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My Peak TV Journey You

You is one of the shows I’ve watched and written about since it debuted. I read all the books, watched every episode, following them in different directions. In preparation for the final season, I looked at my previous writing on it. I was pleased to see that I compared You to The Collector early on, especially as I was reminded of the latter during the most recent season of You Must Remember This. (The episode stated that the music for the film was so bad, it ruined it. I can honestly say that I have no memory of the music.) I was also surprised to revisit my comparison between You and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and never updated it to acknowledge that Scott Michael Foster had a roll in the third season. This is the correction.

For each season of the tv show and book in the series, I find myself wondering why do I put myself through these stories? And the answer is complicated. Some of it is that I think if I came across these stories when I was younger I would have thought it was laugh out funny in a way that I can’t now. I think it’s funny, but in a too tense to laugh way. It gets the joking-but-not-joking aspect of the current age. It knows why it’s hard to fight, and it takes it seriously enough to satirize. Joe’s is so whiney, often while doing horrible things like kidnapping and killing people. The ways in which he blames his victims is funny! But, Joe’s victims are often presented as grotesque caricatures. They’re like to remind you of real world types you already hate. It’s easy to root for their demise. You often have remind yourself that they don’t deserve what Joe’s violence. If anyone is worthy of judging them accurately, it’s not Joe. As the series go on, I also find myself liking how imperfect Joe’s victims are. Right now it feels like movements are always looking for the perfect person to represent their cause. It makes it too easy to dismiss people who we think would be bad examples for the cause. And that’s not good for anyone. So it makes me think, in ways that I like, even when I don’t like the stories themselves.

As with The Collector, Joe’s disdain for his victims is often couched in terms of a have not resenting the haves. It’s easy to see how arbitrary and non meritorious that distinction is. So it is appropriate that in the final season Joe starts as member of a family that has the kind of money and power Joe has literally killed people for being “undeserving” of. And this family is awful in the ways that having too much money makes people awful. They’re obsessed with themselves and power. They somehow are always fighting and avoiding conflict at the same time. They are perfect for making the subtext of Joe’s moral relativism text. And that text says he is often motivated by the idea of looking good in someone’s eyes. He kills to direct attention towards himself, and because he can’t stand when people see him as other than what he wants to be. After his bout with a disassociated identity he can admit to himself that:

He likes killing people, and

He wants someone to love him for the fact that he will kill for them.

At the start of the season he has been on his best behavior largely because he likes the image of him as the supporting husband of the reforming heiress. And as Kate knows and helped him hide some crimes, he deluded himself into thinking that she’d love him even if she knew how many he killed and how he enjoyed it.

Look closely at Joe’s recorded history of hating the rich, and it is clear that a lot of it is just envy. This gets reflected in how the women he calls “You” alternate between those who have similar backgrounds to him, (Beck, Marrienne, and Brontë) and those who have backgrounds he wishes he had (Love and Kate). With the former group he has a “you and me against the world” fantasy, and a “let’s show them how it is done.” Neither is really about the women in question, nor are the great basis for relationships.

Surprisingly, in the fifth season, his wife Kate Lockwood, played by Charlotte Ritchie, develops into an effective foil. In the fourth season she came off as a wishy-washy. The most interesting thing about how she was introduced is that Joe somehow mistakenly thought she was a working class provider of culture to the more aristocratic circle of friends she had, when really she was a new money heiress who didn’t want to be seen as too closely connected to her family’s capitalist empire. Joe is great at seeing what he wants to see. So is Kate. Too bad in her first season that mostly came off as existing for plot, never feeling like a formed character. In the final season, after Joe kills her Uncle Bob on her request, who she is and what she wants finally come into focus. Bob was sabotaging Kate, and she knew he killed before. But this when she begins to understand that he likes to kill and has done more than he told her. It’s a good way to have her have a revelation and be too compromised to act on it immediately. By the time she was saying about their relationship, “I unleashed a monster and I built a mote around him” I was like, that was really well put.

So this makes it time to discuss the Lockwood family:

Cowboy Uncle Bob, played by Michael Dempsey, is good for the first victim of the season and he is an easy one to hate. Firstly, he’s a patriarchal figure who isn’t the friendly alternative he presents himself as. He thinks Joe is a “simp”, therefore mistaken about what to look for in a man. But more importantly he betrayed Kate, attempting to leak a story of her culpability in contaminating a site with carcinogens making many children ill. He betrayed her not because what she did on her father’s behest should be treated as a crime. He does it because in her atonement Kate is having more of the corporation’s profits go towards charity. He’s been rich so long that he can’t even conceive of the “I’d be one of the good rich people” fantasy Joe and Kate try to live.

