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On this special episode of the Really Awful Movies Podcast, we delve into a Netflix series that’s making waves: YOU. Guess you could say, this episode’s all about you.
Joe is a bookstore manager in Midtown Manhattan. He becomes obsessed with a budding writer and MFA student, Guinevere Beck, aka Beck.
The two of them quasi hit it off at his place of work, before things take a more sinister turn. Soon, Joe is lurking about outside Beck’s (it should be said) palatial student housing accommodations. He peers through her window to observe the comings and goings (and especially coming!) Meanwhile, the internal monologue inside his skull tells him everything he thinks he knows about the apple of his eye, the object of his affections/obsessions.
Gradually, You reveals Beck’s entourage of friends, a veritable Sex and the City assemblage (minus the professionalism and successes), a group bursting with Me-monkey Insta-solipsism. Joe, as the trailer says, believes she has the wrong group of friends and a liaison with him will go a long way to fixing that.
Then the Netflix series sets up that class in-group out-group dynamic of the friends with the new boyfriend. Given that he’s a cerebral reader and they’re consumerist bobble-heads, they’re unlikely to see eye to eye.
You was a Lifetime show, and now it’s being sold as a Netflix Original. It has that Lifetime romance-flick-of-the-week glossy sheen, but to their credit, they do the best to depict NYC life (to the best of their abilities and budget, although we hear that the show is being moved to California for tax reasons).
Anyway, on this episode we blaze through 10 episodes of You (Penn Badgley, Elizabeth Lail, Shay Mitchell star) in under an hour.
This is a show that’s cheap, trashy, brainless fun. So that’s pretty much right up our alley, right, champions as we are of genre/transgressive cinema. Join us, folks.
We’re here every Friday, so go and subscribe to the Really Awful Movies Podcast. We also have genre film reviews (mostly horror movies) over at www.reallyawfulmovies.com