Joe Goldberg is a bookstore manager in New York who meets Guinevere Beck, an NYU graduate student and aspiring writer, and becomes consumed by a one-sided infatuation. He feeds it through social media and technology, tracking her activities. Then he removes what stands in his way, including her friends and her ex-boyfriend.
That is the engine of You, developed by Greg Berlanti and Sera Gamble from Caroline Kepnes’ novels. It premiered on Lifetime on September 9, 2018, and later moved to Netflix. Across five seasons and 50 episodes, it ended on April 24, 2025.
Trailer, via Netflix.
Penn Badgley and the voice in Joe’s head
Penn Badgley plays Joe as charming and dangerous at once, a man whose obsessive romantic fixation reads on screen as narcissistic and antisocial. The show’s trick is that we ride inside his reasoning while he does monstrous things.
Season 1 casts Elizabeth Lail as Beck, with Luca Padovan as Joe’s young neighbor Paco, Zach Cherry as bookstore clerk Ethan, and Shay Mitchell as Peach Salinger, Beck’s wealthy best friend.
Later seasons rebuild the show around new settings and new fixations:
- Season 2 moves Joe to Los Angeles as Will Bettelheim, falling for heiress Love Quinn, played by Victoria Pedretti.
- Season 3 puts Joe and Love in the California suburb of Madre Linda, married and raising their son Henry.
- Season 4 sends Joe to London as English professor Jonathan Moore.
- Season 5 brings back his original name, with a new obsession in Bronte.
What the show gets right, and where it thins
The premise does not change, and that is the point. Each season resets the same cycle: a new woman, a new city, a new identity. The best stretch is the first, where Beck is written with enough of her own secrets that she never reads as a prize. Season 3 is the sharpest variation, because Love turns out to be as dangerous as Joe, and the marriage becomes a standoff rather than a hunt.
The cost is repetition. By the London season, the disassociation and the mental break are the show’s way of admitting Joe has run out of room. The socialites dying one by one is a mystery plot, not a character one.
Ranked by what holds up:
- Season 1, for Beck and for the tightest stalker logic.
- Season 3, for Victoria Pedretti and the Madre Linda standoff.
- Season 2, for the Los Angeles reset.
- Season 4, for the premise stretched thinnest.
- Season 5, for a finale that closes a loop it cannot deepen.
You is a smart, nasty show about a man we are asked to find compelling, and it earns that discomfort for longer than most. 7.4 of 10.
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