You

At the recommendation of my sister, I checked out this show about a used bookstore clerk named Joe Goldberg who happens to be a highly sophisticated stalker. Joe meets a creative hopeful named Guinevere Beck, and as such, becomes instantly enamored. He follows her, finds out where she lives, and even breaks in and steals her lingerie. But that’s really the tip of the iceberg here; there’s a lot of intricate head-gaming and psychosis going on in this show, and not necessarily just from Joe Goldberg.

Beck—which is what she goes by—has a toxic friend in Peach Salinger, a distant cousin of writer JD. Peach actively promotes and belittles her friend, and with the advent of Joe Goldberg entering Beck’s life, she clings on harder than ever before. The Peach character is so mean-spirited and manipulating that at times she rivals Joe for worst psychopath on the show.

The use of the soundproof room in the basement of Joe’s book shop is a consistently disturbing framework. In the early sections of You, it is where he stores Benji, an entitled fuckboy Beck dates at the start of the show. You come to find that it was once a young Joe who was put there as a form of punishment, in a series of flashback scenes that tend to be as disturbing as the events happening in real-time.

Electronics are leveraged throughout the show to Joe’s advantage; there are myriad examples of him intruding into Beck’s social life to advance his own obsessive purposes. He steals her phone after a drunken incident where she almost gets run over by a subway car. Peach’s laptop gets confiscated at one point, the contents of which form a basis for blackmail during a particularly caustic exchange between those two crazies.

For a show that originated out of Lifetime, You is distinctly disturbing. At the tail-end of Benji’s involvement in the show, there is a near-unwatchable sequence in which he is withdrawing from opiates inside Joe’s soundproof chamber. The accosting of Peach in Central Park with a rock is also a shocking bloody bit.

I don’t know what kind of defective water we’ve all been drinking lately, but it would seem like we’re all really into good-looking psychopath types right now, and this show will cater to that proclivity if you want it to. There’s also a fiction book with a sequel, so there should be a second season of this show as well to come. I haven’t read them, but with an ending like the one I watched last weekend, we’re going to need another season.