Your Friends & Neighbours: Season 2 Gives Us More & the Same

Weekend stay · reviewed

Prestige TV that earns the label. Binge it in a week and you won’t regret a minute of it. All ten episodes are now streaming on Apple TV+.

★★★½☆ 3.5/5

The first season used a death as its jumping-off point — an invitation to understand that rich people have problems too. Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2 takes that lavish, near-grotesque point of view even further.

Jon Hamm plays the role of a depressed, doting and devoted dad throughout the ten episode Apple TV+ story. The subtlety of his acting could be lost in the bigger-than-life story unfurling from the introduction of a character even bigger than life itself.

“Think Gatsby but make it modern.”

Enter Owen Ashe

Symmetrically-aligned James Marsden enters our screens smoothly in a McLaren 750S to save (more on that complex later) Olivia Munn’s Samantha “Sam” Levitt from not making her first sale. What starts off as a playful flirtation escalates to 100km/h in a matter of seconds, where Marsden’s Owen Ashe love bombs Sam into caving, repeatedly ignoring her polite and firm rejections. The red flags surrounding Ashe have been delusionally recast as racing flags in his mind.. The writers and producers have carefully intertwined these characters’ stories so that everyone has enough screentime to tell their story; a key part of why the first season was such a compelling watch.

“This is a guarded and private community where the price to enter is your soul.”

Coop this season is more of a man in perpetual motion. Continuous movement (sometimes forward, sometimes not, but always in motion). Simultaneously digging himself into holes and then somewhat deftly and seemingly accidentally pulling himself out of another one. Season two’s Coop is a man that’s rebuilding his self-worth, clinging to parts of his past that feel comfortable while also shedding the parts of himself that aren’t serving his ideal of himself. The story is punctuated by his two kids, Tori and Hunter, who can’t help but hold a mirror up to Coop and Mel showing them the reality of who the older couple has become and not the version of reality they’ve likely built up in their heads. From cockroach-infested apartments to a country club with membership fees higher than most people’s annual income, Mel and Coop have endured, built and now must decide if the life they’re holding onto is the life they truly want. Especially at a time when the older of the two children eschewed the gold-brick-lined path to Princeton but insists on independence and being treated like an adult; Coop and Mel are grappling with loneliness in their community of rituals and hidden agendas in a mansion that seems to be a character in itself.

This season was more about relationships and dynamics than the first, the characters taking more fully-formed shapes on screen - propelled by some serious acting chops from the ensemble.

Ultimately Ashe’s saviour complex is not only his downfall but also the mechanic used in the story to add colour to the second season of Your Friends & Neighbours. At the risk of a near-spoiler, Owen Ashe flits around neighbourhood picking up the wounded, and in his mind the weak, taking them along for the ride and then genuinely surprised they aren’t kissing the ground he walks on. His daughter Delilah, played expertly by Erin Robinson, clearly one of the first people in his life to see him for who he is quotes one of the more indelible lines of the show “I love him because I had to but most of the time I hated him”.

Also left behind in Coop’s desctructive wake are two B-plots: Aimee Carrero’s Elena and Lena Hall’s Ali Cooper. Two formiddable women with their own demons who started the show in the first season as being dependant on Coop but are slowly but surely finding their own way outside of his shadow. A recurring theme in the show, illustrated by Olivia Cross (played by Kitty Hawthowne), who is brought back to show the viewers how much Coop has changed since he left that life behind. And Mel, who is slowly grasping back her identity amidst the hot-flashes, hot foreman and hot situations she finds herself in.

The Verdict

This is prestige TV that earns the label - not through shock or cliffhangers, but through craft. Apple has learned to make you feel the sheen without questioning it. Your Friends & Neighbours wears it well.