Netflix's You Is a Must-Watch Indictment of the Tried and True Rom-Com

There’s a scene in You, the soapy drama that premiered on Lifetime last fall and recently moved to Netflix for its second season, that wouldn’t feel out of place in a romantic comedy: Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley), our narrator, has just broken up with his perfectly competent girlfriend, Karen (Natalie Paul), and runs through the streets to the apartment of his one true love, Beck (Elizabeth Lail). Because we hear his thoughts, we know he wishes it was raining, for full dramatic effect. Where ‘80s-era Lloyd Dobler had a trench coat and a boom box, Joe has a rock, which he uses to accidentally smash Beck’s ground-floor studio windows. (Cue laugh track!) He pleads, she forgives, they have makeup sex.

This would be where most rom-com credits roll, but we are not in a rom-com. Instead, You unfurls more like a 10 hour episode of SVU wherein an average Joe bookseller—spoiler, sorry—holds his girlfriend hostage and ultimately kills her. A modern romance column, this is not—but it is a massive hit, because according to Netflix, the series has attracted over 40 million viewers since its platform premiere (which could mean a lot of things, based on Netflix's shadowy reporting, but still, huge). Some fans were drawn in because they thought Joe was hot, much to Badgley’s personal chagrin, a fun/upsetting dynamic that’s now being replicated with the streamer's new Ted Bundy documentary. (Coincidentally, some fans have noted that Badgley-as-Joe bears resemblance to one of the most infamous serial killers ever, unnerving in its own right.) But what the show does exceptionally well is utilize Joe's good-guy perception to skewer several hallmarks of Hollywood romance by following them down dark roads to their ultimate extremes.

At the show’s open, Joe and Beck have a traditional meet-cute: she's looking for a book, he’s a bookstore manager. They flirt; she buys the book; he learns her name; she leaves. But this is where things shift, because for every ostensibly romantic thing Joe does, there’s a sinister end in sight. He looks her up on social media, only to stalk her. While trailing her, he saves her life after she stumbles off the subway platform, only for her to feel indebted to him; he also steals her phone and follows her every text, plan, and move through the cloud. He encourages her to stand up to a sleazy professor; she does not realize she is being groomed to believe that she would not have found that power without his help. He waits for her to kiss him, so that she feels like she entered this relationship willingly. He attempts to befriend her friends, people whom he all but openly hates. Other acts are less veiled: he abducts and murders her on-and-off boyfriend; he starts seeing the therapist with whom he's convinced she is having an affair, and eventually attacks the man at gunpoint. Again, and I truly cannot stress this enough, he begs her to take him back, only to murder her.

Some of Joe’s deeds should stick out as automatic red flags, things you would never do in your own relationships. For example: the habitual murders. Others, like Googling Beck immediately and trying to win over her friends, seem more standard, normal even. And sure, a casual search might seem innocent enough, but the line quickly blurs when you can access someone’s every tweet, status update, and geotagged photo. (If you’ve ever had to stop yourself on a date before revealing that you already know something about someone that they did not tell you, you know exactly where that line exists.) In a typical rom-com, these might even be held up as ideal arbiters of romantic affection—trying to learn more about her and embedding himself in her social circle as a demonstration of his sincere interest in being a part of her life. In You, however, they're just a way for Joe to gain control of Beck.

Not everyone is quite so hoodwinked by Joe. Beck’s best friend Peach is instantly suspicious of him, despite the fact that he presents as a perfectly normal, if deeply nerdy, white dude. (Like Bundy before him, Joe uses his privilege and good looks to lure his victims into his traps, and do stuff like talk his way out of a ticket. Whiteness is so versatile!) She's full of questions for him after he miraculously saves Beck's life, interrogating him about why he just so happened to be in the same subway station at the same time as her, days after they met. Peach is the opposite of a traditional romcom best friend, who, rather than encouraging Beck to "let her guard down" and pestering Joe about wether or not he has any single friends, instead serves as a constant reminder of Joe's flaws and inconsistencies.

