This big mistake turned You from a hit show into another Netflix zombie

Everyone’s favourite stalker is back on screens for a fifth and final season. There’s more murder, more cover-ups, and more grating voiceover, but there’s something – or someone – missing from the action, writes Annabel Nugent

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Ostensibly, there is plenty of intrigue in this latest series of You. Indeed there are murders galore, the sting of marital betrayal, and even Succession-style family feuding. But something is off about this season – for all his chilling charm, Penn Badgley’s serially homicidal loverboy stalker has gone stale.

A show as trashy as You should never be boring. But for proof of how tedious the Netflix hit has become, turn to the recap supplied at the beginning of season five, which rehashes four cycles of largely identical events: Joe loves girl; Joe vows to be a better person for said girl; Joe falls back into his murderous ways; girl finds out. Never has a series four seasons deep needed a recap less. We know the gist so let’s get on with it.

In what is pretty much a reboot of season three’s storyline, Joe is granted yet another fresh start – respawned in New York City with his British socialite wife Kate (Charlotte Ritchie) who knows about his dark past and loves him anyway. They’re rich. They’re happy. Things are peachy and Joe is keeping his homicidal tendencies in check. Until, of course, his ugly past rears its head, along with a pretty new girl – a literature-loving ragamuffin played with the wounded scrappiness of a street cat by Handmaid’s Tale star Madeline Brewer. And thus, the cycle continues, as sure as the sun will rise.

It’s a shame that it has come to this. This, being a series defined by predictable plotting, cloying narration and a roster of one-dimensional characters forgotten as quickly as they’re introduced. It’s a shame because there was an alternative to this. There was, at one point, hope that You could be a different type of show, one that takes risks and plays with audience expectations – and that hope was Love.

Devotees are nodding their heads vigorously right now because in the You fandom Love Quinn remains unrivalled. Played to psychotic perfection by Victoria Pedretti, the character was introduced at the start of season two as a new love interest for Joe who, having just murdered his girlfriend at the end of season one, decamps to Los Angeles, where his eye is caught by a blonde in the grocery aisle. “Does this peach look like a butt to you?” she asks, doe-eyed and angelic. Spoiler alert: Joe ends up killing Love too, because of course he does.

But not before Love leaves her mark. Their innocuous meet-cute (and her cringe-inducing name) belied a character who, across two seasons, displayed depths far richer than the typical girlfriend in a Netflix No 1 show. Love is a widow and a chef, the heiress to the city’s luxury grocery store Anavrin – yes, that’s Nirvana spelt backwards. (Incidentally, that season satirized LA’s cultish wellness scene far more effectively than season four’s later caricature of London’s uppercrust.)

Love is sweet and smiley – a sexy chef who licks a good number of spoons throughout the season. Maybe she’s a little obsessive, but well, it’s nice to see Joe on the backfoot for once, knocked off balance by this sudden wave of affection. Speaking in Gone Girl terms, Love is the archetypal cool girl, and it’s through her character that the writers have a ball exploring the ways that men project a fantasy upon women.

She’s also got a temper. Throughout the season, we see Love’s mood change on a dime – a rapid switch from docile to demented that’s embodied by Pedretti as her whole face slackens and her mouth droops in displeasure. What comes next is anybody’s guess. Much of what makes Love so brilliant is down to Pedretti, who as an actor is as believable as a heartbroken widow as she is with an axe in her hand.

Match made in hell: Joe Goldberg meets his match in Love Quinn (JOHN P. FLEENOR/NETFLIX)

In fact, she embodies that mercurial quality so well (and the writing is just subtle enough) that when at the end of season two it’s revealed that SURPRISE! Love is a killer, too! it comes as a shock but crucially an earned one. And when the twist is played out for us – the way she manipulated Joe the same way he did her; how she was the one to murder Delilah and bludgeon Candace to death to protect Joe; that she killed her au pair to protect her brother and that she had been the one to poison her dead husband – it’s satisfying. An “ah-ha” moment to savour, deliciously deranged. To his dismay, Joe has met his match. Love holds up a mirror to his actions, and he is repulsed because well, it’s only OK when he does it!

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It seems the writers knew they had hit on something special with Love – no other character to date has been afforded their own voiceover as she was, momentarily taking over duties from the increasingly anodyne Joe. And they also let her survive for an additional season, with series three seeing the couple navigate newlywed life with a newborn in the suburbs as they try to get past their tormented history – the murders, the lies, the fact Joe was going to kill Love before she told him she was pregnant. Too much water under the bridge, as they say.

Through Love’s character, You was able to avoid the dreaded sophomore slump. She had made herself so indispensable, in fact, that when it came to the season three finale, a tense stand-off in which only one of them was coming out alive, there was a real possibility that it might be Love. If only. How bold it would have been to kill off Joe and refocus the lens on Love. How exciting! How fresh!

Unlucky in love: Victoria Pedretti and Penn Badgley as Love Quinn and Joe Goldberg in ‘You’ ( © 2020 Netflix, Inc.)

It’s hard to envisage exactly what a series following Love Quinn would’ve looked like – which is, I’d argue, only further credit to her character’s unpredictability. There was so much more to explore in Love, the show could’ve provided a psychic spelunking into her troubled romantic past, abusive parents, and relationship with her now dead brother – a toxic codependence that walked right up to the line of incest but never (as far we’ll ever know now) tipped into White Lotus territory. But no, the risk proved too great. A step too far for Netflix who love to play it safe.

And so, in the end it was Love who perished to the woozy piano notes of Taylor Swift’s “exile” as she succumbed to Joe’s poison. It can be hard to pinpoint the exact moment a good TV show starts to decline, but in the case of You, the answer is cut and dried: it was right then and there. When Love died, the audacious potential of You died with her, leaving us with a walking corpse of a show stuck on autopilot. RIP You. But mainly, RIP Love Quinn.

‘You’ season five is available on Netflix now

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