Everybody’s favorite psycho stalker turned killer will be back for a third season after Netflix renews You for a third season.
Netflix ordered You’s third season with ten episodes that will be premiered in 2021. This didn’t come as a surprise given that just days after its second season has been released, the psychological drama is fifth on Netflix’s top ten most popular television series last year. Netflix has done a phenomenal job in marketing the hit drama, pumping up its online campaign resulting in You have a very strong social media presence. The show’s social media presence exploded on Twitter just a couple of hours after season 2 was released last December 26.
Showrunners Greg Berlanti and Sera Gamble will be returning as executive producers for You’s third season where Gamble will still serve as the primary showrunner. Joe Goldberg actor Penn Badgley and Love Quinn actress Victoria Pedretti will be reprising their roles as well.
You are an on-screen adaptation of You and Hidden Bodies, best-selling novels by author Caroline Kepnes and developed by Berlanti and Gamble for television.
We follow Joe (Badgley) to escape New York to the place that people will think he will go the least, Los Angeles after his former squeeze Candace Stone (Ambyr Childers) resurfaces after a failed murder attempt. Candace haunts Joe, telling him that she doesn’t intend to call the authorities on him because that would be pretty easy. Instead, she plans to just follow him around to remind him of who he really is and what he has done while trying to save people from him.
This leads to Joe needing to take on the identity of ‘Will Bettelheim’, a fake identity created by a hacker (Robin Lord Taylor) who had used the same identity before Joe subsequently borrowed it until his real identity was revealed later on the series. You take us on a rollercoaster of psychological checkers between Joe and Candace, with the two of them dealing with their individual struggles and having to deal with the eccentric but wealthy Quinn family.
You season 2 didn’t fall victim to the typical exhaustion of quality that a lot of television shows suffer from. In some ways, it’s better than the first season. Victoria Pedretti’s Love Quinn has more character layers than Elizabeth Lail’s Guinevere Beck. Don’t get me wrong, Beck as a character was great. But she ultimately was just a McGuffin of sorts. She was there to move the plot that ultimately led Joe is coming to Los Angeles. Love Quinn on the other hand as revealed in season 2’s final stretch of episodes reveals that she was not just Joe’s ‘love interest’ but a vessel of his own personal realization of who he really is and served as a mirror of his own actions.
That and the fact that they have a child together now. Not only can he not escape her in the literal sense of the word, but he now has a sense of purpose, to be a father to his child, and to stalk his neighbor. Yeah, Joe is still Joe, and it will be a delight to see where the story leads us as an audience given that there are now established extraneous variables like Love who can be a formidable foil to Joe. It just sucks that we need to wait an entire year to watch it.