The fourth season of You took place among the elites of England and, with chaos unfolding once again around Joe Goldberg, the most charming stalker found a way to return to New York with his head held high. It is time to write the last chapter of him, as considered by Netflix, which has renewed the psychological thriller for a fifth and final season.
Of course, this renewal is accompanied by bad news: Sera Gamble, co-creator of You along with Greg Berlanti and showrunner for the first four seasons, is leaving her position as chief creative officer. She wants to focus on other projects after devoting the last five years to the character created by Caroline Kepnes in literature. "I feel proud of everything I have achieved and I feel privileged to pass the torch," she said in a press release.
And who will be their replacements? Michael Foley and Justin W. Lo, who already served as executive producers and writers for the play, after working on it since the first and second seasons respectively. They will have to close the trajectory of Joe Goldberg and finalize the initial plan of Gamble and Berlanti, who always imagined You as a story with five seasons.
For You, this five-season arc is quite a triumph. Developed for Lifetime, an American cable channel, it went unnoticed by linear television on traditional television in decline. With the license agreed by Netflix, however, the character played by Penn Badgley became an international phenomenon. The fourth season, which premiered in two parts (the first, on February 9, and the second, on March 9), accumulates more than 323 million hours viewed among subscribers.
You's creative challenge is to portray Joe Goldberg: a man who considers himself some kind of prince charming when, in fact, he's a psychopath who harasses the women he likes. Penn Badgley, who was known to the public for his work on Gossip Girl, has criticized or ironized the reactions of a sector of the public on more than one occasion, which idealizes the toxic behavior of his character.
In addition, You has known how to reinvent itself. The first season was a twisted take on the romance genre with a psychopath in the title role; the second imagined the consequences of Joe fixing on a person as psychologically volatile as himself; the third put him on the ropes by exploring the search for sentimental stability, in addition to increasing social criticism; and the fourth explored commented on the whodunnit genre and the fictional model popularized by Agatha Christie, as well as giving it a twist.
