You Season 5 Review: Final Nail In The Coffin

Season 5 of Netflix’s You is an entertaining if uninspired story that exposes the cracks in this tired formula.

This transformation has only hurt You throughout its previous seasons, as it’s been forced to leave the character-driven storytelling behind and replace it with a more unrealistic narrative filled with forgettable characters and unresolved subplots. Unfortunately, season 5 of You feels like more of the same, although it does benefit from certain connections to the previous seasons that both remind audiences of how good this show can be and serve as a neat bookend to the series.

Season 5 picks up several months after the previous season’s bloody conclusion, with Joe (Penn Badgley) and Kate (Charlotte Ritchie) having moved back to New York to escape the consequences of their crimes in London. In the Big Apple, Joe begins to grow closer to Kate’s family: including her two sisters Reagan and Maddie (Anna Camp), who are fighting for control of the Lockwood family company. Meanwhile, a woman named Bronte (Madeline Brewer) has turned up at Joe’s old bookstore looking for a place to stay, and Joe finds himself immediately charmed by the young literature student.

You’s fifth season immediately struggles to get off the ground due to the scattered story and lack of purpose. Where previous seasons have had a clear selling point that distinguish them from previous storylines (season 3 saw Joe play the family man in California, while season 4 brought him to the classrooms of London), the show’s latest outing feels much less focused. Bringing the story back to New York is clearly an attempt to pay homage to the first season and return to Joe’s “roots”, but there’s no real purpose to Joe’s life there, and its familiarity merely exposes how much the show has declined.

However, things speedily pick up for You season 5 around the half-way point, when its story begins to take a clearer form and the first half is revealed to merely be stage-setting for a much more interesting, faster-moving conclusion. It’s a very sharp change of pace that definitely shouldn’t take quite as long as it does to pay off, but there’s no denying that the final episodes of season 5 should be satisfying for those who’ve stuck with this show since the beginning.

Unfortunately, none of this changes the fact that You really struggles to keep up with the exhaustive, convoluted narrative web that it’s woven for itself. Joe Goldberg remains a fairly compelling protagonist, but the characters around him essentially just exist to ensure that the show’s writers can hit certain narrative beats. Their decisions are so distractingly nonsensical and their dialogue so obviously forced that it’s difficult to really care about any of them – which is doubly critical for a show where, by design, you’re not supposed to care about the villainous main character either. It leaves the entire season feeling somewhat directionless and lost, which is clearly a consequence of Netflix’s show getting so far ahead of the material upon which it’s based.

Thankfully, You is filled with compelling performances that manage to keep audiences invested even when the clunky dialogue is doing its best to prevent that. Badgley and Ritchie have very strong on-screen chemistry, immediately proving why Kate was the perfect character to bring over from the previous season. Anna Camp offers a great dual performance, though both of her characters are constantly bogged down by cliched writing and inexplicable decision-making. Brewer is a surprising standout of this powerful ensemble, and her character gets an impressive amount of screen time that’s all thoroughly earned.

Overall, You season 5 will only be disappointing to those who expected some kind of miraculous recovery for a show that’s seemingly forgotten its roots. It’s a definite improvement on the previous seasons, but it never reaches the heights of the first two; returning fans will appreciate the bookended storytelling that ties Joe’s story together neatly, but it’s not quite enough to justify the scattered first half of the season.

Season 5 of You is now available to stream globally on Netflix.