season 2

Hey there, you. I think you need to watch this TV show I’ve been enjoying for the last two seasons. It’s called You, maybe you’ve heard of it, and it started out on Lifetime before Netflix picked it up. It’s based on a series of books, and the author is Caroline Kepnes. 

Joe Goldberg is the main character. He’s everything that Hollywood and female audiences eat up: he’s an attractive man who manages a bookstore — what’s hotter than a man who reads? — and he oozes with charm. However, that’s not where his character development stops. Instead of finding a nice girl and spending time with her to learn everything about her, he learns it all by himself through stalking her both online and in person while watching through her windows. His love interest’s name is Beck. He finds her weaknesses and her flaws and uses them to his advantage. Instead of helping her solve her problems, he solves them for her by murdering those who he decides are threatening her success. 

The show is from his perspective, and thus it challenges viewers to disagree with his actions. Of course, Joe is a terrible person. He is a serial killer and a sociopath. But he rationalizes his actions in his own head as justifiable in order to save Beck, and the audience receives those rationalizations as fact through his narration and the visuals of the scene. He is an extremely unreliable narrator. He teaches viewers to hate characters who are against him, even though their intentions are a lot more ethical than his. Together, these factors challenge viewers to see through the charm and everything they are taught to trust, which makes every episode an internal struggle. 

You infuses romantic elements into its psychological thriller storyline, which makes every episode unique, shocking, and engaging. What I love most about the show is how focused the story’s progression is on the characters themselves, instead of purely on the plot. Of course, it matters what happens and when, but more importantly, viewers follow Joe’s loss of control. He starts out calm and turns out very desperate — and that’s just in the first season. 

Whenever I watch the show, I catch myself feeling sympathy for Joe and getting angry with other characters. It’s a trap the author and the producers intended in order to make me question why I trust certain figures more than others. There’s bias, since I’m hearing the story from Joe himself, but he does not resemble what the media portrays as the typical criminal. Instead, men like him play love interests in romcoms for the whole family to enjoy, and the shift in dynamics really wakes me up as a viewer to question everything and learn along the way. 

I cannot say too much about the plot, especially in terms of the second season, without giving too much away, but I can say it is addictive. My roommate and I watched the entire second season in a day because she was visiting for about twenty-four hours over winter break and we just could not wait for the semester to resume to watch it together. Was it overwhelming and a lot to process? Yes. Was it a beautiful train wreck from which we couldn’t look away? Yes. Would I do it again? Yes. 

Season three is set to come out sometime in 2021, depending on COVID-19 delays. I highly recommend that you watch You before its release so you can join in on the hype as the new season premieres on Netflix and it inevitably trends on Twitter. You don’t want to regret it, do you?