Your Friends and Neighbors Episode 1 and 2 Recap: This is What Happens and Deuce

Apple TV+’s ‘Your Friends and Neighbors’ stars Jon Hamm as Andrew Cooper, a down-on-his-luck hedge fund manager who loses everything he holds dear in a short span of time. The show begins with him waking up next to a dead body. As he slips on the blood, his shock turns into terror as he realizes what he has landed himself in. He quickly gets about to clean up his mess, but it is too much for him to handle and get out of so easily. To understand the full context of his situation, the show takes us a few months back and discovers all the bad things that have happened to him so far. SPOILERS AHEAD.

Andrew Cooper’s Luck Only Seems to Get Worse

Before he lost everything, Andrew Cooper had it all. He had worked long and hard to achieve success, which would give him a great house in an affluent neighborhood with the money that he seemed to have in abundance. He was married to a woman he had loved almost his entire life and had two kids with. But in the rat race of chasing after money and success, he lost track of his personal life, and things came tumbling down when he found his wife, Mel, in bed with one of his closest friends, Nick, a former NBA player. This led to a divorce in which Cooper lost the house and the custody of his kids to his wife. The cost of alimony and keeping up with the expenses required by his growing children dragged him down so much that he now lives in a small, depressing, rented apartment. At least he has his job. Or so he thinks.

Four months before things take a turn for the worse, Andrew meets a young woman named Liv in a bar. She works in the same company but under a completely different boss. Believing that there is no professional connection between them, Cooper takes her up on the offer of having sex. Then, three months later, he is told by his boss that he is being fired because he slept with his junior and violated the company’s policy. What’s worse is that the money that he thought was his now belongs to the company. The clients he worked so hard to procure are the company’s, with a two-year solicitation condition. Due to this, no other company in town is ready to hire him. Meanwhile, the cost of living keeps increasing as the demands of his wife and children do not come to an end.

Cooper indulges in an affair with Samantha Levitt, a friend of his ex-wife’s who is also recently divorced. Her pot-bellied husband is the owner of a restaurant chain and left her for a young waitress. This newfound freedom has allowed Sam to explore her sexual desires, and she does a lot of that with Cooper, even though he remains emotionally detached from her. Still, they keep revolving in each other’s orbit but cannot reveal their affair to their friends lest they give the others more things to gossip about. Meanwhile, Mel is basically living with Nick now, while Cooper continues to struggle to be in his children’s lives. He tries to bond with his son, who constantly has headphones on to block out the world. He is disturbed by his teenage daughter, who has a twenty-year-old boyfriend, who he kicks in the nuts after he catches them together in the house while the others are away.

The Truth About Cooper’s Firing Comes to Light

When Cooper is fired, he is told that it is because of having sex with a person over whom he had power in the office. He assumes that the woman filed a complaint against him, so he reaches out to her, hoping to convince her to take her complaint back. He is shocked to discover that she never filed a complaint. When he confronts his boss about it, he is told that someone reported him, whose identity has not been revealed. It becomes clear to Cooper that the incident is just an excuse for him to be removed from the way and to take over the list of major accounts that he has secured for the company over the years. He storms away in anger, but this interaction confirms that there is more to the story than he is being told. Later, Liv tries to find out why Cooper was fired when she never filed a complaint, but she is given a promotion instead, most likely to shut her up about the entire thing.

On a personal note, Cooper is not the only person in his family who is going through a mental and emotional upheaval. His sister, Ali, has checked herself out of the facility where she was admitted to help her with her mental health. She is off her meds, which doesn’t spell anything good for her. It turns out that on the day of her wedding, she had a psychotic break. Now, her ex-fiancee is married to someone else and has a family of his own. When she shows up on his porch with a guitar, Cooper is called in to take her away. With his own life in shambles, Cooper tries to put up with his sister and their parents. However, not unexpectedly, he discovers that they, particularly their mother, are not too enthusiastic about the return of their daughter. So, Cooper takes her back to her house, where they will have to find a way to co-exist for a while.

Cooper’s Streak of Theft Leads Him Down a Dangerous Path

When Cooper falls on hard times, he thinks about getting back on his feet by finding another job. His friend and financial manager gets him an interview, but Cooper rejects the job after discovering that he is only being hired to help the boss’s sister’s son get a portfolio that looks good on paper while Cooper does all the work for him. He doesn’t think about stealing at this point, but it happens spontaneously at a party. Their hosts are the kind of people whom Cooper cannot stand, especially after they comment on how amicable his and Mel’s divorce has been in front of everyone. It is out of spite that he pees in the place he shouldn’t and touches the things in the house that are off-limits. While peeking around to destroy or damage other stuff, he comes across a roll of cash, which he keeps.

Later, as he looks at that cash, he realizes that there is more in the house. So, as the hosts leave for a vacation to Belize, Cooper sneaks in and steals an expensive watch. He is almost caught when the neighborhood cops show up, but he acts like he is the owner of the house, and they leave him alone. When he takes the watch to resell it, he discovers that he has to present the watch’s papers, which he doesn’t have. So, he is directed towards a pawnbroker named Lu, who can buy it from him. An experienced Lu immediately sees through Cooper and buys the watch from him at $65k even though he tries to negotiate the price to a higher value.

Soon after, Cooper finds another house to steal from. It belongs to the parents of the girl, who is in his daughter’s tennis match, and they will decide who goes to Princeton. On the day of the match, when the parents are there for their daughter, and Cooper should be for his, he sneaks into the house and steals a watch. This time, he goes directly to Lu, but when she sees the watch, She refuses to buy it. She doesn’t give him any particular reason for her refusal, but she asks him to stop while he is still ahead. As he leaves the shop, she gets a clear look at his license plate and tells her contact to run it and find out everything there is to know about Cooper. This is her doing her due diligence to find out where Cooper is getting his watches from and whether she can trust him.