Even Beck, through her rose-colored romance lenses, experiences a couple moments of almost-clarity. Joe accompanies her to a furniture store, referencing another favorite rom-com trope, and suggests her bedroom isn't big enough for the king-size bed she's considering. When she asks him how he knows that, he covers up the fact that he broke into her apartment by lying about a gas leak and quickly chalks it up to the fact that no one's New York apartment is. Later, when she gets back on social media and Joe notices, she calls him out, but either thinks nothing of it or is flattered by the fact that he's keeping close tabs on her. So flirty, right? What’s more, movies and TV have always taught us that persistence is a key component of romance—see: Love Actually, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, etc—that ultimately leads to the guy getting the girl. In You, the "getting" is, uh, a different endgame.

It took all of two episodes for Amanda Vicary, a professor of psychology at Illinois Wesleyan University, to notice that Joe’s warning signs are hiding in plain sight, if only Beck cared to look. She points out that, thanks to basic human wiring, the lengths to which Joe goes to stake his territory could easily be read as romantic. “According to evolutionary psychologists, women are attracted to that protective, dominant side of a potential mate,” she notes. “The thinking is that these characteristics are still attractive today, even though women don't necessarily need the protection or resources that they did thousands of years ago.” While these days, some female characters are finally being given the chance to capably hold their own—I dare anyone to challenge Viola Davis in Widows—but it wasn't so long ago that Leonardo DiCaprio’s Romeo died trying to save Claire Danes’s Juliet from her Shakespearean family, and Maria lost Tony in West Side Story for the same reason.

Vicary’s work focuses on why women in particular are drawn to true crime stories; in 2010, she published a study that looked at why more women than men reviewed true crime books, and what they hoped to learn from them. “My research found more that people may be drawn to crime to learn how to prevent it from happening to them,” she says. Given that women are more likely to be the victims in both true-crime stories and real life, the stories read like a 101 course in How to Not Get Murdered. Some people take self-defense classes; others search for clues in paperback books. You's Joe is a particularly interesting study, because outwardly he doesn't seem like a horror-show psychopath, but as women know from crime shows and their own experiences, abusers often don't. Badgley himself told the New York Times, “In my experience, it tends to be men who are more horrified by Joe," maybe because his abuse is "less of a novel idea to women. He’s like a nightmare that you’ve repeatedly had, whereas men are like, ‘This isn’t real!’ Women are like, ‘Of course it isn’t real, but it’s extremely representative of something.’”

Zaron Burnett III, a writer who often reports on true crime, sees the genre as a way to better understand women’s fears, and as an opportunity to listen. In his experience, liking true crime “is a way that a woman opens up and admits that the world can be scary,” he says. It confirms what guys like to dismiss. It makes clear how prevalent violence against women is, and that no man understands what that’s like, unless he listens to women. Essentially, it reminds me how little I know what women go through every day.”

True crime, whether fictionalized or documentary, also gives the viewer new ammunition to interrogate habits that much more closely. As writer Bolu Babalola pointed out in Dazed, Joe truly believes that everything he is doing is for Beck’s greater good. He is the ultimate performative “nice guy,” and honest-to-blog claims to be a better feminist than the women on the show. And we as an audience follow along, in part because we have to—he is the narrator, after all—but also because his charm allows him to trick both Beck and us into thinking that everything will be OK.

You isn’t necessarily meant to be a prescriptive, but there is truth in even the campiest of dramas. Joe refuses to give Beck space, drives her friends away, and breaks down any semblance of trust she had for him by checking her social media and phone relentlessly. The show smartly turns "right place, right time" moments that work in rom-coms on their heads, and questions the status quo of the archetypal male romantic hero in the pop culture canon. Rom-coms aren’t real life, but they reflect and perpetuate the standards people have come to expect from one another. And if you haven’t yet learned how to disentangle Hollywood’s happily ever afters from what people actually want in a relationship, well, there’s always season two.