Penn Badgley in You. Image courtesy of Netflix.
Netflix’s You is a hit. I’m all the way over here in Indonesia and both my wife and her sister are pretty into this addictive, pulpy soap opera. The show itself traveled an interesting road to get here - the first season, starring Penn Badgley and Elizabeth Lail actually premiered on Lifetime, but nobody watched it. Netflix picked up the international rights, and the thing, which was withering on Lifetime, somehow became a bone fide hit, leading the streaming giant to take it over fom Lifetime and produce a second season. That’s the alchemy of the market at work, I guess.
You is about a bookish nerd named Joe who on the outside appears to be a somewhat handsome, nice guy but is actually a creepy obsessive stalker who meets women, becomes laser-focused on them and breaks into their houses, steals their panties, hacks into their phones, and stalks them obsessively. Almost the entire show is heavily narrated from Joe’s point of view via voice-over. As a narrative device it’s kind of interesting, because we get Joe’s warped sense of reality and see how he frames all of these indefensible and intrusive acts as proof of how much he cares about the women he stalks.
Also, by placing us so deeply inside the head of an obvious monster the show works over-time to get us to identify with him. This was kind of the neat structural trick it pulled off in the first reason - it took all the tropes from a typical rom-com and re-cast them as the creepy acts of a stalker, proving once and for all that if rom-coms were real life they would actually be horror movies.
On the one hand, the show is truly outlandish and ridiculous garbage - it’s sensationalist pulp about a man who stalks women (and sometimes other people), all the while rationalizing his actions as those of a savior. And as mindless, titillating drama it works because Joe keeps getting himself into these bizarre cringe-worthy situations, and the writing features some pretty good jokes. It’s pretty much tailored for binge-watching. But for me, there’s only so much material in that idea and I thought the second season was pretty useless - you could see the “twist” coming a mile away, and frankly the first season wrapped everything up pretty nicely so I didn’t see the need to keep Joe’s story going.
But Netflix obviously saw a need - and that need is more money. But here’s the thing (spoiler incoming) - Joe tends to end up killing the objects of his affection. He’s not just obsessive and controlling, but murderously so. And the show takes great pleasure in showing him invade womens’ privacy and stalk them, with the clear understanding that by the end of the season’s arc he will probably have killed them or someone close to them. Sure, this does make for watchable drama because we the audience are nothing if not voyeurs and we enjoy watching sick spectacle from the safety of our couches. But it is kind of icky and disturbing, and the show is trying, through the various tricks of the medium, to get you to sympathize with Joe to a certain degree.
So can we divorce those issues from the show’s function as entertaining pulp drama? You be the judge!
