You, in which a serial killer and stalker of women, but a sexy one, is somehow fashioned into the hero of the piece, is a fundamentally preposterous show. It washes its hands of plausibility in favour of vocal fry, phones without passwords and quasi-literary second-person monologues. Perhaps most preposterous of all is that it has stretched the story over five seasons. You used to be fun, at least: a guilty-ish pleasure, aware of its own over-the-top silliness, that once gave the impression of knowing that it wasn’t so much pushing at the edges of credulity as body-barging it into an abyss. But as the seasons have ticked away, the satire has seeped out, leaving a mess of its own making that it tries, and inevitably struggles, to clear up.
The main problem is that Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) is both the hero and the villain. In this final – and that really is a mercy – season, You falls back on its old habit of not knowing which it would prefer him to be. After a predictably murderous stint as a lecturer at an English university, Joe is now married to billionaire and philanthropist Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie), living in New York with her and with his newly returned son Henry. He is no longer pretending to be dead and another person. Instead, he is a public figure, hiding from his many misdeeds in plain sight.
