YOU Season 4 Premiere Review

When I got the notification on my phone from Netflix that the fourth season of You was available, I knew what I was going to do tonight. You is an American psychological thriller television series based on the books by Caroline Kepnes that has caught consistent and growing attention since its premiere in 2018. The series is about a psychopath, Joe Goldberg (Played by Penn Badgley) who lives in a delusion that life (and by that, he means having to kill people for not doing what he wants) keeps getting his way of finding true love. After the first season, Lifetime sold the production rights to Netflix, where it is currently streamed. Coming into the fourth season, it was hard to see how much further this formula could go. Still, there was a lot of hype and expectations to live up to; and personally I found it hard to see how they could do the same thing again, and it still be compelling. 

So to find out, I started the first episode. 

At first we are introduced back into the world of You and Joe gives us his famous inner dialogue. We see what he has been up to since the end of the third season when Joe kills his wife, Love and fakes his own death. He flees to Europe where he is now as the Professor Jonathan Moore. I won't lie, I rolled my eyes sometimes at the utter delusion Joe was telling us. It was the same old same old justifying his actions in some righteous way. His tenacity is as unnerving as it is impressive, but again we know this. 

Ugh, I was afraid of this. There's no way the writers went the safe route with so many eyes on the series now. So, I kept on watching. And soon the story started using some flashbacks. We realize we are much further in the future than we thought, and there was a major piece missing. This entirely changed my mind. Suddenly, the story throws us a curveball, and we see the beginning of an arc that uses Joe's terrifying skills in a new way. As we know, I watch most shows and movies without having seen promotional material, so I was pleasantly surprised to see we are getting a whodunnit season. This was the perfect transition the writers could make, and can successfully say it will be a part of a larger murder mystery resurgence in media (Say "thank you Knives Out series!"). 

Now this is what I wanted. Let's hope it lives up to the promise.