Then there are Kate’s older sisters, the twins Reagan and Maddie, both played by Anna Camp. Camp is delightfully campy and she does make Reagan and Maddie two distinct characters. Reagan the aggrieved bully who resents Kate for being favored by their father. Maddie the intuitive PR expert who gives Joe the pet name of Boo Boo. Their plot had a lot of the most ludicrous twists and occasional moments that made me think “why are they dragging this out?” But ultimately, I’m just glad I got to see Anna Camp play these roles.

Kate’s half brother Teddy, played by Griffin Matthews, is officially illegitimate. He did not grow up with his siblings nor their father. While he is now recognized as a member of the family, the fact that he did not grow up with their father means, unlike Kate, he was never put in a compromising role by their father. He is comfortable spending money, but does have history using it to make problems disappear. Therefore he is unironically living the “being a better rich person” life that Kate and Joe ape. His potential for corruption and disillusionment is one of the tensions of the season.

Finally Joe’s son Henry, now played by Frankie DeMaio, is reintroduced to the narrative. Kate was able use her lawyers to take him from the gay couple in Madre Linda with whom he was left, something she later admits was cruel. His potential for corruption, or more specifically becoming like his father is an even bigger tension for the season.

Joe’s frustration with dealing with this family and the inevitable tension between him and Kate makes room for the new “You” of the season, Brontë, also known as Louise Flannery played by Madeline Brewer. Joe meets Brontë when he finds out that she’s been squatting in Mooney’s Bookstore, his former place of employment which is closed at the beginning of the season. It’s now owned by Kate and waiting for Joe to reopen. This season I noticed a Nancy Sikes poster on the side of one of the shelves. I have to assume that it was made specifically for the series. I doubt there is much demand for posters of the characters from Oliver Twist. Even if there was a series made sometime, I don’t think Nancy would be in high demand. But in a series about a guy who has a history of killing his romantic partners, having a poster of a female character who is murdered by her romantic partner is appropriate.

The fact that Brontë is initially taking part in a Catfishing/entrapment of Joe was predictable. But the kind of predictable that creates excitement waiting for the reveal. In a flashback we learn that Louise studied creative writing at The New School and as her TA/mentor. It’s great to have Elizabeth Lail return to the screen to bring things full circle. Also in negates the scene in season two where Joe fantasizes about Beck forgiving him for her murder. That was just in his head, her murder wrecked people's lives.

(Coincidentally, The New School, was my employer when the first season aired. It kind of amused me that they chose to film in a location whose look said “University Campus”, that clearly wasn’t TNS. TNS does not have a closed campus, the buildings are all distinctly post-WW2, modern architecture. TNS on You is a closed campus with neo-gothic architecture. While returning irritations from the first season, I still sometimes think of that first edition of Jane Eyre. It was obviously not a first edition as it was attributed to Charlotte Brontë, and everyone who ever went though a Brontë phase can tell you that the sisters originally published under male pseudonyms, therefor a first edition of Jane Eyre would be attributed to Currer Bell. While the edition itself was not mentioned this season, Jane Eyre was and Brontë took her name from that family of writers, so I might as well bring it up.)

Louise had to leave her program to return to Ohio and care for her sick mother. While there she saw news of Beck’s murder. When Beck’s book was released Louise finds a reference to Ibsen like the one Beck explicitly told her not to use in her writing. Here we learn that some of the discussion in Brontë and Joe’s first meeting was the same dialogue that Beck and Louise had, only with Brontë having Beck’s lines and Joe having Louise’s. I love this detail. Online Louise meets three other people who don’t believe the official story of Beck’s murder at the hands of her therapist/lover Dr Nicky. One of Brontë’s allies, Clayton, is introduced as a manipulative ex boyfriend. After Joe murders him it is revealed that I’d actually turns out to be Dr. Nicky’s son. That twist was a surprise. Shame they couldn’t fit anything that would have Dr Nicky on screen and reacting to it. Clayton’s murder gets broadcast live on TikTok by Brontë’s other allies, Dominique and Phoenix, played by Natasha Behnam and b respectively. (b also became a reoccurring character on Elsbeth in its most recent season. As Elizabeth Lail also appeared in a couple of episodes of Elsbeth, the connection seemed extra fun.) This brings social media back to the forefront in a way that it really hasn’t been for a while. And it feels refreshed and dangerous, just as it should.

While Joe is released pending trail, the Dominique and Phoenix make a video to crowd source stories of suspicion about him. This leads to one of my favorite Joe narration lines, “Did my death sentence begin with ‘pop off’?”

