Sometimes you just need TV you can pick apart like a tasty snack, gutting it for all its flaws and having an absolutely brilliant time doing so. And You is that. If you enjoyed the previous seasons, you will love this. And if your interest waned when it got a bit repetitive, this season may well bring you back into the fold.
Season four of You starts with a very necessary location change. Our murdering, hopelessly romantic protagonist Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgeley) is now a London boy, working as a university lecturer and hiding behind the pseudonym of Jonathan Moore, though the geographical accuracy on-screen is about as on point as that Taylor Swift song. That is: terrible (what, for instance, is “Putnam” football club?).
Goldberg, sorry, Moore is loving London, which he’s using as a handy new hideout after killing too many people (lovers, enemies, random people who pissed him off) back home in America. He’s also somehow living in a one bed South Kensington flat with built in bookshelves and wood burning stoves on a lecturer’s salary, but hey, You’s complete lack of believability is part of its charm. There’s a cosy familiarity in returning to Joe’s head, like slipping into a well worn pair of shoes.
He follows old patterns again and again, of course. Mourning the loss of his most recent flame Marienne (remember her? From season 3?) Joe falls headlong into another obsession with new girl Kate, played by Charlotte Ritchie, who lives in the flat across from him with her Bullingdon Club-type boyfriend Malcolm (Stephen Hagan). In case you haven’t seen You before, this is what typically happens: Boy meets girl, boy becomes obsessed, girl has dark past, boy kills lots of people to protect her and make sure she stays in love with him, boy runs away.
Needless to say, the scenes where Joe tries to stop himself from going down these old paths have a certain tired inevitability to them. Luckily, the writers know this, and speed through it a little faster than previous seasons.
As ever, Joe accidentally ends up part of another annoying millennial friendship group (again! How does this keep happening to him!), thanks to his obsession with Kate, except this time they’re all extremely posh, overly Bri’ish and feel like they jumped straight out of a Made in Chelsea episode from 2014.
Two of them do shine, though: the stereotypical airhead heiress Lady Phoebe, played by EastEnders’ Tilly Keeper, provides some bubbly, light relief, and Downtown Abbey alum Ed Speelers is more convincing than most as the Boohoo Man version of Eddie Dempsey, a left wing council estate lad-turned-Oxford grad “man of the people”-type running for Mayor. As the new love interest, Ritchie gives it a good go but, crucially, has no chemistry with Badgley, which can make their scenes feel a little stiff. This isn’t necessarily her fault – we’ve seen Joe Goldberg fall in love with so many women now it almost feels as if Badgley’s chemistry tank could easily have run dry.
You has also officially decided that we are on Joe’s side for season four. Yes, it was fun being a bit scared of him during the first and second season, but the writing couldn’t toe that line for four seasons and now the internet has reluctantly ended up rooting for him. As a result, this season’s Joe is more likeable and a touch pathetic, and it’s exemplified in the power switch up, with Joe being the one who’s stalked this time around – possibly by a member of the very same friendship group he’s just joined. Are there murders? Of course they are – but this time, it’s not just Joe wielding the knife.
The humour has been dialled up too. This season he’s disposing of bodies to the tune of Cardi B’s I Like It, corpses are falling out of crates and he’s getting shot in the exact toe he cut off in order to frame Love for his murder. The show knows it can’t survive on just drama anymore, and plays into it with gusto.
There are times where You starts to grate – Joe’s voiceover provides incessant exposition and some of the lines are terrible. At one point someone literally says they are going “peasant hunting” – but hey, we’re not watching for believability. You is hot trash, but it’s also riveting, and we will keep watching.
