Netflix’s You is Bad TV & I Don’t Recommend It (Season 1 Review)
I’m always in search of quality TV shows to watch, but after watching the first season of Netflix’s popular psychological thriller, You, I can confidentially say that it is most definitely not such a show. You is a guilty pleasure show without the pleasure. It is a show where characters aren’t just unlikeable – they’re also unable to grow and without an ounce of complexity or depth. The plot of You is nonsensical and requires viewers to totally disregard any logic. Things that occur on the show are so far removed from what would happen in reality that it might as well be set on a parallel Earth, where people are all awful, and society is somehow completely oblivious to the fact that there’s a (very obvious and sloppy) killer in their midst.
“Look out - he’s right behind you!” Also, please no reading the book before you pay for it.
The protagonist of the show is a creepy bookstore manager living in New York City named Joe Goldberg. Joe has basically every negative characteristic you’d expect in a stereotypical psychopathic serial killer. Despite being extremely disturbed, which we get to hear when we learn of Joe’s true thoughts by way of voiceover, Joe is able to appear completely normal and say all the right things no matter the situation.
“How can he be the killer when he’s so handsome and charming?”
That’s really all there is to Joe’s character though. He’s a cardboard cutout of what we, non-serial killer humans, expect a serial killer psycho/worst person imaginable to be like. What makes villainous protagonists great characters, like Bryan Cranston’s Walter White on Breaking Bad or James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano on The Sopranos, isn’t simply that they’re morally corrupt and that evil equals entertaining – it’s that they’re complex characters with different and often conflicting aspects to their personalities.
Viewers might not agree with them, but we can understand how characters like these became the people they are, as well as also witness them grow and change over time because of their experiences. On You, we get that Joe is awful and crazy pretty quickly, but then that’s all there is to him. Watching the thought process of a crazed lunatic stalker-killer might be interesting for an hour or two if this were a movie, but this is an ongoing series, and the “Joe thinks/does bad thing, says right thing”-routine gets old pretty quickly.
Other characters on the show are equally incapable of growth, or of even being remotely interesting people. This includes Guinevere Beck, the aspiring author Joe stalks and ultimately tricks into having a relationship with him, along with her circle of rich and obnoxious friends. Great characters have the power to elevate a show. On You we get a cast of unlikeable model-looking types without depth.
Pictured: Character trying to look intense.
Issues with characters could be at least partially overlooked if we had an intriguing, well-thought out story, but that’s not the case. The show is totally ridiculous when looked at through any sort of critical lens. You would have viewers believe that it’s a breeze to commit murders (in a totally not planned out and sloppy manner) in an extremely big city like New York. In the world of You, all it takes is a well-timed Instagram post from crazy Joe on a victim’s phone that he’s stolen and all suspicion about what’s happened to a missing person is totally erased.
Joe can also do things like chase another character in Central Park (in broad daylight), but somehow go totally unseen when he clonks them on the head with a rock (since the park is miraculously empty). He can then escape, leaving behind no clues. Joe’s attacks on others are never well-planned. In fact, Joe never really even seems to be all that intelligent. He can just magically get away with any crimes he commits because that’s what’s required of him by the show’s writers.
Actor Penn Badgley (as Joe) giving us looks like this is two thirds of the show’s runtime.
At the end of the day, I know there are plenty of TV shows that are popular not for their realism or quality, but because they’re simply enjoyable shows for people to watch. I watched The OC growing up. I watched Smallville. Not every program needs to be prestige television. But the thing about guilty pleasure shows is that they’re at least supposed to be enjoyable and fun.
You is too mean-spirited for my liking to ever be fun. When you couple that with bad characters and a subpar plot, what you get is a nonsensical mess of a show. I really think the creators of the series believe that simply by making the main character of the show a serial killer, then by default that character must be interesting. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
If you dislike quality (and/or fun), You might be the show for you. For everyone else I’d recommend steering clear of this mindless dud of a show. I wish I had.
Grade: 2/10