You's Second Season Could Be Great if it Avoids Season 1's Big Mistake

The tale of bookstore manager Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) and his girlfriend/obsession, Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail) began as a seemingly subversive one, satirizing the sneakily toxic romantic tropes we've come to expect from these kinds of stories. You exposed the subtly manipulative ways "nice guys" often sway women as we experienced the onscreen courtship through Joe's eyes, understanding that every gesture Beck believed to be sweet or chivalrous was executed with sinister methods. The show's first season took this satirization to the extreme, making nice guy Joe a literal stalker and murderer... and for the most part, it worked. Even at its most ridiculous, it was a sharp, bloody, delightfully indulgent romp.

And then came the finale.

Perhaps we hoped there'd be some sort of correction to the source material, or believed what You led us to believe, that the script might actually be flipped here, that this deadly nice guy might get what was coming to him. But instead they left us with just another dead girlfriend. Just another woman tortured for hours, forced to put on a face to try to save her life, only to be murdered anyway. Not particularly progressive, right? Even with the appearance of Joe's ex Candace (and the potential for retribution), the bad taste was impossible to shake. It's fair to claim that a second season required Joe's survival -- clearly the internet is far too in love with the character to kill him off (much to Badgley's disgust). But now what? How can Season 2 cleanse our palettes and help us move forward? 

You's second season stars The Haunting of Hill House's Victoria Pedretti as Joe's new fixation, and picks things up in L.A., where he's starting over. Pedretti will inevitably be a thrilling new addition, but not if she doesn't stick around for long. Joe's skeletons can't stay tucked away in the closet forever, and if the show decides to add Pedretti's character to the body count, it's time they drop the satire angle. Season 1 ended with the show in a full-blown identity crisis, leading us to believe that Joe is maybe a lovable murderer against the odds. If that's the case, You should embrace that it's about a dude who stalks and murders women, a dude they've framed as an antihero instead of a monster. There are about a zillion other shows that are fine with ending each season (or each episode) with a dead woman, and if that's what You really wants to be, so be it.

Ideally, however, the series gets a handle on what made it so fresh and addictive in the first place: the unmasking of toxic tropes and dangerous behavior in "nice guys" like Joe. If the show owns the monster Joe is, instead of asking us to root for him a la Walter White, maybe its misfires can be reversed. You Season 2 has the potential to be great -- as great as most of the first season, when it felt as though the show was saying something new. We'll never be OK with the way Beck was butchered, but the producers still have a shot to get it right.

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Jade Budowski is a freelance writer with a knack for ruining punchlines and harboring dad-aged celebrity crushes. She was previously a reporter/producer at Decider and is a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow her on Twitter: @jadebudowski.