Apple TV's Breaking Bad Replacement Is About To Have Its 'Skyler Hate' Moment

Ever since Breaking Bad revolutionized television and earned a reputation as the greatest television series of all time, we’ve seen plenty of knockoffs about an average family man getting swept up in a life of crime. Ozark is about a finance guy laundering money for a Mexican cartel, The Americans is about two Soviet sleeper agents disguising themselves as an American family in the Washington suburbs, and Your Friends and Neighbors is about a high-powered executive who starts burgling his wealthy friends to maintain the facade of wealth after losing his job.

While the casting of Jon Hamm as a morally gray antihero makes it a clear successor to Mad Men, Your Friends and Neighbors is very much Apple’s answer to Breaking Bad. It’s all about the thrill of the double life, as a husband and father falls down the rabbit hole of crime to keep his family afloat, and desperately tries to keep his illegal activities hidden from his wife and kids.

Hamm plays Coop, a hedge fund manager who loses his job and most of his assets, finds out his wife has been having an affair with his best friend, and resorts to petty crime to keep funding his family’s lavish lifestyle. It has a different satirical core than Breaking Bad — whereas Breaking Bad used the illegal drug trade to comment on the pharmaceutical industry and the U.S. healthcare system, Your Friends and Neighbors wrings laughs out of the irony of the rich robbing the rich — but the source of the dramatic tension is the same: the protagonist is harboring a dark secret from his family. In season 3, Your Friends and Neighbors is about to tackle the trickiest part of the Breaking Bad formula: Skyler finds out.

Mel Is Poised To Find Out About Coop's Crimes In Your Friends & Neighbors Season 3

In Your Friends and Neighbors’ season 2 finale, the book that Coop’s ex-wife Mel has been working on is rejected for being too boring. It reflects her experiences throughout the season, the beginning of menopause and adapting to the changes her body is going through, but her editor doesn’t think that story is exciting enough. Instead, the editor encourages Mel to write about Paul’s death and Coop’s murder allegations and the goon squad that beat him up in season 1. At the end of the episode, we see Mel starting work on this new true-crime book.

As soon as Mel starts digging around, she’ll undoubtedly notice some inconsistencies and poke some holes in Coop’s story. If I was a betting man, I’d wager that season 3 will revolve around Mel finding out about Coop’s crimes and uncovering his whole web of lies — and it’ll lead to a crucial moment in the Breaking Bad trajectory.

Mel is essentially the Skyler character of Your Friends and Neighbors; Coop is Walt, and Mel is the stick-in-the-mud wife growing increasingly suspicious of him. All the hate for Skyler began around the time she found out about Walt’s crimes, and became both a victim and an accomplice. It was really well-written in its nuance and complexity, but a lot of viewers missed that and simply accused her of hypocrisy. With Mel digging into Coop’s brushes with the law for her new book, Your Friends and Neighbors is about to get to that part of the Breaking Bad formula. It’ll be a make-or-break moment for Your Friends and Neighbors’ Skyler character.

Mel's Season 3 Storyline Can't Be Any Worse Than Her Season 2 Storyline

Whatever Your Friends and Neighbors has in store for Mel in season 3, it can’t be any worse than her storyline in season 2. That was a borderline character assassination.

Exploring Mel’s experiences with menopause was an interesting idea for Your Friends and Neighbors’ second season; it’s a universal experience that’s shockingly underrepresented in the media. But manifesting it as a feud with the neighbor’s dog, who she then killed, was a really baffling way to go.