The Lifetime original series “YOU,” based on Caroline Kepnes’ best selling novel of the same name, portrays a modern-day romance that pushes the boundaries of what is considered to be love. Starring Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley, The Blacklist’s Elizabeth Lail, and Pretty Little Liar’s Shay Mitchell as Peach, the show exposes the rapid escalation of an awkward and seemingly harmless crush to an obsessive and deadly infatuation. Although the show has created a platform to speak about mental health issues and unhealthy behaviors within a relationship, the internet doesn’t take anything seriously, hence our favorite twitter reactions to “YOU.”
Since the beginning of Joe’s narration describing Beck as she enters the store and browses around, we get the first introduction of his obsessive nature and high-level of intelligence. His narrations, though insightful to his state of mind, can make the audience feel uneasy. We see and understand how he rationalizes everything he does and thinks of her because of the way she behaves. Now, everything Beck does is for her own best interest and doesn’t take him into consideration at all in the beginning, which means, Joe’s literally reading his own intentions into her actions making it so that in his mind she wants him as much as he wants her. The worst part of it all is he manipulates her so much, he eventually always gets what he wants.
The most frustrating and infuriating part of watching the show is seeing how Beck continues to fall in love with Joe and grows to depend on him for so much when we know it’s all part his demented manipulation. Personally, I may have pleaded “¡Amiga, date cuenta!” at Beck through my computer screen a few times during the show. But that’s how it gets you; the audience becomes invested in either Joe’s pursuit of Beck or in rooting for Beck to be safe or you go back and forth between one and the other. The scariest thing is we’ve all met people like this. We’ve all seen situations like this progress in our lives. We all know how this ends.
In the second to last episode, Beck starts putting things together, doing some investigative journalism, figuring stuff out and the audience is rooting for her to realize who she really is. He has caused her so much pain and could do so much more to hurt her, we only want her to get out of there safe. Just when Beck is about to blow the lid on the entire situation, he convinces her to trust him saying exactly what she told him months before and everything went back to normal between them. This was another “Amiga, date cuenta” moment, except we were screaming it at this point. But alas, just when we thought we had lost Beck to Joe for good, she found the box of mementos he had stashed from all of his murders and break-ins to her apartment. She figured it out too late this time.
This one is funny and scary ‘cause it’s true. I’m pretty sure that regardless of who you were rooting for in the show, you could recognize the danger Beck was in throughout its entirety. And I do mean the show’s entirety. From the moment she walked in the door and caught Joe’s attention, Beck’s life and that of everyone around her was in danger.
Someone wrote “Dan Humphrey walked so that Joe Goldberg could run” and that is the realest assessment of these characters I can think of. In the series “Gossip Girl,” Dan Humphrey, portrayed by Badgley as well, created an internet persona and blog where he would cyberstalk and bully himself, his friends, his girlfriend and his enemies. Joe Goldberg is basically that persona brought to life and turned murderous. Badgley has said in interviews that he would like to use this show to bring more attention to the dangers of social media and unhealthy behaviors in relationships; hopefully that will be true.