He’s a creep, he’s a weirdo. But Penn Badgley’s murderously swish villain in You (Netflix from Thursday) is also a streaming-era sensation – a knave from whom viewers crave the very worst. There’s lots of his trademark throat-squeezing, gaslit nastiness in the show’s fifth and final season – but Badgley’s big sign-off as nice-guy-with-heart-of-ice Joe Goldberg is nonetheless a honking disappointment, hobbled by an increasingly loopy plot that not even this deranged series can sell.
There is precedent for bad guys becoming TV box office. In terms of binge-watch bums on seats, Dexter was the original serial killer as heroic underdog – and, even as the bodies piled up, the character has lived on through multiple spin-offs. More recently we’ve had Netflix’s arty take on Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley character, with Dublin’s Andrew Scott turning the air frosty as a lost soul who only feels he has a life when taking someone else’s.
You was always far sillier – even more so than Dexter, which concluded with the killer running away to become a lumberjack. Across his time on our screens, Goldberg has been a stalker-y book shop manager, a fake literature professor and the trophy husband of a megabucks heiress.
He is still married to the high-flying Kate (Charlotte Ritchie) as this final run gets under way, and having inherited a son from previous seasons, is eager to turn his life around. Which means less screen time, being present for his family and also no longer trapping women in the perspex torture box he used to keep in the basement of his bookstore and then killing them. One step at a time, eh?
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There is an alternative reality in which You would be a stark dissection of the epidemic of violence against women. Not in this universe however: the show is so deliriously cheesy that nobody could take it seriously, much look to it for social commentary. That remains the case as Joe’s attempts to protect Kate from corporate infighting takes a turn for the gory – while his fascination with a newcomer played by The Handmaid Tale’s Madeline Brewer leads him back to his old bookshop and down an ever more destructive path.
It’s all hugely absurd – even by You’s previous standards and while Badgley does his best, there is no saving this preposterous affair. The body count inevitably increases across the season – but the expiration date that matters is that of You itself. Ultimately, the series ending feels like a mercy killing.
