The introduction of a new male character who acts as a surprisingly effective therapist (Robin Lord Taylor) for Joe opens him up a bit, allowing more psychoanalysis to take place outside of his voiceover. We’re more in on Joe’s creepiness from the get-go this time around, even if it’s at a slant, with end-of-episode switchbacks that make it impossible to pretend he’s simply a good guy who happens to fall into circumstances that require murder or that draw out the stalker in him, as Joe would like to do. Instead, You toys with us, like when it offers a vision of Love calling Will out and jerking him off at their work, making it seem like she might be nuts too, before revealing the truth that it’s all in his head. This season acknowledges that it can no longer play the “maybe he’s a psychopath, maybe he’s just a romantic” card the way it did last year. The show continues to provide biting commentary on things like designer grocery stores, which makes the show fun and keeps Joe and his alias Will just on the side of “is this guy psycho or does he have a point?” That said, the show’s best zeitgeist-y commentary is the fact that this misogynist murderer is the one blathering on in voiceover about the same surface-level critique of the way women use social media that we’re all sick of hearing everywhere from the nightly news to our boomer relatives over the holidays. Read more – You: Subverting the Nice Guy Trope He’s trying not to repeat the mistakes of his past, and in one of its most inspired subplots, Joe confronts another male predator – though of course, to Joe’s mind, the word “another” has no place in that sentence. Precariously, Joe attempts friendship this time around. Sera Gamble, of the insightful, pop culture riddled The Magicians, and Greg Berlanti, of the emotional coming of age stories in Dawson’s Creek and Everwood to Love, Simon and, to an extent, the Arrowverse, are a perfect pair to remix tropes that are meant to get our dopamine flying, like a 360-degree slo-mo kiss, with a truly unsettling use of a meat grinder.Īfter a successful (but somewhat divisive) first season on Lifetime that picked up popularity once it was bingeable on Netflix, You is back for season 2 and admirably up to the challenge of keeping its format fresh without straining all believability that a guy who killed at least three people is still out there doing his book-store-clerk-from-a-Wes-Anderson-movie thing. If you insist on depriving yourself of that joy, there’s enough background info in the flashbacks and “previously on” to give you an idea, but again: you’re only robbing yourself. If you’re completely new to the show, it’s worth it to binge season one for Shay Mitchell’s Peach Salinger alone. Guinevere Beck now occupies the role of spectral ex-girlfriend, haunting Joe – who goes by Will – as he tries to be a better man with a woman who is, of course, called Love. Throughout the season, You season 2 goes into more detail about how their relationship ended, what Candace is after, and Joe’s troubled childhood. In last season’s finale, she showed up in the flesh after a number of hallucinations. To update the show rather than simply having this being You the Sequel: Now With a Different Stalkee, Joe is in LA, hiding from Candace, the ex-girlfriend he (and we) thought he killed prior to the events of the first season. Yes, there’s another Joe skeptic, but instead of a friend of the object of his affections (word choice intentional), it’s the property manager at his apartment complex. Although this time, instead of a malleable young Joe analogue, it’s Ellie, a 15 year old girl capable of going toe to toe with Joe and maybe even figuring out what he’s up to or at least taking him down a peg. You is back on a new network (rescued by Netflix) for season 2, in a new city, with a new love interest (saccharinely named Love), and a new moppet to protect. But to the viewer it becomes ever more clear that, Dan Humphrey-wholesome good looks aside, Joe is the real danger. He thinks he’s the leading man, the Nice Guy™ there to rescue a woman from the vain banality of millennial heartache and her own bad choices. You is horror filtered through romantic comedy, with Joe literally quoting When Harry Met Sally (apparently the only way he’d consume a woman’s words) in his ever-present voiceover. Joe is a New York bookseller who will go to any length to get the girl he wants, all while convincing himself that his dangerous and disturbing acts are for her sake. Enter You, a10-episode scripted drama narrated by Penn Badgley’s Joe.
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