Most men on television bore me to tears. Give me Peggy over Don, Kim over Jimmy, Eileen “Candy” Merrell over everyone on The Deuce. Give me Donna and Cam over Gordon and Joe, Nora and Laurie over Kevin and Matt; give me series rotten with women, The Good Fight, GLOW, Killing Eve, Pose. Then again, Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley), the protagonist of Lifetime’s You, is not most men: The handsome manager of a New York book shop, Joe is also an obsessive stalker and, seven episodes in, a murderer twice over. He’s a public masturbator, a brazen manipulator, a home invader, a frequent thief. He’s not, in short—the text of Badgley’s Twitter bio aside—an “antihero” in the mold of so much (dull) TV drama, merely flawed, occasionally selfish, partially damaged. No, Joe is worse. Much, much worse.
As Paste’s Alexis Gunderson wrote last month, You’s high-wire act, positioning a total creep (and dangerous criminal!) as its main character (and narrator!), is key to the series’ confrontation with rape culture. In essence, You, developed by Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti from Caroline Kepnes’ 2014 novel, administers a weekly test to viewers, identifying the range of questionable acts we’ll let slide in the name of “love.” This is, as it were, the series’ pick-up line: I’m not too proud to admit that I’d let Penn Badgley stab me is a phrase that popped into my head during the pilot episode, before I recoiled at my own sick social conditioning. Now past the midpoint of its first season, though—and with the caveat that a series this devotedly nasty is liable to jump the rails at any moment—You’s confusion of romantic expectations is no longer the driving force of its narrative; it’s become a more traditional potboiler, albeit an especially toothsome one, turning on the if, when, and how of Joe’s capture, and the lengths he’ll go to elude it. No, You does one better, and broader, than its high concept suggests. Much, much better: It breaks TV drama’s antihero curse.
In fact, as Vox’s Todd VanDerWerff points out in his terrific exegesis on the connections between #MeToo and TV’s “asshole protagonists,” Joe is a walking, talking broadside against the brooding figures of the medium’s “Golden Age.” You turns the subtext of the antihero drama—the troubled interior life of a difficult man—into text—Joe’s narration, addressed to his unwitting quarry, Beck (Elizabeth Lail)—and shows that interior life for what it is: a veritable Yucca Mountain of toxic ideas and heinous acts, gussied up with references to European literature and the chivalric ideal. “You fall for the wrong men,” Joe says of Beck in the pilot, and perhaps of us. “Bad men. You let them in. You let them hurt you.” You, with refreshing frankness, digs into this attraction—this deception—not by trying to “complicate” it, to unearth “nuance” or cultivate “empathy,” but by emphasizing, again and again, that men capable of such behavior must first be remorseful before they can be redeemed. And for Joe, unsurprisingly, remorse never enters the equation: Perhaps his most frightening character trait is his belief that he has Beck’s best interests at heart.
Where the antihero drama assumes that we will love, or at least care about, a monstrous protagonist—and indeed frames him as a man, not a monster, despite his monstrous acts—You does the reverse; with the exception of Paco (Luca Padovan), the young neighbor Joe takes under his wing, the series slowly strips its male characters of any traits that might be called “sympathetic,” leaving only the monster within. Paco’s mother’s boyfriend (Daniel Cosgrove) is “an alcoholic shitbag who beats women.” Beck’s main squeeze, Benji (Lou Taylor Pucci), is an airhead start-up bro born with a silver spoon in his mouth, a shameless cheater and a disloyal friend. Her MFA adviser, Professor Paul Leahy (Reg Rogers), is a serial sexual harasser; later, she endures a limousine meet-and-greet with a hotshot agent desperate to get in her pants. “Look at you!” he cries as she climbs into the car, capturing the satisfyingly broad brush with which You paints. “Like a literary hooker!”