Major spoilers for Season 2 of Your Friends & Neighbors are ahead! Read with caution, and stream the series with an Apple TV subscription.
I always thought James Marsden’s Owen Ashe was like a cockroach in Season 2 of Your Friends & Neighbors, and then that proved to be true in the final episodes, because he wouldn’t die. In the show, Jon Hamm’s Coop and his accomplices wound up killing Ashe not once, but twice. It was quite the brouhaha, so I obviously had to ask the show’s creator why he wanted this character to die more than once.
So, Episode 9 of Your Friends & Neighbors ends with a massive fight that involves Coop, Ashe, Barney and Nick. Ultimately, it ends with Marsden’s character on fire and running down a hallway while shooting at the other guys. After he trips and falls, hitting his head really hard, he is deemed “dead.”
Then, about 15 minutes into the finale that aired on the 2026 TV schedule, we learn that Ashe isn’t dead. He wakes up as the guys are driving to a place to get rid of his body. And what follows is a wild fight in a moving car that ends with said car being driven into a lake. That’s when Ashe actually dies, as he’s left in the water while the others swim away. So, why the fake death and then the real death? Here’s what creator Jonathan Tropper told me:
Purely for fun. First of all, the notion that these guys are so out of their depth – because, if I was in a situation like that, I'm not sure I know how to take somebody's pulse, right? And I wouldn't know that, ‘Oh, a guy who's been taking ketamine and doing this stuff might appear dead to me,’ but might not be.
I do love when characters are really bad criminals, and this show is full of them. Specifically, while Coop is good at stealing, he finds himself in over his head time and time again as he winds up in other illegal or compromising situations. So, he doesn’t handle things like a con-man in a great heist movie would.
No, in this case, he and his friends wound up totally not realizing that Ashe wasn’t dead. This led to the second fight, where he actually died. Explaining the “irony” or all that, Tropper said:
And just the notion that, ‘Okay, he's dead, let's deal with that,’ and then realizing, ‘Oh, we might have called his death a little too soon,’ and the irony of that being that he still ends up dead. I just think there's sort of an absurdity to that and a fun to that that just adds to the energy of what's going on there.
It’s wild twists like this that make Your Friends & Neighbors a great Apple TV show, and it makes me excited to see what happens next. That’s because, while Ashe is really dead this time, he doesn’t seem totally gone. In the final frames of the season, we see a man fishing in a lake where that sunken car is, and I can’t help but wonder if he’s going to catch a dead body.
So, will Ashe continue to haunt Coop and co. from the grave? After two deaths and some wild twists, I certainly think it's possible. Thankfully, we’ll get to find out because the show has been picked up for a third season, and I’m sure it will be full of unpredictable moments like the one that involved James Marsden’s character dying not once, but twice.
