The Pitch: TV’s favorite semi-reluctant serial killer is once again on the move: After New York, Los Angeles, and Silicon Valley suburbia, Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) has a new identity, a new job, and a new city to explore. Sure, he’s licking his wounds a little bit, after having to fake his own death to escape the violent end of his marriage, but for a lover of books and old things, there are worse ways to live than teaching London college students about American literature.
Joe’s determined to lie low and not let his past — including his failed efforts to reconnect with Marianne (Tati Gabrielle) — complicate his life again. Before he realizes it, though, he’s been sucked into the circle of a new flavor of the young, rich, and annoying (they exist everywhere, it appears) just as members of this friend group start getting murdered.
Takes a serial killer to recognize a serial killer, and so Joe becomes committed to figuring out who the alleged “Eat the Rich Killer” is, if only for the sake of Kate (Charlotte Ritchie), Joe’s bristly yet vulnerable neighbor who has her own secrets, which is only one reason Joe’s intrigued by her…
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The Beginning of the End? The new season of You continues building upon the format established by past seasons in ways that are often pleasantly familiar — Joe arrives in a new city, stumbles across a new social scene that looks glamorous but features plenty of toxicity, and becomes fixated on an new “you” in ways that eventually result in lives ruined and people turning up dead.
As any lover of romance novels or Law & Order will tell you, the formula is the feature, not a bug; and watching Joe once again face the (usually figurative) knives of the spoiled rich as he builds a new life for himself in London makes Season 4 compelling from the jump. It helps that after Season 3’s dark descent into suburban marriage, the show isn’t afraid to move on like Joe has, finding a fascinating new set of character dynamics to explore and also pushing him into an altered role: No longer just trying to cover up his own crimes, Joe now finds himself trying to uncover someone else’s.
It’s a fitting choice for a season set in the homeland of detective fiction greats like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. However, it does start to feel a little rote at times, even though Season 4 contains more twists than any past season, with a body count that leaves you feeling a bit numb towards the end. (Hard to be shocked by yet another shocking murder at a certain point, even when you’re not sure whodunnit.)
You (Netflix)