“What goes around comes around.”
A dangerously charming, obsessive man goes to extreme measures to insert himself into the lives of women who fascinate him.
Latest episode: S5 E10 Finale (Apr 24, 2025)
Obsessed with an aspiring writer, a brilliant bookstore manager begins quietly and strategically removing all obstacles that keep her from him.
Meet Will Bettelheim. He's not your regular Joe. He's new to LA and has sworn off love. But love, like murder, has a way of tracking you down.
Now married with a young baby, Love and Joe try to forge a normal life in the affluent suburb of Madre Linda. But old habits die hard.
Starting anew in London, Joe vows to bury the past and be his best self. But on the rocky road to redemption, a new obsession starts to take hold.
Joe Goldberg returns to New York City, where his journey began, seeking a "happily ever after" with his new wife, Kate, a billionaire CEO. However, their perfect life is threatened by Joe's past and his own dark desires. Joe grapples with being a member of the elite, struggling to reconcile his past actions with his desire for a good life.
I didn't expect You to become this sharp. When it arrived in 2018, it looked like glossy Lifetime pulp—a lurid little thriller about a bookstore manager stalking a poetry student. But over five seasons, ending with its final stretch in 2025, latestnetflix.com argues, Greg Berlanti and Sera Gamble kept bending it into something nastier and smarter.
The show isn't really about one serial killer. It's about the rotten logic we've been sold by romantic comedies for decades. We've been trained to read persistence as devotion, obsession as passion, and boundary-breaking as proof of love. You just follows that fantasy to the bloodstained place it was always capable of reaching.
The whole thing stands or falls on Penn Badgley, and the casting is half the joke. He came in carrying the history of Gossip Girl, where Dan Humphrey was basically the patron saint of the aggrieved "Nice Guy" who worms his way into elite spaces and calls it sincerity. As Joe Goldberg, Badgley twists that energy just slightly and turns it poisonous.
The performance is unsettling because of how little he pushes. He holds himself in a tight, almost painful stillness. He barely blinks.
"A compulsively watchable stalker thriller powered by Joe Goldberg’s unnerving charm, even as later seasons grow repetitive and less focused."
The early seasons hook viewers with tense plotting, sharp inner monologue, and a lead performance that makes Joe both magnetic and terrifying, turning the show into an easy binge. Over time the story leans on recycled obsession-and-murder cycles, increasingly far-fetched character choices, and a divisive later stretch that some find boring or directionless, especially in the London arc and final seasons.
Joe Goldberg spent autumn 2018 on a basic-cable Sunday at 10. The September 9 pilot drew 820,000 same-day viewers. Episode 9, "Candace," sank to 470,000. The November 11 finale managed 530,000. The Hollywood Reporter later put the live-same-day average at 611,000. Lifetime had already renewed Greg Berlanti and Sera Gamble's thriller in July, before a single episode aired, in part to lock a California Film Commission credit. The network did not own the Warner Horizon show. latestnetflix.com's read is that On December 3 it handed season 2 to Netflix and issued a polite goodbye,.
Season 1 landed on the streamer December 26. In January Netflix said more than 40 million member accounts were on track to watch in the first four weeks. Entertainment Weekly printed the fine print. A view is 70 percent of one episode. Even with that asterisk, the cable leftover became the homepage.
The Hollywood Reporter had him attached in June 2017, his first series lead since Gossip Girl ended in 2012. He told iNews he sat on the fence for months. "I wish you guys well, I hope you find someone. But I'm not sure I wanna do this." Six months a year, maybe six years. At ATX he called embodying Joe "really disturbing." Gamble and Berlanti wanted that discomfort. They needed someone who could play the nice bookstore guy in scene one, then let him split,,. At the Television Critics Association tour he offered the worst possible spot. "If you like Gossip Girl, this one is going to be a killer." Asked about a reunion, he said he would do it "if Dan got to kill them". Domino Kirke, whom he married in 2017, pushed him to take the part. Years later he told Variety that fidelity was one reason he had wanted to walk, a detail he had not said out loud in 2018.
They shot New York and wrapped December 19, 2017. Elizabeth Lail played Beck. Shay Mitchell was Peach for the first six hours. John Stamos recurred as Dr. Nicky. Caroline Kepnes, who wrote the 2014 novel, scripted episode 8. Rotten Tomatoes later posted 93 percent from 58 reviews. Critics put the season on year-end lists at TV Guide, the Associated Press, and the New York Times. Linear viewers did not show up.
After the move she told Vulture the show was "always built to be extremely binge-able." Internationally it had already been a Netflix original. The U.S. Just caught up. She also told iNews they were in post on episodes 1 and 2 when the Harvey Weinstein story broke. The #MeToo calendar was not the pitch. It became the air date. Season 2 followed Kepnes's Hidden Bodies and moved Joe to Los Angeles. Badgley was the only series regular who walked out of the book vault. The Lifetime trailer, Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me" over a subway save, is still the cleanest warning the show ever cut.
Later he asked Gamble to take intimacy "from 100 to zero." That is season 4 talk. In 2018 he was still the man Lifetime could not sell past 611,000 and Netflix could not keep off autoplay.
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