Joe Goldberg heads to London for a whodunnit in You season 4
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Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) is looking for redemption. (And because he's Joe, he believes he can find it.)
After three seasons of finding love, obsessing over love, and then losing (or killing) said love — in one case, her name was literally Love (Victoria Pedretti) — Joe is starting over in London. (Reminder: In You's third season, Joe killed his wife and faked his own death, hence his new home overseas.) And as he says in the season's first teaser, "I've gone through a bit of refinement upon crossing the pond."
"Four seasons in, we need him to be reasonably self-aware but he obviously has huge blind spots," showrunner Sera Gamble tells EW. "He keeps finding himself f---ing up over and over again, so he will be working very hard to try to redeem himself this season. That's part of the fun of the season, is watching him try to be better and try to be kind of heroic in many ways."
Netflix Penn Badgley and Lukas Gage in 'You'
One of the biggest changes he makes, aside from living in a different country, is his job: Joe Goldberg is now a professor named Jonathan Moore. "Very early on in the life of the series, [author] Caroline Kepnes told me that she envisioned him in this academic setting eventually, and I just loved that image," Gamble says. "So we've known for years that we wanted to eventually put him in a university. It's also fun because for the first time, really, he's talking about the books he loves so much and getting the correct level of respect that he never really got when he was a bookstore manager."
That's not to say that everything has changed. Joe — sorry, Jonathan — will still find himself surrounded by people he finds insufferable. (Possibly insufferable enough to kill?) "He does have a talent for falling in with a very privileged and insular circle," Gamble continues. "Each season there's a different flavor to that, and this season we got to play with a group of people who actually have titles. The European aristocrats come from incredibly old families. It's just a different world."
But Lukas Gage's Adam is a fellow American. "His character is extremely important to us because our intention by no means was to go to England and just start making fun of people from other countries. We have something to say about privilege and obscene wealth and living an insular, sometimes ignorant, life," Gamble says.
Heading into season 4, Gamble says the writers were very aware of the challenge in front of them: to keep the show from feeling redundant. "We knew we were going to have to embrace that the show was going to change from season to season," Gamble says. "It would have to be a different kind of thriller, in addition to being a different kind of love story." For season 4, You is heading into whodunnit territory.
"It doesn't matter how many whodunnits I read or see, they still are so compelling," Gamble says. "It's just a really fun genre. And maybe the first very famous serial killer is from London with Jack the Ripper, so we very quickly started to talk about classic whodunnit structures — Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie." The real question is: Is there a world in which Joe Goldberg didn't do it?
You kicks off part 1 of its fourth season Feb. 9 on Netflix.
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