(This story contains spoilers from “Everything Becomes Symbol and Irony,” the season one finale of Your Friends & Neighbors.)

Andrew “Coop” Cooper (Jon Hamm) can never exactly go back to his past life. For the entire first season of Apple TV+’s Your Friends & Neighbors, the former hedge fund manager has fought to keep his head above water after getting cheated on, divorced and then unceremoniously fired. In order to fund his lavish lifestyle, Coop resorted to secretly stealing from the homes of his neighbors in their affluent neighborhood and pawning those stolen goods off to a terrifying secondary market buyer — only to discover that he is the prime suspect in killing his on-again-off-again lover Samantha “Sam” Levitt’s (Olivia Munn) husband, Paul. 

But in Friday’s season finale, Coop is able to not only acquit himself of murder and find the real culpable party, but is also given a chance to rejoin the professional ranks that had previously turned their backs on him. Sam, it turns out, had watched her husband kill himself on FaceTime, and then tried to stage his death to look like a homicide in order to collect on his hefty life insurance policy. Then Coop declines a generous signing bonus (and as much of an apology as one can expect in corporate America) by refusing to meet with a valuable client in Switzerland, and secretly decides that a life of crime suits him just fine.

“If he took (his old job), he would go back to being the same sleepwalking, suburban, middle-aged man that he was before this happened. The goal of this story was always to wake him up,” creator and showrunner Jonathan Tropper tells The Hollywood Reporter in the interview below.

That liberation will remain a driving force for Coop in season two. He is last seen breaking into and driving away from yet another house after standing up his former bosses. Apple TV+ ordered a second season last year, in a big vote of confidence, ahead of the series premiere. While taking a break from putting the final touches on the last two scripts of next season, Tropper discusses all the major developments in Friday’s finale and the various creative challenges he’s encountered in making a series that is both an existentialist drama and cheeky satire of the upper class. He also teases the impending arrival of James Marsden’s mysterious character.

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When you look back at Coop’s arc over the course of this first season, what do you think was the turning point for him? How does the threat of going to prison for life crystallize everything that’s important?

The turning point was less about getting arrested and more about when he was offered his old life back. When you watch what he’s been through all season, the temptation to take back his old life must have been tremendous: You’ve almost gone to jail. You’re now not going to jail. The last few months of your life have been this terrible odyssey, and here is somebody basically giving you the keys back to the kingdom, to everything you once held dear.

The turning point was realizing that he can’t take it. If he took it, he would go back to being the same sleepwalking, suburban, middle-aged man that he was before this happened. The goal of this story was always to wake him up. I think he was planning to take the job until the last possible minute, and it’s the realization that breaking the rules and robbing people and being in their homes became something more than just a means of making money for him. It actually liberated him from a script he’d been following his entire life.

Where is Coop’s moral compass by the end of the season?

Morality has taken a backseat right now to self-discovery, and part of what his journey is going to be is reconciling his place as a father and family man with what he’s doing. His journey’s not complete yet, but the first step of his liberation is complete. Then the question is, now that you’ve been freed, are you going to locate your moral compass or not? Is morality a thing that still exists in contemporary society? Is it something he’s going to have to adhere to, and can he redefine it? Or does he have to eventually cling to it? Those are going to be really interesting explorations to take on in future seasons.

So much of this finale is about Coop finally putting the pieces together about what happened the night he woke up next to Paul’s corpse, in a pool of Paul’s blood. At what point in the writing of the season did you decide that Sam was going to unsuccessfully frame Coop for her husband’s murder? How did you justify that choice from a writing perspective?

We sat in the writers room for a long time, and we always knew (Coop) was going to wake up next to a dead body. And that wasn’t just to have a murder mystery — it was also to really put a fine point on the notion that you can’t open the door to this world and not expect things to come through in the other direction. He embraced a life of crime and, as a result, it’s plain to see the arrogance in thinking you can control that world. Once you open that door, you’re going to be subject to what you’ve let in. We always knew we wanted him to start there, and he was going to have to come to terms with the fact that he had entered a world he can’t control.

Landing on Sam was more about landing on (Paul’s death) not actually being a murder. We kept talking about other versions of: Who killed Paul? And it started to sound like a thriller and a procedural. One night I went home and one of the writers in the room called me. We had decided on a certain path for the murder, and he said, “It just doesn’t feel surprising or interesting or real to me.” It made me realize I had fallen into this trap, which we fell into a number of times while we were planning the season. Sometimes, we were thinking we were writing an actual mystery — and we’re not. The show has a mystery in it, but the show is not a mystery. Ultimately, the show is a social exploration. It’s a little bit of a satire, and thematically it’s all about what makes these people tick.

