5 shows like ‘Your Friends and Neighbors’ to stream while you wait for season 2
The first season of “Your Friends and Neighbors” has come to a close, and while we wait to see what Andrew Cooper steals next (and from whom), there’s a very specific hole left in our watchlists.
The Apple TV Plus series introduced us to Jon Hamm’s Andrew, a freshly fired hedge fund manager who decides to spend his free time breaking into the homes of his rich neighbors — not out of desperation, but more like curiosity, boredom and maybe a touch of existential spite.
With its deadpan voiceover and sharp commentary on the absurdity of wealth, “Your Friends and Neighbors” makes it weirdly easy to root for a guy rifling through someone else’s medicine cabinet. While we wait for season 2 to sneak back into our lives, here are a few shows like “Your Friends and Neighbors” that scratch the same itch.
‘The Riches’
In this FX drama, an Irish Traveller family decides to take up residence in an upper class neighborhood when they’re involved in a car accident that kills a wealthy family named the Riches.
On the run from their clan, from whom they’ve just stolen a large sum of money, they have little choice but to assume the identities of the Riches, struggling to fit in within a WASP-y community of hedge fund managers and high-powered attorneys.
Starring Suzy Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver as Rich parents and Noel Fisher, Shannon Marie Woodward, and Aidan Mitchell as their three children, “The Riches” benefited from the strong performances and bonds between its central cast.
Watch on Hulu
‘Weeds’
Andrew Cooper on “Your Friends and Neighbors” wasn’t the first TV character to engage in nefarious, illegal goings-on beneath the surface of an otherwise picture-perfect suburban neighborhood.
Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker) preceded him by a number of years on “Weeds,” when she — a mother with two boys to provide for whose husband has recently died — starts a lucrative side hustle as the local marijuana dealer.
“Weeds” was a satirical take on the typical family drama, and it ran for eight seasons on Showtime from 2005 to 2012. Along the way, it earned 20 Emmy nominations, including several for Parker as well as Elizabeth Perkins as Botwin’s neighbor.
Watch free on Plex
‘Breaking Bad’
This may sound familiar: A typical family man whose marriage is on the rocks finds himself in the midst of a crisis and, determined to provide for his wife and kids, begins working as a freelance criminal. Initially, he tells himself it’s a means to an end, but before long, he starts to relish his life of crime, and what’s more, he’s good at it.
This could describe Andrew Cooper in “Your Friends and Neighbors,” but is just as easily applied to Walter White (Bryan Cranston) in “Breaking Bad.” After White, a mild-mannered high school teacher, is handed a devastating cancer diagnosis, he realizes that he can make enough to keep his family comfortable after his death by opening a meth lab.
But that’s just where it starts. Before long, he gets deeper and deeper into the criminal world, until he’s virtually unrecognizable. Breaking Bad was a hit series on AMC, earning four Emmys for Cranston, three for Aaron Paul, and two for Anna Gunn. It also generated a popular spinoff, “Better Call Saul,” which offers up an origin story for White’s shady lawyer, Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk).
Watch on Netflix
‘Good Girls’
It can be easy to justify a little light larceny when you find you and your family in dire financial straits. This is certainly the case in “Good Girls,” when a trio of suburban mothers decide to turn to robbery when they each, for different reasons, fall on hard times.
Beth (Christina Hendricks) is reeling from a recent divorce after her husband cheated on her. Ruby (Retta) needs money to pay for her child’s medical treatments. And Annie (Mae Whitman) is about to become embroiled in an expensive custody battle.
They’re all more or less justified in looking for not-so-legal side hustles, which they find when they decide to team up and rob a local grocery store. Surely they’ll just commit one robbery, get away with it, and then that’ll be the end of it, right?
Watch on Netflix
‘Palm Royale’
Set in Palm Beach in 1969, this comedy-drama feels a little bit like a mash-up between “Mad Men’s” period aesthetics and the criminal antics of “Your Friends and Neighbors.”
It stars Kristen Wiig as the ambitious Maxine, who is determined to do whatever it takes to join the high-flying members of Palm Beach’s most exclusive country club. Her increasingly absurd antics only prove the lengths she’s willing to go to accomplish her goals, as she clumsily manipulates seemingly everyone in town to earn a coveted spot among their elite.
Wiig is in fine form in Palm Royale, showcasing her deftness with both comedy and drama. Palm Royale was renewed for a second season in 2024, so we should be getting more social-climbing dramedy in the near future.
Watch on Apple TV Plus
