It’s taken me long enough to realise it, but the Netflix series You – now entering its fourth season – is very close to being good. Although we have to be careful, throwing around words with traditional meanings such as “good”, don’t we. It’s not good, exactly, in that it’s good, but it’s very good at what it does, and I think in 2023 that’s close enough to good that we’ll take it. So: despite everything I have said about You since its inception, the Netflix series You is g – I can’t say it. It’s gooooo – I can’t. [Closes eyes, inhales deeply] it’s alright.
Where are we this time? After New York, LA and suburbia, Joe now finds himself murdering about in London, although in a way you may have to turn your brain off for: he teaches on a campus in Egham, exits on to a street in Spitalfields, then walks all the way to the expansive flat in Kensington that he lives in on a professorial salary. (Normally I don’t care too much about US productions taking egregious licenses with London geography and financial reality, but come on.) He sees a beautiful woman for less than 100th of a second through a window and falls utterly and completely in love with her in a way that somehow always ends up with a perspex cage. The point with You, though, is to just let it wash over you without thinking too hard – essentially it’s a soap, just with higher production values and an incredible face and performance at the centre of it – and the schlockiness of it has always been a feature, not a bug. No more is this evident in season four, where Joe – doing the usual growling, menacing voiceover that Penn Badgley so excels at – is faced with a cavalcade of posh English people, all sounding more English than an English person has ever sounded on screen. Obviously, at some point, someone dies. The cogs whirr into motion. Bluffs and double-bluffs. Every character could secretly be a threat. Thrills and twists await. And then, that beautiful woman wanders casually on to screen and – hello, you.
In recent years I’ve been working up a pitch to UK and US governments where, when a TV show gets big enough buzz online, every writer and producer involved in that show has their internet connection cut until the entire run is over. This would be legally enforced. This is because, well, the internet is still a relatively new and ever-moving, ever-bulging tool, and whenever it likes something it suffocates it. A good example, I have always thought, was Orange Is the New Black, which started as a very high quality TV show, then devolved into something that felt almost exclusively like fan service, and then devolved even further until it was being written by the fans, for the fans, essentially becoming fan fiction of itself. The worst thing that could possibly happen for a TV show in 2023 is for the people involved in it to discover that the viewers actually like it. That’s when you get, for example, Sex Education season three.
I was expecting season four of You to suffer from that same fatigue. But what it’s managed to do is a tremendous trick, sort of forced by the central mechanism of the show itself: whenever Joe gets a bit murdery and burns his life down, which is constantly, he has to flee and do a hard reset somewhere else. At the end of the last season he killed his wife before she killed him, cut two of his own toes off to leave in the kitchen her body was in, burned the house down to frame it as a murder-suicide then dropped his baby son off on the porch of a trusted friend. Any other TV show would have some loose ends to tie up. Not You! He never mentions it again! He’s got English friends to make! He’s got another woman to follow through a crowd while wearing a simple black cap, as if that disguise alone is enough to distract from the fact that he’s possibly the most handsome man on the planet! Occasionally he’ll sit down somewhere and think, “I really must stop murdering people,” but then he murders someone again anyway, and the ride just whirrs around all over again. Listen, it comes with caveats, but: if you turn your brain off, if you don’t interrogate it too much, and if you really don’t try to intellectualise it, You is actually – fine, I’ll say it. You is good.
