Despite his distaste for the artifice of L.A., Joe quickly decides that Love is everything that Beck wasn’t: brilliant, family-oriented, and, most of all, real. (Yes, that’s “Nirvana” spelled backwards, and the twins Love and Forty are named for the tennis scores). She and her brother, Forty (James Scully), run a bookstore-slash-health-shop called Anavrin. and reinventing himself as “Will Bettelheim,” Joe falls for a woman literally named Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti).

You also treats its characters’ personalities with a newfound irreverence. Los Angeles boasts more sunshine and cheerier personalities than New York’s literary scene, and the new city’s ambient warmth clashes with Joe’s escalating violence. Season 2’s fresh approach to You’s grim material owes partly to the change in setting. These new characters, especially the women, challenge Joe’s sense of power and control in different ways, at times bringing a welcome lighter tone to the show in the process. Rather than simply diving deeper into his psyche, You surrounds Joe with a dynamic ensemble that pushes the story into richer territory. In its newly released second season, the show builds on its condemnation of Joe by moving beyond its clever examination of the “nice guy” trope.

Beck became a literary star only in death, and Joe enjoyed the spoils of her fame.Ī self-aware work of melodrama, You combines the best elements of murder-mystery series, Millennial sitcoms, and revenge fantasies. His final gesture toward Beck encapsulated the way he disguised selfishness as love: Joe killed her after she learned about his other murders, then published a heavily edited volume of her writing. By the end of the season, You had presented a clear indictment of Joe, skewering his veneer and showing just how easily some misogynists can conceal their beliefs. When the aspiring writer Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail) walked into his store, Joe became dangerously fixated on her the show contrasted Joe’s supposedly feminist-leaning sensibilities with his obsession, which turned to stalking and violence. You introduced Joe (played by Penn Badgley) as a charming bookstore employee at the start of Season 1 and then quickly revealed his evil side. He has fled something much more specific: the multiple murders he committed in the tri-state area and the man he framed for them. But none of these nuisances is the reason that Joe Goldberg, the loathsome protagonist of Netflix’s hit dark comedy You, finds himself on the West Coast at the outset of the show’s second season. ĭisillusioned New Yorkers abscond to Los Angeles to escape any number of undesirables: the rats ( and raccoons) that traverse grimy subway stations, the trains that seem to arrive with less regularity than the vermin, the puddles of icy sludge that turn crosswalks into ecological terror sites every winter. This story contains spoilers for Season 2 of You.

Who plays joe in you netflix