The grim, stalker-narrated murder thriller on Netflix . You’ve been sloppy a lot of the time, but you’ve also been intriguing. While Penn Badgley’s flawless, rapturously obsessed performance is the driving force of the series, something about You has always seemed like it’s tap-dancing over the story’s vulnerable points, attempting to give the sense of motion even while it’s staying in one place.
You, now in its third season, is the finest it’s ever been – every bit as nasty and stinging and eager to play with its viewers, but now with a wonderful counterbalance for Joe’s monotonousness.
The most remarkable element of You, apart from Badgley’s unsettling, dark-eyed stare, has always been the way it employs internal monologue.
Familiar motifs from romance stories are defamiliarized and then reframed as nightmare invasions as seen through Joe’s eyes and recounted in an intimate second-person address.
(Does it strike you as romantic that he took your notepad and has been carrying it about with him for weeks?)
Television seldom fools its viewers the way You does; untrustworthy narrators are a problem for screen narrative, and few shows can pull it off, much alone with You’s warped, twisted assurance.
The show’s weak point has always been its internal mechanics, despite its riveting performances, astute sociological observation, and the changing, slippery intricacy of You’s direct approach to its audience.
Sure, it’s thrown a few wrenches in the works – flashbacks to Joe’s past, distracting neighbour kids, and hovering side characters that invariably intrude.
You, on the other hand, has kept with the fundamental simplicity of its core concept, at least in the first season and much of the second: Joe likes a lady, he likes her a lot, he likes her too much, and ultimately he likes her to death.
Yes, there is more to it than that.
Season three introduces many important changes to the show’s prior formulas.
The first is that the performance has moved to yet another new location.
Season one was set in New York and was a parody of Brooklyn-ish affluent hipster society; season two was set in Los Angeles and had a lot of fun making fun of dippy health types.
Joe has moved to Madre Linda, a fictitious Bay Area suburb, in season three, and if he despised the Williamsburg man buns and the organic fruit of L.A., it pales in comparison to the utter hatred he has for the suburban, life-optimizing tech culture of Madre Linda.
Have you watched the third season of “you”
