Jonathan Tropper has a 6-year-old daughter; as of exactly today, I do as well — Happy birthday, Emily! So despite Tropper’s status as the creator of Apple TV’s Your Friends & Neighbors and Cinemax’s Banshee and Warrior, when he says he has nothing of value in his house because he can’t have anything of value in his house, I tend to believe him. (Imagine if we had boys.)
But Tropper’s boys are the fully grown Jon Hamm, Hoon Lee, the aptly-named Mark Tallman and James Marsden, the fellas of Your Friends & Neighbors season two. Save the 45-year-old Tallman, the guys are all in their 50s, but their characters are still plenty destructive — especially self-destructive. Together, Andrew “Coop” Cooper, Barney Choi, Nick Brandes and Owen Ashe, respectively, form a motley crew of dudes who all kinda-sorta have their hands in each others’ pockets, both above board and below. Coop has his gloved hands in more than his friends’ pockets.
The basic premise of Your Friends & Neighbors is this: Coop, who (quite literally) fucked himself out of a cushy hedge-fund management job, turns to a life of home-invasion burglary to make ends meet and to fill some sort of Richard Mille Felipe Massa automatic chronograph watch-sized hole in his compromised soul. He targets his — you guessed it — friends and neighbors in the affluent (and fictitious) Westmont Village, a stand-in for Westchester County, New York.
In season one, Coop swipes jewelry, expensive wine, designer handbags and more to pay his alimony, child support and to keep up appearances in a neighborhood where appearances are all that matter. He’s got another motive as well — Coop is acting out to enact some modicum of revenge on the uber-rich men and women who he still mingles with at the country club but can no longer relate to. It is Tropper’s job to pick Coop’s targets, assign value to the stolen items value, ultimately, to write his protagonist both into and out of pickles — a task that doesn’t get any easier as the series evolves.
Your Friends & Neighbors season two premiered Friday on Apple TV; read The Hollywood Reporter‘s Q&A with Tropper on the new season, below.
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Do you keep a running list of luxury items for Coop to take?
Believe it or not, we don’t. It all happens organically in the room. I sit with the writers [and] we talk about things. We don’t want to steal anymore watches. You can do an interesting piece of jewelry because there are so many varieties of jewelry, but it’s like, “How do we keep exploring this? What are other items that have assigned value, that are sort of ridiculous but also meaningful?”
How do you assign the ultimate value to the items you choose?
There’s a lot of internet research. One thing people assume, which is not true, is we don’t partner with any brands. We don’t partner with any companies. When we want the Rolls-Royce, Rolls-Royce sends us that car. That’s different. But when we’re writing— whether it’s a Patek Phillipe watch or that [season two item redacted], we do a lot of research. We see where things sold for, both on auction and retail, and then we come up with a believable, grounded number that sounds right.
How does Coop choose what he wants to go after? Because he typically goes in with a target — sometimes a non-obvious one — and doesn’t often deviate.
The biggest thing for us is he’s stealing things that won’t get missed right away, because the idea is he doesn’t want the cops getting called. If people feel burglaries are happening, then, you know, alarms will start getting used more, security systems will start getting used more. So it’s always about if I can get in and out [and] no one’s ever going to raise the alarm.
In a lot of cases, what that means is it’s something very mobile, very small, the kind of thing also that somebody would first assume they had misplaced it rather than assuming they were robbed. Because (if they were robbed), more things would be gone, right?
Generally, it’s stuff he could put in his pocket or into a bag and move quickly. Once in a while he breaks that — like in season one, he stole a painting and caused him a lot of grief, right? Every time he breaks his own rules, he gets into a lot of trouble.
What would I steal from your house?
I have a six-year-old daughter, so we have nothing of value in the house. It wouldn’t pay. The only you could steal from my house is scripts.
Jonathan Tropper has nothing of value in his house, he says.
Roy Rochlin/GA/The Hollywood Reporter/Getty Images
The setting is among the wealthiest on TV, and so much of the show is about the wealth. Does that translate directly to it being an expensive show, budget-wise?
In the scheme of Apple’s one-hour dramas, I think we’re heavily on the smaller-budget [end].
Is that because the expensive props are generally provided in exchange for the exposure?
Certain brands are, as you know, happy for us to feature their products. In certain cases, yeah, we do work out deals. We generally don’t like to do brand partnerships because they come with conditions. The only way to get that Rolls was to speak with Rolls-Royce, and they were happy to cooperate. There’s no exchange of money.
Our props department and our production department really handles that. I don’t get terribly involved in that, so I can’t speak too knowledgeably about it, but I will say that I do know, as far as one-hour dramas go, we are not on the big-budget [end].
THR note: It was Marsden’s friend, coincidentally also named Owen, who works for Porsche that brought them Ashe’s 918 Spyder. (Marsden calls it his “dream car.” Olivia Munn, whom he picks up for a spin in the show, says it is “hard to get in and out of.”) Marsden only really got to drive the 918, which can range from under $1 million (MSRP) to many millions of dollars, on Samantha Levitt’s (Munn) driveway; Tropper didn’t even get to do that, telling THR: “I would have liked to get behind the wheel and try it. I’m not even a car guy, and I wanted to drive that. Whenever we had those Porsches out, we had a we had the guy from Porsche to keeping an eye on everything. I don’t think I could have just taken it for a spin.”
Coop is a cinephile. How do you choose the films he watches?
I don’t do it all myself. I have a another executive producer right around the show, Jamie Rosengard, who’s a bigger movie buff than I am. I gave Coop this personality trait of watching movies because that’s who I was in a community where all the other men watch sports, and I didn’t watch sports.
Sometimes it’s as simple as he’s gonna watch a movie that I loved, right? Other times there are thematic elements like film noir. He’s a big film noir fan, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that we consider our show to be suburban noir. And the voiceover that Coop has is very much related to the, you know, Philip Marlow/Sam Spade-type (both played by Humphrey Bogart) and all that.
So sometimes there is a symbolism to it, and other times it’s just what we could be watching. I worked really hard, and it took a lot of effort for us to get Commando. It’s not a classic, but there’s no man my age who doesn’t know that movie by heart and so it was fun to get that.
Without spoiling anything for readers, the danger in season two only grows. Westmont is a small, insular community often selected for its security — when are people going to start moving out?
The question is, how many of these things are actually going on above the line where people are hearing about them? But also, I think part of the fun is how these communities can sort of absorb and move on… It’s a community that, regardless of what happens a week later, they’re all going to the country club.
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Your Friends & Neighbors is now streaming the first episode of season two, with new episodes dropping weekly on Apple TV.
