By Kelly
I tried the Netflix Original You yesterday, and watched all 10 episodes in one sitting. To say it’s addictive is an understatement. I didn’t even get through either season of 13 Reasons Why in one sitting, and that show had me up until 3 a.m. on weeknights.
I’m sure you can tell from the show’s image that it’s not the happily ever after type. Though it starts with a typical bookstore meet cute, between Joe (Penn Badgley) and Beck (Elizabeth Lail), it goes wrong fast, and it’s pretty disturbing. But it’s also really entertaining.
Spoilers ahead
The most disturbing thing is that the anti-hero main character, Joe, is so sympathetic you find yourself rooting for him when you totally shouldn’t. Even though he ends up doing some really terrible things, he tries not to do those things first, before he slips, and he feels really bad about them. There’s even a period where he makes a real attempt to turn his life around. He eventually fails, but there’s something really endearing about the attempt. I mean, don’t get me wrong, even though he’s a hopeless romantic bookworm on the surface, dude’s totally crazy, but it’s way more entertaining to watch a sympathetic monster than a completely demonized one.
Another sympathetic layer to this is Joe’s foil, Paco (Luca Padovan), the young kid who also reads to escape abuse as Joe did as a child, though season one only begins to scratch the surface of what exactly happened to young Joe. Paco is the one character in the show that Joe never seems to turn on, even after promising Beck that he would “Never hurt someone he loved”, which doesn’t turn out to be true…for her.
Another good point this show makes is that Beck really allows some awful people into her life. Her self-absorbed, non-boyfriend Benji (Lou Taylor Pucci) is a pretentious food snob who cheats and makes overpriced soda, and her supposed best friend Peach (Shay Mitchell) is trying to turn her into a doll (which is fitting from a Pretty Little Liars veteran), control her life, sabotage her career, stalk her and take advantage of her sexually after convincing her to take drugs. So I do agree that those two people need to get the hell out of her life permanently, but, I mean, she could just stop returning their calls, Joe. Murder’s quite a jump.
I had previously never heard of the two books the series is based on, You and Hidden Bodies, until now, but I can’t wait to read them. The writing in this series is so fascinating and cliffhangy, I bet you’ll get hooked, too.
Happy binging!
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