Comedy
The Rehearsal
A comedian tries to give real folks a chance to practice real scenarios in a fake environment. Too bad the show is really foul.
Burglary, as Andrew “Coop” Cooper has recently discovered, is much easier than you might think.
Once upon a time, Coop was a successful New York hedge-fund manager who seemed to have conquered the American dream. Mansions, cars, million-dollar watches, a stunning wife and family…Coop had it all.
Until, of course, he caught that stunning wife having an affair with his best friend. One bank-breaking divorce later, the mansion has become a rental, and the cars—well, he kept the cars. A man can only sacrifice so much. And at least he still has his job, right?
Not so much. After discovering Coop’s ethically-questionable affair with a colleague, Coop’s boss snatches up his clients and promptly fires him.
Which leaves our American-dream-conqueror with no mansion, no wife, no watches, and no money. But don’t worry—he still has alimony, car payments, private school tuition, and that $15,000 laser-skin treatment his daughter really wants.
So when he’s invited to a party at his über-rich friends’ über-large house, Coop finds himself wondering: do they really need that Rolex gathering dust in a drawer? How much could they miss one roll of hundred-dollar bills? In his newfound absence of wealth, Coop has come to the sudden realization that all of this excess—the mansions, the cars, the watches—is all totally meaningless.
And if it’s all meaningless, why shouldn’t he just … take it? What right do his friends really have to their own property? To quote Coop’s former boss as he shoves Coop out the door: “It’s not yours if you can’t keep it.” What’s the worst that could happen?
The worst that could happen, as it turns out, is waking up on the floor of someone else’s house next to a dead body. Whoops!
We find little to applaud for Andrew Cooper as a character, and somehow even less to praise about Your Friends & Neighbors. The show is filled with foul language, drug and alcohol use, and multiple sexual situations that pop up so suddenly they could qualify as jump scares. Even when everyone’s clothes are on, conversations feature dialogue ranging from suggestive to explicit. Plus, the opening moments of the show promise some violent content later on.
Then, of course, we face the premise as a whole. There’s something darkly cynical at the heart of Your Friends & Neighbors. Characters rarely act outside of their own interests, and breaking the rules only matters when it backfires. Coop is still bitter over his wife’s affair, but he has no problem sleeping with a married woman; he’s outraged over his boss stealing his clients, but he thinks nothing of robbing his friends.
That may be the show’s entire point. Perhaps the creators are saying that the wealthy are hypocrites who will do anything for one more dollar. But even if that’s the case, is there a point to such overbearing pessimism? Even kinder moments, such as Coop dropping everything to drive across town and pick up his unstable sister, are overshadowed by his moral apathy in the very next scene.
It might be easy to diminish the show’s issues to “the main character steals, and stealing is bad”—he does, and it is—but at the root of these problems is a relentless cynicism and a complete disregard for ethical standards. It makes Your Friends & Neighbors a somewhat uncomfortable watch.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that this is all leading to some grand redemption, or perhaps a cautionary tale about the consequences of greed. Even if this is the case (which seems unlikely), it’s hardly worth the content you’ll have to wade through to get there.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at [email protected], or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
After suddenly losing his job, Andrew “Coop” Cooper resorts to robbing his wealthy friends to pay for his various expenses.
At the beginning of the episode, Coop wakes up on the floor next to a dead body, seemingly unaware how it got there. We see a gruesome head wound and blood covering the floor.
Sexual content is prevalent, both in action and dialogue. We see a montage of Coop and his wife when they were newly married; the scenes are brief, but they each feature graphic sounds and movement. A few other similar scenes appear throughout the episode. Each are equally brief, yet equally sudden, and though no nudity is shown each are equally explicit. We also hear sexual acts described in detail and graphic discussions of extra-marital affairs.
Coop goes down to his basement to find his daughter’s naked boyfriend coming out of the bathroom (his daughter is 17 while the boyfriend is 20; Coop raises strong objections to this, but his ex-wife has no concerns). While nothing is technically shown, we come a hairsbreadth away from male nudity onscreen.
Patrons at a bar drink cocktails and shots of liquor. Guests at a house party drink socially, although Coop has too much whiskey, which makes him act hostile to the other guests. He later finds a joint of marijuana while robbing his friend’s house and smokes it while drinking the home’s store of liquor.
Coop’s girlfriend (who happens to be a married woman) gives him the middle finger. The f-word is used 37 times throughout the episode, while the s-word is used 17. “A–“ is heard eight times. God’s name is taken in vain 13 times. “H-ll”, “d-ck” and “d–n” are each used twice.
Lauren Cook is serving as a 2021 summer intern for the Parenting and Youth department at Focus on the Family. She is studying film and screenwriting at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. You can get her talking for hours about anything from Star Wars to her family to how Inception was the best movie of the 2010s. But more than anything, she’s passionate about showing how every form of art in some way reflects the Gospel. Coffee is a close second.
A comedian tries to give real folks a chance to practice real scenarios in a fake environment. Too bad the show is really foul.
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