The first season, which aired on Lifetime before Netflix took over, was the "love story" of Joe and Beck (Elizabeth Lail), and those quotation marks are doing some pretty heavy lifting. Of course, we all know how that story ended, and so when we catch up with Joe at the start of Season 2, he's going by another name, trying to evade his ex-girlfriend Candace (Ambyr Childers), and determined to turn over a new leaf this time around... but, like watching a car crash in slow motion, the viewer knows it's all about to head sideways.
Take this exchange from the first episode of season two, in a scene where Joe first meets the improbably named Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti).
"I am sorry if I seem skeevy," he says, having just been staring at her from across the store.
"No," she replies. "Well you might have, if you looked like a skeeve, which I guess is me saying, good choice showering today."
It's played off as the kind of low-key flirtatious banter that kicks off so many romantic comedies, but even if Joe weren't canonically a psychopath at this point in the series, Love's seemingly innocuous comment still reinforces a dangerous idea: that a handsome man is inherently trustworthy.
It's called the halo effect. If somebody makes a positive impression on us in one areasay, by being really, really good-lookingwe are more likely to project all kinds of other positive attributes onto them. One of the recurring points of You is that Joe is able to evade getting caught for so long because he has the privilege of being a handsome, white, perfectly nice-seeming guy, with a relatively slight physique which makes him appear physically unthreatening.
The fact that he's played by former teen heartthrob Penn Badgley means the viewer, as much as his new victim, is lulled into the belief that he is a viable love interestto the point that Badgley had to tweet reminders to fans following the success of Season 1 that Joe is a psychopath and not a model for romantic behavior.
Even in the wake of #MeToo, after countless women have shared their experiences of sexual harassment and assault by colleagues, when the statistics show that the majority of violent crimes against women are committed by somebody the victim knows, there is a persistent idea in pop culture that it's always some other man behaving terribly. That stalking and assault are the purview of unwashed strangers, who have less pleasingly symmetrical faces and hang out in dark alleys.
Why, Love seems to be asking, would a handsome man need to trick or coerce anyone into being with him? It's a question that ignores the dynamics of abusive relationships , which are based upon notions of power and control , not romance or attraction.
The #MeToo movement has directly informed the plot of You's second season. Following his move to Los Angeles, Joe finds himself entangled in an investigation into a popular comedian who has a history of hanging out with teenage girls. This comedian (played by Chris d'Elia) is outwardly funny and likeable, and without getting into spoiler territory over whether or not he is guilty, You operates on the assumption that his fame and affable persona have functioned as protection thus far.
In that regard, the entire second season feels at times like a commentary on where we are at this point as a culture in the wake of #MeToo, where men who faced public accusations and were fired from their high profile jobs have already started to mount ill-advised comebacks . We, as an audience, know that Joe is guilty of murdering the object of his obsession, Beck, as well as bumping off Benji and Peach (not to mention a host of other sins), and yet we watch him get this second chance: a fresh start on the opposite coast. And, by virtue of watching the story from his perspective, we feel complicit when he falls back into his old patterns, and sets his sights on a new target.
You, of course, is fiction, and it certainly makes for compelling, wildly entertaining viewing as Joe's best laid plans go awry and he becomes embroiled in another series of increasingly dark crimes. But the show also serves as a kind of warning, albeit one that goes to the extremes. A serial abuser can be as handsome, intelligent, charming, and gregarious as they come, You tells us, and giving them the benefit of the doubt after a slap on the wrist and brief hiatus is not going to change those patterns of behavior.