You (Season four, part one)

Part of any film or tv show set in the real world is about verisimilitude. If you set the show in London and mention real places, then you need to make sure you connect them sensibly. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves has Robin and co walk from the White Cliffs to Nottingham via Hadrian's Wall in a day. If that doesn’t make you shudder or laugh, try looking up their relative positions on you maps app. You pulls a few of these about London, he walks home from work, it’s about a six hour journey. He stays in a nice flat in S. Kensington that he’s renting. I can’t find anywhere to rent there for less than £12k per month, and he’s meant to be doing that on a lecturer's salary? Really? Likewise, as a visiting lecturer in a British university he’s unlikely to be a professor, our lecturing positions are different, professors are heads of departments and similar. Students mostly call staff by their first name at university level. Hilary was my head of faculty, I know she was professor someone, but I called her Hilary to her face for three years and never called her professor anything. My head of department was Derek, I do remember he was Professor Gadson, but I only ever called him Derek. I only remember his surname because emails for staff were in the form Derek.Gadson@, and I remember quite a few of those email addresses for some reason. I don’t remember my HOD from my PhD, I don’t remember interacting with him, but I remember it was a man. I have a vague memory he might have been called David but I’m not sure.

All of these things are points I noticed in just the first episode, but oddly I didn’t mind it that much. They’re niggles, yes, but they’re not important ones. As I’ve said before, You is about Joe as a romantic lead but turned up to 15, showing us that the traits that we supposedly admire in a romantic lead are actually, at least borderline, creepy. I remember enjoying Love, Actually when it was released, it was a solid Richard Curtis RomCom. Although I haven’t watched it in years, decades even, look at the way so much of that is now regarded as problematic. You is essentially doing that, but quickly and harder. There are others throughout, like a character who declares he’s running for Mayor of London from Oxford University (very unlikely, but they work it in a way that could, just, work) then he calls it “this city” - no. Oxford is not London. smacks scriptwriters.

Season four partially diverts away from the familiar You formula. In the previous seasons we’ve always had Joe and his current You, the woman with whom he’s obsessed. Joe has apparently actually turned over a new leaf. He’s lecturing, trying to avoid getting involved with a variety of women (at least not beyond the bounds of propriety with a student he likes for example) although he does end up drawn to the wrong woman for all the right reasons (for a change) and, at least at the half-way mark, he moves away from a relationship with her that would presumably lead up to her death. He doesn’t frame it in those terms, but it is a sign of change.

Joe as detective is interesting. I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. Parts are whimsical and delightful but other parts feel very lazy. The group of Brits than Joe meets feels like it was written in a very American writers room that had no British input, not even a twenty minute YouTube research session. There are certainly rich hoorays out there, but this lot are mostly old money. Old money brats certainly act up but not like this. This feels like American nouveau riche or British celebrity excess, not old money. And children of old money don’t do these sorts of jobs - they do jobs to further the power of the family. Ironically, the only job that might work is from the one who hates her father and has walked away from him. So Joe detecting around them feels off but it’s hard to be sure if that’s because the whole ‘Joe as detective' thing isn’t working or if it’s more the people he’s working his skills on. Honestly, there are times Joe’s inner voice is saying “they all deserve to die” and probably for the first time I’m agreeing with his murderhobo tendencies.

Where The Haunting of Bly Manor was just as unrealistic in its portrayal of English culture, it was in a tradition of gothic horror that we started (this particular subgenre at least, not the whole thing), country house and all. But the murder mystery, the amateur sleuth, which is what You seems to be going for, has moved on. Even Agatha Christie moved on from the likes of The Mousetrap and Hercule Poirot to Miss Marple - a little old lady living in a village in the middle of nowhere (with a murder rate to make the worst American cities look safe). This is much Death on the Nile or Glass Onions though. Albeit with more kinky sex.

Despite all of this, Joe, and his inner voice, remain compelling. His sarcastic inner voice is funny and still manages to walk that fine line between keeping him relatable and repugnant. He accurately skewers the characters around him with funny commentary far too often, then goes “and so you must die!” Then he will act on that. Many of us might think things along the lines of “I wish they would die” but Joe goes and acts on that thought. That remains here.

I wish they’d done Britain better but this still flies and entertains. At the end of season three I was looking forward to multiple more seasons. I appreciate this is the midpoint of season four, so they can pull a lot out of the bag in the remaining episodes, but the rumour mill suggests that there’s one more season left. I will happily watch that, but, at the same time, I think that feels about right from this first half of season four.

Bechdel Test: Pass. I’m not 100% sure every episode passes but there are a lot of female characters and they talk freely to each other. They talk about art, booze, drugs, sex and all kinds of things. Sometimes they also talk about men, true, but it a small part of their conversations. Because it’s done so well and so widely, I’m going to be generous on the one episode where I’m not quite sure.

Ko Test: Pass. There are several WOC, of several ethnicities, all of whom have quite chunky speaking parts. I would say that the balance of ethnicities looked off to me, it looked more like an American mix than a British mix, but the numbers are small and it’s hard to be sure, and that’s not what this test looks at.

Russo Test: Pass. This is tricky. There’s one scene that looks explicitly like mlm sex, another that hints there might have been an mlm relationship (one man in common in both scenes). If that character is into mlm sex, it would clearly make him some flavour of queer, probably bi/pan since he’s also engaged to a woman and seems to genuinely love her and enjoy sex with her. However, they talk about this later, and it becomes far less clear whether this is about mlm sex or a power kink combined with a golden showers kink. Even if the only interaction is kinky play, rather than a full relationship, I think we’d largely regard that as sexual, and even if he doesn’t label himself, his fiancée labels him as pan because of this and (I assume) other things.