You · Season 1 · Netflix
You Season 1
You Season 1 is a MUST-WATCH, BollyMeter 8.5/10. 10 episodes on Netflix from 9 September 2018.
Updated
What BollyAI Thinks
Season 1 premiered on Lifetime in September 2018 before Netflix acquired it and launched it globally in December 2018, at which point it became a word-of-mouth phenomenon. Critics scored it at 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 62 reviews, with the Guardian calling out its smartest formal move: the show makes viewers complicit in Joe's rationalisation, then holds that against them. Penn Badgley's voiceover is the engine - sardonic, charming, delusional. The New York City bookstore milieu grounds a premise that could easily tip into camp but stays genuinely unsettling. Audiences largely agreed, and the social-media discourse around Joe's fandom became part of the cultural conversation the series was deliberately staging.
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The Room
“It is smart enough to let us know that to sympathise with Joe is to be complicit in his crimes.”
Guardian“Its sparklingly cruel sense of humour is what makes it compulsively watchable.”
New Statesman
Standout Episodes
The hours worth arguing about — premieres, finales, and the turning points. BollyAI reads the room episode by episode.
- E1Pilot8.0
The premiere establishes the entire series mechanism in 44 minutes: Joe narrates his obsession with aspiring writer Beck as if it were romance, while the show films it as surveillance. The gap between Joe's internal monologue and the audience's perception of his behaviour is the whole show in miniature.
The moment: Joe's first covert look into Beck's apartment window, filmed from Beck's perspective as a trespass but narrated by Joe as intimacy.