
Within the opening few minutes of its fourth season, You provides a brief guide to – or reminder of – its bonkersness.
Joe (Penn Badgley, wonderfully mixing guarded charm with creepily compulsive serial-killer inclinations) killed his wife in suburban America before she killed him, at which point he chopped off his own toes and burnt down their house to make it appear like a murder-suicide.
He then left his son with a friend and travelled to Paris to look for his lover.
So, how is Joe doing now that he’s taken on a new persona (and beard) as a raffish university lecturer in the upper crust of London? Basically, he’s somewhat annoyed, darkly amused, and never short of a witty remark.
And when another dead corpse comes up in his flat during a private members’ club booze-up, he’s angered by the idea that he’ll have to chop the body up at a sawmill.
That is and always has been You’s love-it-or-hate-it appeal. With a shrug of the shoulders, it transforms into black material.
Any twisted set piece provides an opportunity for Badgley’s gravelly internal monologue to shine. By breaking through the fourth wall in this way, You become deliriously ridiculous, extremely unpleasant – and magnificently self-aware.
As suspicion falls on the people at the secret members club and another member of the gang is brutally murdered, it’s tough not to draw pleasant parallels with classic English murder mysteries.
Joe is seated with a stack of Christie novels in the following scene. When he attempts to figure out what’s going on, art gallery owner Kate (Charlotte Ritchie) warns him to ‘Stop playing s****y Sherlock.’
That’s how much fun You are in the midst of sex, drugs, and murder. That’s why Joe’s social circle, full of toffs fiddling on Instagram and screaming phoney tears, feels taken directly from the worst excesses of The Royals – and yet it doesn’t matter. You become escapist, binge-watching nonsense because the writing is so genuine to its universe and so vibrant.
It’s up to You if you make it through the first ten minutes.
Streaming on Netflix from today.