In the Season 2 premiere of “Your Friends & Neighbors,” Jon Hamm’s Coop falls on his back while trying to steal a $100,000 Montblanc pen. Coop has fallen before. This time, he can’t get up. After spending the first season trying to outrun the consequences of losing his job, his marriage and his place among Westchester’s elite, time — and middle age — have finally caught up with him.
For Jonathan Tropper, the creator, showrunner and executive producer of the Apple TV series, the moment reveals “a vulnerability, a weakness in the armor” for Coop. “It’s so normal and it’s so quotidian, to fall,” Tropper says. “And at the same time, for him, it could mean getting arrested.”
It’s not just Coop, either. His ex-wife Mel, played by Amanda Peet, has to confront the changes that come with perimenopause. None of it is treated as a revelation or a joke; it’s just one more thing to deal with in a life built around trying to keep up appearances. Rather than becoming an exceptional storyline, aging is an essential part of these characters’ lives.
Like much of the show, the season’s details of middle age came from conversations Tropper heard around him during his years among Westchester’s ultrarich — many of them in the sauna or steam room. “PRP, stem cells, cold plunges, GLP-1s,” he says. “Everyone in their 50s is consumed with staving off the inevitable.”
But while men and women may share similar anxieties, the show embraces how differently that plays out: When Mel tries to have sex in the car after a first date, for instance, she’s interrupted by vaginal dryness, a symptom of perimenopause.
“I loved that scene when I read it,” 54-year-old Peet says. “I loved that I had more sex scenes in my menopause season than in any other season… [Mel]’s not just this invisible, sexless woman.” It made going to work “a joy,” she adds, because “it’s smack in the middle of my wheelhouse in terms of what I’m going through.”
Mel’s storyline was shaped by a writers’ room that included women familiar with menopause.
“I already have my own experience,” says Tropper. “I need people who bring experiences I don’t have to the room.” He admits he hadn’t been aware of rage as a symptom of perimenopause, but it fit where Mel’s at. “Raging against the second half of your life, raging against how the world’s perceiving you, and how the world looks at you at a certain age.”
For Coop, his physical limitations become a realistic hurdle. Later in the season, when he gets stuck on the second floor of a house he’s robbing after the owners come home early and get into an argument, he narrates that a few years ago, he could have jumped to escape, but now it’s just not possible. “There’s something fun about conflating the physical aches and pains of middle age with the more metaphysical aches and pains of middle age,” says Tropper.
One of Peet’s favorite scenes to film finds Mel, with help from Coop’s sister, Ali, tip over an annoying neighbor’s latrine toilet and end up in jail — a moment that shows how “Your Friends & Neighbors” captures the indignities of middle age. “I just thought that episode was really funny and special and weird. Coop and Mel are both spiraling in their own way. They’re kind of parallel spiraling.”
On set, the realities of aging were hard to ignore too. Hamm wore an arm brace during filming after a baseball injury, while Peet worked through a frozen shoulder in Season 1. Tropper, who at 55 is the same age as Hamm, notes that nobody in their 50s bounces back from overnight shoots quite the way they once did.
But it’s because these actors are in their 50s, and have the confidence to portray aging honestly, that the show can do what it does so well. These are stars who no longer feel the need to protect how they’re seen. “[Hamm’s] already done the iconic TV role. He’s already won the Emmys. He’s really leaned into playing this guy on his back foot because he’s played so many versions of an alpha male,” says Tropper. “I think he really loves playing the alpha male who’s starting to crumble.”
Tropper sees the same with Peet and with Olivia Munn, 46, who plays another resident of the show’s tony suburb: They have the life experience that makes them more willing to show “the uglier side, the less attractive side, the honest side of it all,” he says.
It also helps that the second season arrived at a time when Hollywood seems more willing to let middle-aged (and older) adults exist as multifaceted, flawed humans. In other Emmy contenders such as “Hacks,” “Shrinking” and “The Beast in Me,” aging is a process, not a plot device or gag.
Peet is excited by the frank portrayal of it all onscreen: “Seeing more middle-aged women in leading roles makes it more likely that you’re gonna be able to touch on these things.” She credits the wider public conversation to actors like Naomi Watts and her menopause advocacy. “I remember when my mom told me she was in menopause,” she says. “I don’t think anyone talked about it, and I don’t think anyone in her life ever told her, ‘Part of why you’re having a hard time could be hormonal.’”
It’s resonating with viewers too. Peet recalls doing a school run one day and having a woman come up to her. “She was like, ‘I feel seen because of your show,’ and that’s all you want as an actor. That’s it.” Adds Tropper, “It’s fun on a show that is as slightly absurdist as ours to still be able to make people feel really real and relatable to viewers. That’s our goal — it’s kind of like the expression that’s been used before: to show real frogs in an imaginary pond.”
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