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. 


 

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