You, Season 4: Eating the Rich

I am midway through the 4th season of the popular Netflix series, You, and it appears that we are taking a break until Netflix drops the rest of the season in March. Not my choice but probably for the best, since I'd, otherwise, be binge-watching the entire season in 4 days and then be forced to wait another year for the premiere of season 5. Instead of 11 months. Wait, what? 

This 4th go-round of You may be my favorite season yet. It treads much the same path as recent cinematic fare like Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, and Glass Onion: it's all about skewering the rich. Besides a change of locale (this time to London) and a fetching new supporting cast, our favorite on-the-lam serial killer, Joe Goldberg (Gossip Girl's Penn Badgley), has grown a beard and (inadvertently and unwillingly) hooked up with a group of spoiled upper-class snots. Despite Joe's best efforts to turn over yet another new leaf, these Brits are even more obnoxious than their American counterparts, and as we know from past seasons this type of behavior doesn't often bring out the best in our antihero. Sure enough, before the credits roll on episode 1, we've got one dead aristoshit sprawled across Joe's kitchen table with a knife stuck in his chest, and a badly hungover Joe wondering how he got there. Did Joe kill him? 



Unsure of what transpired the night before, Joe decides his best option is to dismember the body and get rid of it. But these things never go as smoothly as you think they will so it's not long before Joe is getting anonymous text messages suggesting that someone knows everything about him and may, in fact, be stalking him, instead of the other way around. Along the way, we are treated to the sight of a very impressive shvantz sporting a Prince Albert, no less, another male cast member receiving a golden shower in the basement of a trendy restaurant, Joe shagging the dead guy's icy-hot girlfriend with their clothes on in a local park (following a funeral), more texts from anonymous, more bloody murders, more fully-clothed banging, non-stop verbal abuse from the upper-class twats, a little hunting excursion ala The Most Dangerous Game, and Joe being shoved from an upper floor window of somebody's daddy's country estate. What's not to love? 



And speaking of Love, I'm so glad she's not around this season. By the time the season 3 finale rolled around last year, she was gnawing away at my last nerve, and let's face it, having two serial killers fall in love (or whatever that was) and reproducing is getting dangerously close to This Is Us territory. Okay, maybe not This Is Us but you get what I mean. This Is Us with a dose of Dexter, maybe, only funnier and with better dialogue. It's the witty dialogue, in fact, that keeps me coming back to this show season after season. Joe's ongoing narrative, which takes place entirely inside his head, is both self-serving and self-delusional, sometimes bleak but also smart and often hilarious (in the darkest of ways, of course). As entertaining as I find You to be, though, I'm not sure how much more mileage it has left in it. I applaud author Carolyn Kepnes for managing to get 4 bestselling books (that I haven't read) out of the material but, to be honest, the Netflix series does keep getting more and more preposterous. And I am saying this as someone who is a fan of the show. I'm looking forward to watching this season's remaining 5 episodes although I can't imagine what a season 5 might entail. Or if the suspension of disbelief required will, finally, supersede my enjoyment of You. 


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
This is not for you. (1) (1) The only words on the dedication page of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.  Believe you me, he means it. At 662 pages, House of Leaves is Danielewski's magnum opus , a work deified by a large and devoted cult following, and swallowed hook, line and sinker by numerous literary critics from such august  institutions as The New York Times (go figure), The San Francisco Chronicle , The Wall Street Journal , Newsweek and The Guardian . My question is this: what is wrong with these people ?   What? You think I'm being unfair? Okay, maybe just a bit. Not everyone who holds House of Leaves  in high esteem is a pretentious douche attempting to demonstrate their intellectual superiority by claiming that they  get it . I'm pretty sure I got it , and by it , in this case, I mean Danielewski's number. With regards to the book as a whole, it is all about the footnotes. I'm not fooling myself into believing my completion of it means anyth
Read more
Image
Oh, dear God, please deliver me from this dreadful Prime series that C is currently obsessed with. He has been binge-watching episodes of Zorro over the course of the past week and I've had the misfortune of bearing witness to most of them. A newly-minted Spanish redo of previous Zorro's, this incarnation's constant violence (purely for the sake of violence), idiotic swordfights, horrendous dubbing, and a "plot" that is a bottomless pit of sheer stupidity, is so far over-the-top that it would be campy if the participants displayed the slightest trace of irony or wit. Main characters are repeatedly shot, stabbed, strangled, blown up and beaten, but almost no one stays dead because the show thrives on the chaos these dreadful people cause for our (none-too-bright) hero and his frenemies in the Spanish military. Make no mistake, Zorro receives his share of lethal (for you and me) injuries, but this series moves so quickly from one breathless scene of carnage to anot
Read more
Image
Salt burn  - definition: A condition arising when fine salt coagulates proteins near the surface of a fish being prepared and prevents any further penetration of salt into the flesh.  Saltburn is both the title of director Emerald Fennell's latest movie, and the sprawling home of the film's aristocratic family and their transient menagerie of long-term guests. I found an ambiguously tasty irony linking all these clarifications that only became clear to me once I googled the meaning of  salt burn . I'll let you figure this out for yourself once you've watched this spectacularly dark, psychological thriller from the director of 2020's much-lauded  Promising Young Woman .  Oscar-nominee Barry Keoghan, fresh off last year's  The Banshees of Inisherin , returns to the screen as the utterly  plain  (to put it, kindly) Oliver Quick, an unfashionable, socially awkward sad sack who, thanks to a scholarship, is beginning his freshman year at Oxford . While his fellow stu
Read more