Apple TV’s Your Friends and Neighbors has been nominated this year in the marquee Emmy category of Outstanding Drama Series. It marks the first-ever Emmy nomination for the series, and it has been achieved in just its second season. It also made a kind of Emmy history as becoming only the second series to score the prestigious nomination without being nommed in any other category in the same season (the first was Big Love in 2009). That indicates the series, which will be heading into its third season in 2027, is becoming a word-of-mouth hit, not just with audiences but also with Television Academy voters.
It is well deserved, and creator/showrunner/writer/executive producer Jonathan Tropper joined Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees Studio to talk about how it got to this point and how much might have had to do with the wild second season. Joining him was co-star Hoon Lee, who plays series star Jon Hamm’s cohort Barney Choi.
Watch the conversation below and scroll down for photos from the event.
The series sees Hamm, back in a suit a la Mad Men’s Don Draper, being fired as a hedge fund manager, dealing with a recent divorce, and trying to pick up the pieces in wealthy Westchester’s Westmont Village, where he turns to stealing from his neighbors’ homes only to discover a host of secrets and affairs hidden within those compounds. In the second season he continues the practice only to be confronted by a new neighbor (James Marsden) who threatens to expose him, an act that once again could put his whole family at risk.
“I’m not sure what it is about the second season specifically that made it catch on. I think in some cases, it’s just the fact that we came after the first season. You know, if I sat down and thought about it, second seasons are generally a little denser,” Tropper mused. “There’s more character complexity because we’ve already built the world. And so I think in the binge culture, the fact that people can sit down and watch 19 episodes as opposed to just the first nine episodes probably gave us a little more staying power. And I think it’s one of those shows that just had a wonderful word-of-mouth spread.”
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Indeed. And was he surprised by that single Emmy nomination? It WAS surprising and surreal. “We were in Europe, so it was the end of the day for us. We had no idea they were being announced that day and my phone just started to blow up. And, you know, I couldn’t really wrap my brain around it until I really started hearing from a lot of friends in L.A. who in real time were learning with the nomination. And then I began to realize that we were in that conversation [which] was really exciting. It’s really great,” he said.
As for his initial desire to tackle this particular world, it was something that had been on his wish list. “This is a show I really wanted to do for a long time. I just had to get to a point where people would let me make this show. Due to a handful of circumstances. I came up more on the side of television action shows, but I had been writing novels that were more set in worlds like this, and that dealt with these types of situations and journeys,” he said. “And I think I was just biding my time till somebody trusted me enough to do a show like this. I lived in Westchester for 15 years. I knew this world really well, and I know it’s really right to me for exploration, and I think it was just a combination of my own maturation and the ideas coinciding to to bring this show forward.”
As for the casting, and notably getting Hamm, as Andrew Cooper, to return to world later than but still in the universe of a Don Draper? “I mean having Jon Hamm in that role is interesting because you really can’t shake the specter of Don Draper. I think that follows him the minute you put him in a suit, you see. And the way I viewed it is kind of a deconstruction of that character. Or, you know, as John likes to say, you know, ‘Don Draper sold the American Dream and Andrew Cooper bought it.’ And I think we started from there,” Tropper said.
Lee is just one of a sterling cast of supporting players getting rich roles, Barney Choi being one of the buzziest. What did Lee think of the opportunity?
“I think the great appeal of it is being able to give voice to sort of all of your inner turmoil and your inner chaos,” he said. “A lot of the times I’ve been asked to play characters for Jonathan that are sort of organizers of the world or as fixers or operators, and that necessitates a kind of level-headed approach, so to be able to let fly with neuroses after neuroses and sort of allow the character to really spin out was incredibly fun for me to start to, to dabble in, And now that’s just building as the stakes go up for the entire situation, as it becomes more invested in Coop’s world, he starts to really unfurl. And that’s proven both fun but also challenging. And that challenge is always interesting. Like the general feel of the show, it’s incredibly fun to do.”
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