‘You’ Showrunner Struggles to Imagine Fitting Justice for Joe Goldberg
You Season 4 has kept Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley)’s hands clean so far. Joe is not directly responsible for the murders that are occurring in London, but he sure is involved. Even if Joe stops the Eat the Rich killer, there’s probably too much blood on Joe’s hands for him to walk away clean. But, what comeuppance he might ultimately face still stumps showrunner Sera Gamble.
Gamble was a guest on The Hollywood Reporter’s TV’s Top Five podcast on Feb. 10 to discuss You Season 4 Part 1. She looked ahead to how things might end for Joe and explained why she struggles with deciding what that looks like. You Season 4 Part 2 premieres March 9 on Netflix.
Will Joe Goldberg get away with murder when ‘You’ ends?
It’s not like Joe hasn’t sacrificed. He gave up his son when he faked his death in the season 3 finale. But, in a world where killers and stalkers often go free, Gamble struggles with giving You such a definitive ending.
“The central conversation that we have among the writers, between Greg [Berlanti] and I and a lot with Penn, is about the fact that it would be nice to end this arc with some form of justice,” Gamble said on TV’s Top Five. “Guys like this don’t usually see a lot of justice from the world. That’s actually kind of challenging to plot. How does Joe Goldberg go down in a world that he’s been braining people with bricks in broad daylight for years? He’s cute and he looks right and he gets away with it. So the deeper question that we frequently pitch on this in the writers room is what’s real justice? What would hurt him the most? And then are we going to do that to him or not?”
The production of ‘You’ coincided with MeToo
You was in production in 2017 when MeToo gained prominence after the Harvey Weinstein expose. When the show premiered in 2018, it was meeting the moment, though it wasn’t planned.
“Something troublingly meta that was happening frequently, we made You right before the last five years of MeToo,” Gamble said. “MeToo exploded when we were in post. We added a text about Harvey Weinstein because that was happening as we were finishing episode 1. So by the time that the show was out, everyone was talking about MeToo in this fresh conversation way. Everyone was optimistic about it and the conversation has changed and it was new.”
Unfortunately, in the years since 2017, optimism has waned. Weinstein was convicted, but other offenders have evaded consequences. Some have made sincere efforts but others’ ring hollow.
“Now here we are several years later and we’re making a season about an objectively horrible man who is going to do what it takes to redeem himself,” Gamble said. “Every time I check the news, some other guy who faced a consequence, we’re now talking about what he needs to do to redeem himself. He’s either enacting and performing or actually embodying the behaviors of redemption. I feel like I’ve watched the whole wave of that movement as we’ve been making the show about this guy.”
Joe Goldberg is sincerely trying to change
Gamble describes Joe’s evolution on You as a sincere effort to change. Whether or not that excuses past murder remains to be seen.
He has at least tried to change a few times. This is a central theme of this season is can he redeem himself? Can he be redeemed? He comes to London, especially after the events of the first episode, he’s very much like I do need to right the karmic scales a little bit. To that point, I’m going to settle in and teach English literature, American literature and stay out of trouble. One of the locals that he meets in the first half is this author Rhys who has written a whole memoir about having done shady things earlier in his life and having a difficult childhood and rising above it and working to become a better person. That was the chat that started us off every Monday morning.
Sera Gamble, TV’s Top Five, 2/10/23
