Logo text
Jonathan Tropper has a 6-year-old daughter. As of today exactly, I do too – Happy Birthday, Emily! So, despite Trooper’s status as the creator of Apple TV Your friends and neighbors And Cinemax Banshee and warriorwhen he says that he has nothing of value in his house because… He couldn’t have anything of value in his houseI’m inclined to believe him. (Imagine if we had boys.)
But the Trooper’s boys are Jon Hamm, Hun Lee, Mark Tallman, and James Marsden, the Trooper’s buddies. Your friends and neighbors Season two. With the exception of 45-year-old Tallman, all the men are in their 50s, but their personalities are still very much subversive – especially self– Devastated. Together, Andrew “Cobb” Cooper, Barney Choi, Nick Brands, and Owen Ash, respectively, form a motley crew of men who each have their hands in each other’s pockets, both above and below the plate. Coop puts his gloved hands in more than one of his friends’ pockets.
The basic premise of Your friends and neighbors It is this: Coop, who has (quite literally) fucked himself out of an easy hedge fund management job, turns to a life of home-invasion burglary to make ends meet and to fill some kind of Richard Mille Felipe Massa chronograph-sized automatic hole in his vulnerable soul. He targets his friends and neighbors in – you guessed it – the affluent (and fictional) village of Westmont, a stand-in for Westchester County, New York.
In the first season, Coop trades jewelry, expensive wine, designer handbags, and more to pay his alimony, support the children, and to keep up appearances in a neighborhood where appearances are all that matters. He has another motive, too — Coop is enacting a measure of revenge on the wealthy men and women he still socializes with at the country club but can no longer communicate with. The Tropper’s job is to choose targets for Coop, assign a value to the value of stolen items, and, ultimately, write the protagonist in and out of Pickles — a task that doesn’t get easier as the series develops.
Your friends and neighbors Season 2 premiered Friday on Apple TV; He reads Hollywood ReporterA Q&A with the Tropper about the new season, below.
***
Do you keep a running list of luxury items that Coop will take?
Believe it or not, we don’t do that. It all happens organically in the room. Sit with the book [and] We talk about things. We don’t want to steal watches anymore. You can make an interesting piece of jewelry because there are so many types of jewelry, but it’s like, “How do we continue to explore this? What are the other items that have a certain value, that are kind of silly but also meaningful?”
How do you assign the final value to the items you choose?
There is a lot of research on the Internet. One thing people assume, which isn’t true, is that we don’t partner with any brands. We do not partner with any companies. When we want a Rolls Royce, Rolls Royce sends us that car. This is different. But when we write, whether it’s a Patek Phillipe watch or this one [season two item redacted]We do a lot of research. We see where things are sold, whether at auction or retail, and then come up with a fair, reasonable number that seems right.
how Barn Choose what he wants to go after? Because it usually aims at a target – sometimes a blurry one – and often does not deviate.
The biggest thing for us is that he steals things that we wouldn’t miss right away, because the idea is that he doesn’t want to call the cops. If people sense that burglaries are happening, you know, alarms will start to be used more, security systems will start to be used more. So it’s always about whether I can get in and get out [and] No one will ever sound the alarm.
In many cases, what that means is that it’s something very mobile, very small, and it’s the kind of thing that someone might assume they’ve missed rather than assuming it’s been stolen. Because (if they get stolen), more things will disappear, right?
In general, they are things that he can put in his pocket or bag and move around quickly. Every once in a while he breaks that – like in Season 1, where he stole a painting and it caused him a lot of grief, right? Every time he breaks his rules, he gets into a lot of trouble.
What will I steal from your house?
I have a six-year-old daughter, so we don’t have anything of value at home. You won’t pay. The only thing you can steal from my house are texts.
The setting is among the wealthiest shows on television, and much of the show revolves around wealth. Does this translate directly into it being an expensive show in terms of budget?
In the scheme of Apple’s one-hour dramas, I think we’re relying too heavily on the smaller budget [end].
Is this because expensive props are generally provided in exchange for exposure?
As you know, some brands are happy to showcase their products. In some cases, yes, we make deals. We generally don’t like partnering with brands because they come with strings attached. The only way to get that car was to talk to Rolls-Royce, and they were happy to cooperate. There is no exchange of money.
Our props department and our production department really handle this. I’m not very involved in that, so I can’t speak to this subject with great knowledge, but I will say that I know, as far as one-hour dramas go, we’re not on a big budget. [end].
THR note: It was Marsden’s friend, also coincidentally named Owen, who works for Porsche, who brought them Ashe’s 918 Spyder. (Marsden calls it his “dream car.” Olivia Munn, who took it for a spin in the show, says it’s “hard to get in and out of.”) Marsden has only ever gotten to actually drive the 918, which can range in value from less than $1 million (MSRP) to several million dollars, on Samantha Levitt’s (Moon’s) driveway; Trooper couldn’t even do that, telling THR: “I wanted to get behind the wheel and try it. I’m not even a car guy, and I wanted to drive it. Whenever we had those Porsches, we had a Porsche guy to watch everything. I don’t think I could have taken it for a spin.”
Coop is a movie lover. How do you choose which movies to watch?
I don’t do it all myself. I have another executive producer on the series, Jimmy Rosengard, who is a bigger movie fan than I am. I gave Cobb this personality trait of watching movies because I was that guy in a society where all the other guys watched sports, and I didn’t watch sports.
Sometimes it’s as simple as watching a movie you liked, right? Other times there are thematic elements like film noir. He’s a big fan of film noir, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that we view our show as suburban film noir. And Coop’s voiceover is closely tied to the Philip Marlow/Sam Spade type (both played by Humphrey Bogart) and all that.
So sometimes there’s symbolism to it, and other times it’s just what we can see. I worked really hard, and it took a lot of effort to get there Commando. It’s not a classic, but there’s no guy my age who doesn’t know this movie by heart so it was fun to get it.
Without spoiling anything for readers, the danger in Season 2 is only growing. Westmont is a small, isolated community that is often singled out for its security – when will people start moving out?
The question is, how many of these things actually happen beyond what people hear about? But also, I think part of the fun is how these communities can kind of pick up and move on… It’s a community where, no matter what happens a week later, they all go to the country club.
***
Your friends and neighbors It’s now streaming the first episode of Season 2, with new episodes downloaded weekly on Apple TV.
