{"id":373448,"date":"2026-04-03T19:17:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T19:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/373448\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T19:17:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T19:17:08","slug":"luxury-items-coop-steals-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/373448\/","title":{"rendered":"Luxury Items Coop Steals, Explained"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJonathan Tropper<\/a> has a 6-year-old daughter; as of exactly today, I do as well \u2014 Happy birthday, Emily! So despite Tropper\u2019s status as the creator of Apple TV\u2019s Your Friends & Neighbors<\/a> and Cinemax\u2019s Banshee and Warrior, when he says he has nothing of value in his house because he can\u2019t have anything of value in his house, I tend to believe him. (Imagine if we had boys.)<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Tropper\u2019s boys are the fully grown Jon Hamm<\/a>, Hoon Lee, the aptly-named Mark Tallman and James Marsden<\/a>, the fellas of Your Friends & Neighbors season two. Save the 45-year-old Tallman, the guys are all in their 50s, but their characters are still plenty destructive \u2014 especially self-destructive. Together, Andrew \u201cCoop\u201d Cooper, Barney Choi, Nick Brandes and Owen Ashe, respectively, form a motley crew of dudes who all kinda-sorta have their hands in each others\u2019 pockets, both above board and below. Coop has his gloved hands in more than his friends\u2019 pockets.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe basic premise of Your Friends & Neighbors is this: Coop, who (quite literally) fucked himself out of a cushy hedge-fund management job, turns to a life of home-invasion burglary to make ends meet and to fill some sort of Richard Mille Felipe Massa automatic chronograph watch-sized hole in his compromised soul. He targets his \u2014 you guessed it \u2014 friends and neighbors in the affluent (and fictitious) Westmont Village, a stand-in for Westchester County, New York.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn season one, Coop swipes jewelry, expensive wine, designer handbags and more to pay his alimony, child support and to keep up appearances in a neighborhood where appearances are all that matter. He\u2019s got another motive as well \u2014 Coop is acting out to enact some modicum of revenge on the uber-rich men and women who he still mingles with at the country club but can no longer relate to. It is Tropper\u2019s job to pick Coop\u2019s targets, assign value to the stolen items value, ultimately, to write his protagonist both into and out of pickles \u2014 a task that doesn\u2019t get any easier as the series evolves.<\/p>\n

\n\tYour Friends & Neighbors season two premiered Friday on Apple TV; read The Hollywood Reporter\u2018s Q&A with Tropper on the new season, below.<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tDo you keep a running list of luxury items for Coop to take?<\/p>\n

\n\tBelieve it or not, we don\u2019t. It all happens organically in the room. I sit with the writers [and] we talk about things. We don\u2019t want to steal anymore watches. You can do an interesting piece of jewelry because there are so many varieties of jewelry, but it\u2019s like, \u201cHow do we keep exploring this? What are other items that have assigned value, that are sort of ridiculous but also meaningful?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHow do you assign the ultimate value to the items you choose?<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a lot of internet research. One thing people assume, which is not true, is we don\u2019t partner with any brands. We don\u2019t partner with any companies. When we want the Rolls-Royce, Rolls-Royce sends us that car. That\u2019s different. But when we\u2019re writing\u2014 whether it\u2019s a Patek Phillipe watch or that [season two item redacted], we do a lot of research. We see where things sold for, both on auction and retail, and then we come up with a believable, grounded number that sounds right.<\/p>\n

\n\tHow does Coop choose what he wants to go after? Because he typically goes in with a target \u2014 sometimes a non-obvious one \u2014 and doesn\u2019t often deviate.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe biggest thing for us is he\u2019s stealing things that won\u2019t get missed right away, because the idea is he doesn\u2019t want the cops getting called. If people feel burglaries are happening, then, you know, alarms will start getting used more, security systems will start getting used more. So it\u2019s always about if I can get in and out [and] no one\u2019s ever going to raise the alarm. <\/p>\n

\n\tIn a lot of cases, what that means is it\u2019s something very mobile, very small, the kind of thing also that somebody would first assume they had misplaced it rather than assuming they were robbed. Because (if they were robbed), more things would be gone, right? <\/p>\n

