One of the trickier aspects of You (Netflix) is its inability to reconcile its contradictory sides. On the one hand, it adores Joe (Penn Badgley), its book-loving, supersensitive lead who can disguise himself completely by putting on a baseball cap; on the other, he stalks and murders women who fascinate him, plus any men who get in the way of his obsessions.
In previous series, the show dealt with this tiny personality flaw by pairing him with a woman called Love who was as over the top, shall we say, as he was. By the end of season three, even she was too much of a killer for him, so Love had to go, taking with her the increasingly diluted gag about whether anyone was talking about love or Love.
Now, Joe, who has been declared dead in the US after leaving a bit of his foot behind in his old house, has come to London to re-stalk Marienne, the librarian who intrigued him when he was living in the suburbs.
British viewers sensitive to geographical liberties being taken by American series should consider this a trigger warning: not only does Joe end up posing as a professor on a vast university campus that seems to be inside Spitalfields market, but also we see a brief establishing shot of a part of London that looks suspiciously like Oxford. Don’t get me started on the efficiency of his walking routes, or the fact that no one goes into a pub in England and sits at the bar, alone, drinking neat whisky. It’s a pint in the corner with a newspaper, thank you very much.
In Spare, Prince Harry writes about “Club H”, in the basement of Highgrove, where he would hang out with his brother, Willy, and bring back friends from the pub, who all had nicknames like Badger and Skippy. You’s take on England is very much this world. Here, “twatty big dick” is the kind of insult that people use freely; everyone hunts with shotguns while spending a weekend at the country pile.
Under the alias of Jonathan Moore, Joe teaches English in the middle of Spitalfields and lives in Kensington in a vast flat borrowed from a Skippy or Badger type called Malcolm. Malcolm introduces Joe to his high society friends: an artist and billionaire’s son named Simon, an heiress named Gemma, a socialite named – I’m not making this up – Lady Phoebe Borehall-Blaxworth, and a gallerist, Kate (Charlotte Ritchie), who is the daughter of a supermodel.
It is all jolly hockey sticks and absinthe-soaked hurrahs until the group starts to be picked off, one by one, by a mysterious killer who isn’t Joe. This invites exactly the kind of attention he is trying to avoid, now that he is reformed and everything, because killing women is obviously very bad and he is totally over it.
The grubby pleasure of You, and the reason to keep watching, comes from its satirical side, which is far better than its stalker-murderer element (although this does give it a shot of adrenaline). In season one, it sent up intellectual literary New York. In season two, it had a ball with LA’s hippy-adjacent ultracapitalist spiritualism. Season three tackled marriage, parenthood and suburbia. But it feels a little adrift in London.
What is it trying to satirise here? With varying degrees of success, I think it is having a pop at the British class system, which is a surprise for those of us who weren’t expecting such a frothy thriller to turn into a Crass album.
It has another go at reinvention by turning itself into a Cluedo-esque Agatha Christie whodunnit, although it is arch enough to feature a discussion about whether or not the whodunnit is the lowest form of literature. It is fun, although it suffers a little under the weight of comparison, given that Rian Johnson has been plugging away at an updated and self-aware take on Christie with the Knives Out films, which are much cleverer than this.
When it works, it works because Badgley is charismatic and the show is brash enough to drop a decent number of plot twists into every episode. There is no waiting around for something to happen. All Joe has to do is glance out of a window at a woman and all hell breaks loose. It is a guaranteed rollercoaster, dressed in a tweed jacket, pointing its finger at toffs who look down on “peasants”. Whether You is any good or not is almost beside the point at this stage. It is entertaining, but it is also sort of awful, which means it hits that sweet spot of Netflix ambience. Don’t look too hard at it and you will have a lovely time.