So I spent the whole night thinking about it and realizing that in a town where no one is quite what they seem, a murder shouldn’t actually be a murder. It makes total sense that somebody would go to these great extremes to hold onto what was theirs, which is what the show is about. So just like Coop spent the whole season going to extremes to hold onto what he thought was his, Sam is doing the same thing. Her weight feels more extreme than Coop’s, but it’s actually not — which is why at the end, even when he’s angry when he finds out what happened, he also understands because she’s not doing anything different than he was. He was the victim of her process, and he has a certain level of sympathy for that. That felt much more on target with what the show was exploring than putting an actual murder in there.

Coop and Sam have a really emotionally charged conversation in the foyer of her house about what you just talked about. Did you ever consider having Sam shoot Coop at the end of that confrontation and having a different kind of fallout from Coop’s actions?

No and that’s because, as Coop points out to her in that scene, she’s not an actual killer. What that scene was about was two people confronting each other on life-threatening stakes for both of them. And yet, we decided not to play up the drama. (There are high) stakes, but we wrote that scene almost like a breakup scene.

In this community where everybody watches everybody and where appearances are everything — and even dealing with high crimes and framing someone for murder and insurance fraud and breaking into homes — it’s still two people arguing about how they hold onto what’s theirs. That struck me as a very realistic way this community works, which is, “Yeah, we’ll deal with the police, we’ll deal with the law, we’ll deal with all that shit, but really, where do we stand (personally)?” That feels very unique to this community where everyone is trying to keep up appearances and figure out their status within the neighborhood.

Coop jokes to his ex-wife Mel (Amanda Peet) that Sam, with a good lawyer, will probably get out of jail with court-mandated community service. Does this mean we haven’t seen the last of Sam?

We can certainly expect more from Sam in season two. She’s (Olivia Munn) on set right now!

Coop and Mel clearly still have some unresolved feelings for each other — I don’t think they ever really fell out of love, but maybe they stopped seeing each other. Where do you think they stand by the end of this season?

Coop and Mel’s relationship is the broken heart of the show, and that will be something they’re always reckoning with. It doesn’t go away. They’ve stayed in the same community, and they are both suffering — and were suffering — from the same emptiness that probably led to the mistakes they each made. I think as smart, capable, prideful people living in this community, that’s something both of them find very hard to swallow. The tragedy of their relationship is that there are moments where you see they’re still best suited for each other, and at the same time you realize a moment later that they can’t possibly ever be together again.

There’s also damage continuing to be done as they move forward, because they’re still sharing certain aspects of their lives. If Coop moved to L.A., there’d be a very different situation, but the fact that they still live within a few blocks of each other, have all the same friends, go to all the same events, and deal with their kids together puts them in a situation where neither of them can cleanly move on, and they can continue to pick at the scabs they’ve already created. I think (their love) retains a certain level of poignancy and power because they’re never really free of each other.

In the finale, right after urging him to reject a plea bargain in order to fight for their family, Mel suddenly kisses Coop. Is there any hope for them to reconcile romantically at some point down the road?

I guess there’s always hope, but my feeling is that there’s no fairytale here. They broke what they had, and they can’t put it back together. So I guess the question is: Is a broken love more powerful than no love? I think that’s something we have a bunch of seasons, hopefully, to answer, but I don’t think I have a goal to ultimately bring them together. There’s too much damage done. I think it’s unrealistic to think that somehow, through some misadventures, they can find each other. It’s more interesting to watch them both deal with the onset of midlife and midlife crises and family crises, and see if they can form some kind of functional unit in their new reality.

What’s the significance of the running gag with Coop’s car trunk popping open every time he tries to speed away from a scene?

(Laughs) The trunk (popping open) is the result of damage to a status symbol, and I think that’s what that is symbolically. It also turns into a fun little plot point by the end of the season. It was a constant reminder that his image has been dented and tarnished, and that the things he holds dear are all starting to break.

When you look back on the season as a whole, a lot of the characters’ actions stem from a need to fill an inescapable void in their lives. What did you and the rest of your creative team want to capture about the mundanity and ennui of high-class suburbia?

It’s not unique to high-class suburbia, but it’s the great emptiness that comes with a certain age, when you have a minute to catch your breath from the striving you’ve been doing for the last 20-some odd years — either because you’ve attained the goal or because you haven’t. You’re sitting there and realizing, “This is what I’ve devoted some of the most productive years of my life to. What was it really for?” That’s something that is more of a midlife thing than a wealth thing. But of course, when you’re wealthy, you are sometimes afforded the time or the luxury to sit and really navel-gaze and think about it.