\n\tGenerally, it\u2019s stuff he could put in his pocket or into a bag and move quickly. Once in a while he breaks that \u2014 like in season one, he stole a painting and caused him a lot of grief, right? Every time he breaks his own rules, he gets into a lot of trouble.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat would I steal from your house?<\/p>\n

\n\tI have a six-year-old daughter, so we have nothing of value in the house. It wouldn\u2019t pay. The only you could steal from my house is scripts.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tJonathan Tropper has nothing of value in his house, he says.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRoy Rochlin\/GA\/The Hollywood Reporter\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\n\tThe setting is among the wealthiest on TV, and so much of the show is about the wealth. Does that translate directly to it being an expensive show, budget-wise?<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the scheme of Apple\u2019s one-hour dramas, I think we\u2019re heavily on the smaller-budget [end].<\/p>\n

\n\tIs that because the expensive props are generally provided in exchange for the exposure?<\/p>\n

\n\tCertain brands are, as you know, happy for us to feature their products. In certain cases, yeah, we do work out deals. We generally don\u2019t like to do brand partnerships because they come with conditions. The only way to get that Rolls was to speak with Rolls-Royce, and they were happy to cooperate. There\u2019s no exchange of money.<\/p>\n

\n\tOur props department and our production department really handles that. I don\u2019t get terribly involved in that, so I can\u2019t speak too knowledgeably about it, but I will say that I do know, as far as one-hour dramas go, we are not on the big-budget [end].<\/p>\n

\n\tTHR note: It was Marsden\u2019s friend, coincidentally also named Owen, who works for Porsche that brought them Ashe\u2019s 918 Spyder. (Marsden calls it his \u201cdream car.\u201d Olivia Munn, whom he picks up for a spin in the show, says it is \u201chard to get in and out of.\u201d) Marsden only really got to drive the 918, which can range from under $1 million (MSRP) to many millions of dollars, on Samantha Levitt\u2019s (Munn) driveway; Tropper didn\u2019t even get to do that, telling THR: \u201cI would have liked to get behind the wheel and try it. I\u2019m not even a car guy, and I wanted to drive that. Whenever we had those Porsches out, we had a we had the guy from Porsche to keeping an eye on everything. I don\u2019t think I could have just taken it for a spin.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCoop is a cinephile. How do you choose the films he watches?<\/p>\n

\n\tI don\u2019t do it all myself. I have a another executive producer right around the show, Jamie Rosengard, who\u2019s a bigger movie buff than I am. I gave Coop this personality trait of watching movies because that\u2019s who I was in a community where all the other men watch sports, and I didn\u2019t watch sports. <\/p>\n

\n\tSometimes it\u2019s as simple as he\u2019s gonna watch a movie that I loved, right? Other times there are thematic elements like film noir. He\u2019s a big film noir fan, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that we consider our show to be suburban noir. And the voiceover that Coop has is very much related to the, you know, Philip Marlow\/Sam Spade-type (both played by Humphrey Bogart) and all that. <\/p>\n

\n\tSo sometimes there is a symbolism to it, and other times it\u2019s just what we could be watching. I worked really hard, and it took a lot of effort for us to get Commando. It\u2019s not a classic, but there\u2019s no man my age who doesn\u2019t know that movie by heart and so it was fun to get that.<\/p>\n

\n\tWithout spoiling anything for readers, the danger in season two only grows. Westmont is a small, insular community often selected for its security \u2014 when are people going to start moving out?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe question is, how many of these things are actually going on above the line where people are hearing about them? But also, I think part of the fun is how these communities can sort of absorb and move on\u2026 It\u2019s a community that, regardless of what happens a week later, they\u2019re all going to the country club.<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tYour Friends & Neighbors is now streaming the first episode of season two, with new episodes dropping weekly on Apple TV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jonathan Tropper has a 6-year-old daughter; as of exactly today, I do as well \u2014 Happy birthday, Emily!…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":373449,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,90065,29705,179186,411,140869],"class_list":{"0":"post-373448","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-james-marsden","12":"tag-jon-hamm","13":"tag-jonathan-tropper","14":"tag-tv","15":"tag-your-friends-and-neighbors"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373448\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}