Season one was in New York, and was a send-up of Brooklyn-ish wealthy hipster culture season two was in Los Angeles and had great fun poking at dippy wellness types. The first is the show’s shift to yet another new setting. Season three has more than one significant innovation to the show’s previous formulae. But the very intensity of his obsession turns it into a form of status quo, and inevitably creates a question: Will this rhythm ever change? It’s not that watching Joe identify, pursue, grow close to, and then kill another victim is boring. How will Joe lure his latest love object? Will his violent nature be revealed? Will she see through him? Will one of her friends find out and get killed to keep them quiet? How will it all get filtered through Joe’s perpetually returning childhood abandonment issues? Plus, the show is full of oddly soothing mechanical pleasures it is competence porn for anyone who likes their serial killers to be calmly, pleasantly detail-oriented. ![]() At least in the first season, though, and much of its second, You has been stuck with the fundamental simplicity of its basic idea: Joe likes a woman, he likes her a lot, he likes her too much, and then he likes her to death. It’s thrown lots of wrenches in the works, sure - flashes to Joe’s past, distracting neighbor children, hovering side characters who inevitably intrude. ( Is it romantic that he stole your notebook and has been carrying it around with him for weeks?) Television rarely screws with its audience the way You does unreliable narrators are a challenge for screen storytelling, and few shows can pull it off, much less do it with You’s warped, twisted confidence.įor all the gripping performances, sly social observation, and the shifting, slippery complexity of You’s direct address to its viewers, the show’s weak point has always been its internal mechanics. Seen through Joe’s eyes, and narrated with an intimate second-person address, familiar tropes from romantic stories are defamiliarized and then reframed as nightmarish intrusions. ![]() Now returning for a third season, You is the best it’s ever been - every bit as dark and stinging and cheerfully willing to screw with its audience, but now outfitted with a glorious foil for Joe’s monstrousness.īeyond Badgley’s unnerving, dark-eyed gaze, the most striking feature of You has always been the way it deploys internal monologue. ![]() Its lead character, Joe Goldberg, is a monster in the guise of a particularly thoughtful boyfriend, and while Penn Badgley’s perfect, rapturously obsessive performance is the driving force of the series, something about You has always made it seem like it’s tap-dancing over the story’s soft spots, trying to create the impression of momentum even when it’s staying in one place. Netflix’s dark, stalker-narrated murder drama You has often been messy, and typically been compelling. A stalker drama can be fun, but it’s got nothing on the murder-romp possibilities of a serial killer Mr.
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