Apple TV’s 19-Part Crime Series Is Changing Genres In Season 3

I recently caught up on Your Friends and Neighbors on Apple TV ahead of its second season, and I have very mixed feelings about the show (mostly positive, but some negative). I raced through season 1 in a day; I loved the pitch-black humor, I loved the twisted irony of a rich guy stealing from his rich friends to stay rich, and, as a lifelong Mad Men superfan, I loved seeing Jon Hamm back in TV antihero mode.

But when I caught up to season 2, and started watching that week to week, I started to sour on my new favorite show. As Coop went back into the finance world, it lost the satirical hook that made season 1 so much fun — the rich robbing the rich — and just became another Succession knockoff. James Marsden was the absolute perfect addition to the ensemble; he stole every single scene he was in, and saved this sophomore slump from feeling like a complete disaster.

By the time the season 2 finale rolled around, and Mel had tortured her new neighbors and Elena had been all but forgotten about, I was ready to give up on the show. But the cliffhanger ending has me intrigued. It seems as though Your Friends and Neighbors will move away from this Succession-lite corporate drama and go back to pulpy criminal antics in season 3, and in the guise of a whole new genre.

Your Friends & Neighbors Will Go Full Film Noir In Season 3

Up until now, Your Friends and Neighbors has been a dark comedy about the rich eating the rich. Season 1 was a straightforward crime thriller, then season 2 shifted to more of a blue-collar crime drama. But the season 2 finale sets up a full-blown mystery noir for season 3. The penultimate episode of season 2 saw Marsden’s breakout star, Owen Ashe, slip and die while pursuing his business associates with a gun, and the finale began with Coop and his friends crudely disposing of his body in a lake.

That seemed to be that, and everyone tried to move on. But the episode ended with a fisherman unexpectedly stumbling upon the corpse, so Coop is undoubtedly about to become a murder suspect for being in the wrong place at the wrong time once again. This is a classic film noir trope: a bunch of criminal cohorts get rid of a body, the body resurfaces, and the guilty parties worry which of their friends is liable to dime.

On top of that, Mel is about to start poking around Coop’s past and digging into his life of crime as research for her new book, so she’ll be on him like an intrepid reporter a la Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole or Robbie Robertson in Spider-Noir. Coop is already doing a bad job of hiding his crimes, so this can only get messy. Mel is about to have her Skyler White make-or-break moment.

There’s A Great Irony In Your Friends & Neighbors Embracing Classic Movie Tropes

©Apple TV+ / Courtesy Everett Collection

Your Friends and Neighbors works best when it embraces the inherent irony of its premise — the irony of rich people robbing rich people to supplement their own riches — and there’s a delicious irony in the show embracing classic movie tropes. Just about every time we see Coop at home, he’s watching an old cinematic masterpiece on TV, whether it’s Thief or The Killing or Night of the Hunter or To Live and Die in L.A. or Sweet Smell of Success.

Coop loves watching classic Hollywood movies, and now, he’s living in one. He’s had to dump a body in a lake, just like Norman Bates, and he’s debating which of his friends knows too much, like Humphrey Bogart and his fellow gold panners in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Your Friends and Neighbors season 3 has finally got me excited about the show again, after a very hit-and-miss season 2.