tropper says. “I think it just adds an interesting unspoken dimension to him. The baseball hat he’s wearing when he robs these houses has the C from the Criterion Collection.”
Your Friends & Neighbors already has been renewed for a second season, but don’t expect Coop to become more of a criminal mastermind.
“He will never achieve any level of great competence when it comes to criminal activity,” Tropper says. “But the stakes will get higher. He is a guy whose reach will exceed his grasp, and because he’s had some level of success doing this, he’s an ambitious guy, and he’s going to look to do better. At the same time, he recognizes there’s something unsustainable about this. And so, his struggle is going to be, How do I get away from this when I can’t go back to the other thing? This is satisfying something in me—it’s answering something in me beyond the theft—but it’s also keeping me from making a viable long-term plan.”
Your Friends & Neighbors is streaming exclusively on AppleTV+.
Valerie Kalfrin is an award-winning crime journalist turned essayist, film critic, screenwriter, script reader, and emerging script consultant. She writes for RogerEbert.com, In Their Own League, The Hollywood Reporter, The Script Lab, The Guardian, Film Racket, Bright Wall/Dark Room, ScreenCraft, and other outlets. A moderator of the Tampa-area writing group Screenwriters of Tomorrow, she’s available for story consultation, writing assignments, sensitivity reads, coverage, and collaboration. Find her at valeriekalfrin.com or on Twitter @valeriekalfrin.