But I think it was just the idea that people who reach these levels of wealth have worked and strive to get there, either because they were put in that position and had to get on the treadmill or because they attained the treadmill by themselves. But in either case, once they’ve attained it and the engine of striving is no longer what motivates them, then the question becomes, “Well, what does motivate me? And what am I doing that’s worthwhile and that feeds my soul and that makes me feel complete?” In many cases, they realize they’ve been chasing the wrong things.

To your point, these midlife issues aren’t specific to high-class suburbia, but the whole premise of this show is built around the lives of wealthy people, even though there are a few characters from a lower socio-economic background. What kind of class commentary were you trying to make, and how do you feel about the way it has landed and been received by the wider audience so far?

Oh, I’m happy that it’s been received pretty much in the way we intended. We are making a comment on consumerism in this late stage of capitalism in the United States and the spell we’re all under that’s been put together by marketing and advertising people for the last 40 or 50 years.

(There’s) the notion, certainly in communities like this, where people have achieved a wealth they perhaps never expected to achieve and not quite knowing what to do with it and not having the foundation to necessarily put it to good use. It becomes almost like a catalyst for bad behavior because there’s a feeling of power, there’s this feeling of access, and at the same time, the lives they’re living in don’t seem to be enough for them. With the building of any wealth comes the notion that “I should have more, whether it’s wealth or love or family or meaning or something.” I think you find a lot of people just reaching out in really complicated ways to try to feel like what they’ve done is worth it and where they’ve arrived was worth the journey.

In retrospect, when you were first pitching and conceptualizing the show, was there a particular element that you felt was the most difficult to crack creatively? What lessons from the first season are you already implementing in the making of the second?

The hardest thing going into the first season — the thing we were most worried about — was landing the tone and making sure this was a show where you invested in the characters and you believed in their plight and you sympathized and empathized. At the same time, we could do things that were slightly outrageous and absurdist and farcical, and not lose that emotional buy-in. I wanted the show to be smart and poppy, and have a slightly satirical edge to it, but never at the expense of character and emotion — and that’s a tricky plane to land. I feel like we largely did it.

It’s really been an interesting experience shooting season two while season one is still coming out, because we’re all still getting inundated with remarks and thoughts from people. I’ve stayed offline. I haven’t read any reviews or any press about the show, and I’m refusing to because I don’t see how I can make season two if I’m getting all those voices in my head.

But essentially, I think the challenge remains the same. In success, we still have to make sure that we’re not starting to either take ourselves too seriously or not take ourselves seriously enough. I think as the stakes get higher and as the misadventures continue, how do we make sure we’re both maintaining the emotional buy-in but also not falling into the emotional trap and forgetting that this show has a sense of humor and a certain absurdist mentality as well? I think that’s going to be our challenge for every season we get to make the show.

James Marsden will be joining the cast as a series regular next season, playing an as-of-yet-unannounced role that is reportedly connected to Sam. How are you looking to expand the world that you’ve created with new characters like that? What can you share about his role?

I’m not going to say anything about it, because I think the show works better when you don’t know, but obviously bringing someone like Marsden in is to bring in a great disruptor to the community. One of the things I felt we really needed was somebody who ups the ante, ups the stakes. When you start planning a season, you talk about: What’s the pond and the pebble? What’s the inciting incident or moment that generates story for the next ten episodes? And for us, the character that we came up with, that we were lucky enough to get James to come and play, is the person who is the pebble in the pond for season two.

Will there be a time jump at the top of season two?

When we start the second season, for a moment, it’s not clear where we are. So I’m not going to say anything, but it’s nothing too radical.

What else are you looking to accomplish next season?

Like with every show, we want to go deeper into some of the other characters. In a first season, some characters seem to almost be there in service of your main characters. In a second season, you want to make those characters independent of your main character.

I’m really interested in exploring who Sam is when she’s not in a relationship with Coop; I’m really interested in exploring Mel as something other than Coop’s ex-wife and the mother of his kids. So our priority going into the writers’ room was obviously (still) Coop: How do we take Coop further and how do we continue Coop’s emotional and intellectual journey? And then it was, how do we take our other two leads, Sam and Mel, and explore them as characters going through what they’re going through independent of Coop? And then we’ll work on the other characters as well, whether it’s Nick (Mark Tallman), Elena (Aimee Carrero), Barney (Hoon Lee) or Grace (Eunice Bae), and we’ll fine tune the microscope on them as well so that we can really be playing with the thematics of the show across a broader spectrum.

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All episodes of Your Friends & Neighbors are now streaming on Apple TV+.