You originally ran on the Lifetime series before Netflix picked the show up. Penn Badgley stars in You as Joe Goldberg.
Magnus McFaulds
Lantern Staff
You is a show that makes anyone who watches concerned for their own safety. Coming out on Wednesday, Dec. 26, it came at a perfect time for a post-Christmas, cuddle with your sweetheart binge. It really is that, but it is not what viewers would expect and may leave them questioning some moments in their own relationship. Aside from its unsettling tones, You sparked the interest of Netflix watchers, gaining itself reported more than 40 million viewers in its first month.
The show starts innocent with its lead, Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley), a New York bookstore manager, going about his daily bookstore activities when the unsuspecting love interest, Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail), wonders into the store in search of a book. Viewers immediately start falling in love with them both. They seem so perfect, and Joe seems like a possible dream man based on the monologue that fills in every potential silencing moment in the show. From the second Beck enters the store to the last second of the tenth episode, he is obsessed with her and does not hide it. He becomes the stalker of all stalkers, searching her on every social platform you can imagine and then finding her home. This is only the beginning of an escapade of very concerning moments in the life of Joe and his obsession.
Joe can be described as a, psychopath, murderer, creepy and private. Viewers can learn all of this from the first 10 minutes of the show. It takes 10 episodes to find out anything about his old love interest, Candace Stone (Ambyr Childers), who is in just about every single episode, but not in any normal way like one would expect. No, not even close, she appears in a series of progressively revealing flashbacks and sometimes disturbing memories and dreams through Joe. She is the one character that from her first appearance viewers are convinced they know exactly what happened to her and feel like they can guess every moment that they see her in, and they would be right, until the last episode, but I won’t spoil that. Other characters such as Beck’s best friend, Peach Salinger (Shay Mitchell), Beck’s lover as of the show’s start, Benjamin “Benji” Ashby Jr. III (Lou Taylor Pucci), and Joe’s young neighbor, Paco (Luca Padovan), have a less defined story and is a harder guess for their outcome but still leave little to be guessed.
I’d personally say the show has a very predictable storyline. I love TV and film, but after watching countless hours, viewers start to know where a show is going and each plot line is going to take you the second it is introduced. The first thing the show gives viewers for free is the underlying foreshadowing through the opening ident. Showing nothing but a big ‘YOU’ with blood splattering on to it, I don’t want to give it away too easily, but viewers might get the idea that there may be some bloodshed? Well, you’d be right. I personally am in love with the show, and every plotline opens it, nicely closes them, but if they’re left open, and many are, they are done in a way that allows yourself as the viewer to wonder how it’s going to go and be tied off until the second season is released sometime in 2019, likely in the fall.
Besides the fact that I have a personal love for the show, I’m still not happy with the storytelling. The entirety of the show feels like there is someone in the background holding up a big sign telling you what’s going to happen next, and they may as well have done so. They leave nothing for the imagination with the seemingly nonstop monologues from Joe that tells you his every single thought and action even off screen. Actions get spoon fed to the viewer in case you couldn’t guess what happened.
Overall, You is nicely shot and looks very hopeful for the next season. They have a lot of work to do if they expect to get viewers to the end of another season. I would put it at a very generous seven and a half stars.
