So Season One of Your Friends and Neighbors was quite a debut, with Jon Hamm starring as a Wall Street bigwig who gets fired right after getting a divorce, so naturally he decides to become a “cat burglar,” sneaking into his rich-bastard neighbors’ houses to steal high-end watches and other easily fencible items. The inimitable writer John Cheever explored this fantasy plot back in the 1950s with his short story “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” but Your Friends and Neighbors is definitely a worthy reboot of sorts.
Season One began with the iconic scene of Jon Hamm (as Andrew Cooper or “Coop”) waking up in a pool of someone else’s blood, on the floor of a mansion, as the mystery to be solved. Coop was charged with murder and at one point seemed headed for a conviction, before some very unlikely evidence was discovered and Olivia Munn (as the sexy widow Samantha Levitt, or “Sam”) confessed to a screwball plot to frame him for murder after her husband’s suicide, all to get $20 million in life insurance money. If that quick-fix of a plot device wasn’t enough, when Coop gets miraculously off the hook for Sam’s ex-husband’s death/murder, an even more unlikely plot twist followed: Coop is amazingly offered his old job back, with a big bonus and perks, only to turn it down in favor of . . . more cat burgling?
Season Two does not begin with Coop in a puddle of blood, and by the end of Ep 1, does not have a convenient murder mystery to turn it into a Whodunit. But I sense something is looming on the horizon. A new character is introduced: James Marsden plays Owen Ashe, a mysterious “billionaire,” who seems rather chipper, eager, slippery, and suspicious. He and Coop hit it off quickly. By the episode’s end, there’s a party at Ashe’s unlikely Tudor mega-mansion, in which all the party-goers end up jumping into the swimming pool, just for the fun of it, a la the gymnasium-floor scene in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. I’d put money on some major mystery being revealed in Episode 2. Ep 1 seemed like a warmup for trouble ahead. All the main characters have returned, including Coop’s son and daughter and ex-wife, Mel, played by Amanda Peet. The actor Hoon Lee plays Barney Choi and I sense he’ll be even more important that in Season One. For one thing, he finds out about Coop’s cat-burgling and “wants in.” It’s all a bit far-fetched but much fun, a satire on the lives of the rich but not necessarily famous.