Hello, you. I see you, scouring The Michigan Daily Arts section, looking for your new favorite TV show to watch. You probably saw this headline and a familiar face and let out a little gasp of excitement. “It can’t be,” you think. “Is he really back?” You better believe it.
Part one of Netflix’s fourth season of “You” just dropped, and as it turns out, our favorite stalker is back in action. Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley, “Gossip Girl”) is now Jonathan Moore, an English professor at an unnamed university in London that is shot to look suspiciously like Oxford. After following his season three love interest, Marianne (Tati Gabrielle, “Kaleidoscope”), to Paris and then London, Joe is met with a rude awakening: Marianne wants absolutely nothing to do with him. Even worse — she’s terrified of him. Joe decides that this is his last straw and officially swears off women and love. Cut to a scene of Joe looking out of the window of his unreasonably spacious London flat and into his neighbor’s flat and seeing a beautiful woman. Oh no, here we go again.
But it’s not quite the same formula of the previous seasons. Joe’s neighbor, Kate (Charlotte Ritchie, “Ghosts”) is an icy, uptight gallerist and the girlfriend of Malcolm (Stephen Hagan, “Hope Street”), an obnoxious, wealthy, “royal-adjacent” (his words, not mine) colleague of Joe’s at the university. Joe gets roped into Kate and Malcolm’s friend group almost comically easily and finds himself immersed in a group of aristocrats and children of billionaires who have been told since birth that the world literally revolves around them. Combine this with the fact that a mysterious killer starts picking off the group one by one and is simultaneously texting Joe attempting to frame him for it, and this season shapes up to be a full-blown Agatha Christie novel come to life.
Season four of “You” flips the typical formula for the series on its head. Instead of Joe stalking a woman and killing those closest to her in order to gain her affection, he now has his own stalker obsessed with him, and for once the deaths are not working in his favor. In giving Joe his own “Joe,” we get to see deeper into his character for insights we didn’t get in previous seasons. The truth is, Joe loves the cat-and-mouse game itself. Despite his move across the pond and his many conscious efforts to be a better, different person, Joe inevitably falls back into his old habits, caught in the web of murder and conspiracy. So while he may think that changing his name changes his personality, he simply cannot escape his nature. Though he may prefer to be the stalker, he simply always needs his “you.”
In this way, season four is just like the rest. As he plays the game, Joe makes it his priority to figure out this mysterious object of his obsession, sneaking around to find out more details. Because without this game, he’s just an ordinary bookkeeper. It reignites the old dynamic with a new layer of paranoia on Joe’s end, which was a brilliant way to flip the script on Joe without framing him as a total victim. Joe’s monologue now consists of questions like “Why are you doing this to me?” Ironically, this must have been what his previous victims were thinking, so no matter what happens to Joe, you never feel too sorry for him.
An outstanding element of the new season is the slight shift in focus off of Joe and into a commentary on class and wealth. Almost all of the characters in this whodunit are rich beyond comprehension and, as such, come with their own ridiculous and aloof views of the world. They are brazen, over-the-top and at times so downright awful that their deaths are more often comedic than tragic. This group seems to be made of an entirely different species of elitists; Joe’s failed attempts to become one of them only make their murders into even more of a “Knives Out”-esque viewing. Joe tries to show us that he’s really not like these new people and that he’s so much more sensible and normal — just a regular guy trying to wipe the slate clean. Yet despite his best efforts and name changes, he is always going to be the same guy. No matter what he does, he cannot outrun his past.
While season four of “You” might not maintain the same tone as the previous seasons given that most of the main characters are really just goofy caricatures and the ultimate reveal of the killer is more or less predictable, it comes with its own charm. The social commentary — supplemented by Joe’s internal monologue — is robust, and the question of who the bad guys and good guys are is not so straightforward anymore. Is the bad guy the killer that’s picking people off one by one? Or is it the group of insanely rich people who seem to have a sociopathic lack of empathy for everyone around them? After everything we’ve seen him do, can Joe even really be considered the “good guy”?
Despite the tone shift from previous seasons, season four of “You” still lives up to the hype. It has everything that we’ve come to love about the series while adopting a fresh new twist. While I was initially skeptical about the introduction of an entirely new cohort of characters (Victoria Pedretti, you are deeply missed), the new themes worked surprisingly well. With part two not releasing until March 9, Joe’s fate still hangs in the balance — but I’m sure our favorite sociopath will figure something out.
Daily Arts Writer Swara Ramaswamy can be reached at swararam@umich.edu.