Imagine falling in love with your local bookstore clerk, just to find out he secretly stalked you and forced himself into your life. Well if you’re into thrillers then this new Netflix series for 2019 is the one for “you”.
The psychological thriller YOU premiered in Lifetime last September to fairly low numbers-(it averaged about 650,000 viewers per week)-and honestly, it never entered my radar. I’d never heard of it until it premiered on Netflix last month, where its second season will also air, as the show is now a “Netflix Original”, and since then, I’ve seen a number of articles and reviews written about the series. Even though I’m only on the 5th episode, things have gotten pretty intense!
The “clever” bookstore manager uses his Internet know-how to stalk a woman into falling in love with him, and it’s not the light, cute type of stalking your high school crush either. Joe Goldberg (Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley) steals the phone of Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail), follows her texts, hacks into all of her social media accounts, breaks into her apartment, watches her have sex both from inside and outside of her apartment, and when friends or exes interfere with Joe’s plan to win over Beck, murder is not out of the question.
If you’re into tv shows that are alluring and mind boggling, then YOU is a perfect fit. It’s fascinating, and it works because it is well written, the characters are well developed, and because it fits into a mold that has already been pre-mapped and hardwired into our brains. We have to constantly remind ourselves that the outcome that Joe wants — where our minds go out of inertia, out of the habit of years of television watching — isn’t the outcome that we want, because Joe is an abhorrent, malicious and evil human being. It’s a horror movie that Sera Gamble and Caroline Kepnes have overlaid into a rom-com formula, and for that alone, YOU is a fascinating and uncomfortable series to watch.
The psychological thriller YOU premiered in Lifetime last September to fairly low numbers-(it averaged about 650,000 viewers per week)-and honestly, it never entered my radar. I’d never heard of it until it premiered on Netflix last month, where its second season will also air, as the show is now a “Netflix Original”, and since then, I’ve seen a number of articles and reviews written about the series. Even though I’m only on the 5th episode, things have gotten pretty intense!
The “clever” bookstore manager uses his Internet know-how to stalk a woman into falling in love with him, and it’s not the light, cute type of stalking your high school crush either. Joe Goldberg (Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley) steals the phone of Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail), follows her texts, hacks into all of her social media accounts, breaks into her apartment, watches her have sex both from inside and outside of her apartment, and when friends or exes interfere with Joe’s plan to win over Beck, murder is not out of the question.
If you’re into tv shows that are alluring and mind boggling, then YOU is a perfect fit. It’s fascinating, and it works because it is well written, the characters are well developed, and because it fits into a mold that has already been pre-mapped and hardwired into our brains. We have to constantly remind ourselves that the outcome that Joe wants — where our minds go out of inertia, out of the habit of years of television watching — isn’t the outcome that we want, because Joe is an abhorrent, malicious and evil human being. It’s a horror movie that Sera Gamble and Caroline Kepnes have overlaid into a rom-com formula, and for that alone, YOU is a fascinating and uncomfortable series to watch.