The stalking moves to the suburbs in the third season of Netflix’s smash hit ‘You’ (2021).
Picking up where the second season left off, Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) is back to his Peeping Tom ways as he and his wife Love (Victoria Pedretti) play an axe-murdering, bakery-bludgeoning game of house.
Still offering insight into Joe’s interior life through his casually bonkers narration, viewers come to learn that suburban boredom will probably kill Joe before he kills the neighbour he was lusting over at the end of season two.
In this outing, Joe has committed to being the picture of domesticity and there are two things keeping his more violent tendencies in check: his murderous wife and baby Henry. The former because Love is on a killing spree of her own and the latter as Joe wants to be a good father.
Wearing the façade dangerously thin is Madre Linda, a Stepfordian suburb where momfluencer Sherry Conrad, a stellar Shalita Grant, is queen.
‘You’ is up to its old trick of effectively burying the murderous misdeeds of its main characters in a slew of characters who are kind of awful.
Momfluencer Sherry is a perfectly curated, humble-bragging phony who can make or break Love’s new bakery business on a whim, her husband is a pathologically motivational, iron-pumping supplements company owner, their sexy neighbour is a cheating real estate agent married to an emotionally unavailable tech guy and the resident Ned Flanders is an anti-vaxxer whose kid gives measles to baby Henry.
One of the goodish guys is Tati Gabrielle’s Marienne Bellamy, a local librarian struggling with issues of addiction and with obtaining custody of her young daughter. She’s also the latest apple of Joe’s eye, God help her.
Marcia Cross even recurs amid a great cast including Scott Speedman, Saffron Burrows, Travis van Winkle and Dylan Arnold. But in the middle of it all are Joe and Love, trying not to murder each other or anyone else.
For their part as the resident psychos, Badgley and Pedretti are gold. ‘You’ is still about a stalker, now in therapy with his murdery wife.
Women in this series are also still being given a relatively raw deal. Love is rendered as particularly emotionally unstable and not beyond sleeping with a teenager. Marienne is the damsel in distress. Love’s mum is bitter and boozy and Sherry is initially a superficial, validation-obsessed queen bee while Joe is our mesmeric, toxic but relatable serial killer antihero.
‘You’ has been renewed for a fourth season and bid you all ‘Au revoir’.
‘You’ (2021) is now streaming on Netflix.
– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and Instagram; marthamukaiwa.com
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