There is a deluge of response videos giving the opportunity for stars of previous seasons to show up and state their positions. I was pleased to see Saffron Burrows reprise her role as Love and Forty’s mother, blaming Joe for the deaths of her “babies.” Even though almost immediately after Love and Forty get called out as terrible people. Zach Cherry appeared as Ethan for the first time since season one! But my favorite were the swinging couple from season 3, Sherry and Cary Conrad, who also wrote a book about their experience being kidnapped. It’s great how they were able to fit that into their sense of self.

While Joe has accepted that he’s the type of person who enjoys killing, he also wants to be known as the guy who “didn’t kill any of the people in the TikTok stitch.” In some ways this feels like a contradiction, but I think it goes well with how he blames his victims for “making” him kidnap them and then resenting their needs for survival. For this reason it was a good surprise to learn that he was still in touch with Will Bettelheim, the only kidnapping victim Joe voluntarily released. He also lives a life of crime, so they have similar head spaces. The TikTok plot also introduces a Men’s Rights Vigilante, named Dane, played by Jefferson Dove. Dane attempts to kidnap Brontë, but gets kidnapped by Joe. It’s a good way to point out that while Joe showers the women he addresses as “You” with positive attention, he’s really no different then the men on the internet who rant about women not giving them what they want.

The final season ends with Joe’s crimes coming to light and the image he cultivated in others eyes being destroyed. The story of Joe’s exposure, and his relationship with Brontë, works as a mirror of the audience’s with Joe and the show. It cycles through suspicion, buying into his romanticism, and eventually lands on disgust for him. Louise/Brontë starts as a cat fisher, finds her self drawn to Joe’s attention and affection only to return to needing to expose him for Beck’s murder. It’s as affected by her frustration with her colleagues in exposure as it does with Joe’s charisma and the rapport they build. This gives her an identity crisis, not unlike Joe’s dissociative identity in the previous season. Meeting Joe’s surviving victims, Marrienne and Nadia, who Kate has gathered for her own taking Joe down plan, eventually clears her head. Marrienne in particular can relate to the situation in which Brontë/Louise finds herself. Nadia, who went to prison after being framed for one of Joe’s murders, has a righteous anger that is great to see. It’s really satisfying when she reveals to Kate that Joe is the “eat the rich killer” and Kate, while now aware that he’s killed more people than he admitted, has this reaction that says, “why did I never suspect that?”

This is a good place to segue back to me and why I have been watching so long. As I said in a previous post, I’ve never been in love. I’m also asexual. So I don’t have any experience getting into these powerful emotional states that make you do things that look crazy to those on the outside. But I do like fiction, and take it in through multi media. So I often see how people value romantic love over any other kind of love, and find this disturbing. People project onto romantic love the possibility of redemption, a proof of personal righteousness. This expectation of the power of romantic love is an insane amount of pressure to put on a relationship between two people! And I think some of the appeal of You, both television and books, is that is one of their subjects. In an earlier entry about the book series I made a comparison between You and Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. Now I am going to wrap up by comparing it to another opera, Donezetti’s Lucia Di Lamermoore. For those who don’t know, Lucia Di Lammermoore is about a Scottish noble woman who is in love with a man from a rival clan. Her brother forces her to marry another man and during the wedding night she snaps and kills her husband. Some people writing about the opera point out that her murderous decent in madness isn’t just because she was forced into an unwanted relationship. It’s because of the dueling pressure of her brother demanding family loyalty and her lover who wants her undivided affection. Who can live like that? I like the acknowledgment that the kind of pressure that people put on romantic love is destructive.

Before the season came out, Netflix released a video of Penn Badgley summarizing the previous four seasons. In his summaries he mentioned the distinct, but related, color palate each season has. It did make me appreciate how good it looks. The shots often have a fuzziness around image edges emphasizing Joe’s tunnel vision, and helping maintain focus. It’s a well made production.

There were moments of the season where I thought that they were stretching things out unnecessarily. I found Maddie and Brontë’s fluctuating from ally to adversary with Joe frustrating. But I like where it ended up. An emasculated Joe is put on trial and convicted for all his crimes. “Goodbye Yellowbrick Road” plays over a montage of Joe’s arrest and trial. It’s a call back to how Peach was listening to that song when he attacked her while jogging in the book, though my show memory doesn’t include this detail. Louise takes over the narration, sums up where various characters ended up. Then we see Joe, in prison, receiving sexually explicit fan mail. He thinks this is more messed up than what he’s done. Then he muses that this is a sign of a how there is really something wrong with society, implicating the viewer. Even as someone who kept watching to make sure he got punished, who am I to disagree?

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