How to Make a Self-Aware Show About a Serial Killer
This story contains spoilers for Season 2 of You.
Disillusioned New Yorkers abscond to Los Angeles to escape any number of undesirables: the rats (and raccoons) that traverse grimy subway stations, the trains that seem to arrive with less regularity than the vermin, the puddles of icy sludge that turn crosswalks into ecological terror sites every winter. But none of these nuisances is the reason that Joe Goldberg, the loathsome protagonist of Netflix’s hit dark comedy You, finds himself on the West Coast at the outset of the show’s second season. He has fled something much more specific: the multiple murders he committed in the tri-state area and the man he framed for them.
introduced Joe had presented a clear indictment of Joe, skewering his veneer and showing just how easily some misogynists can conceal their beliefs. His final gesture toward Beck encapsulated the way he disguised selfishness as love: Joe killed her after she learned about his other murders, then published a heavily edited volume of her writing. Beck became a literary star only in death, and Joe enjoyed the spoils of her fame.
