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"At the end of the day, people really are just disappointing, aren't they?"
"I should have seen the signs. But you never do when you're in love."

You is a psychological thriller series developed by Sera Gamble (Supernatural, The Magicians) and Greg Berlanti, based on the novel of the same name by Caroline Kepnes.

Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) seems like a perfectly normal bookstore manager on the surface, but when he meets Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail), a graduate student and aspiring writer, it soon becomes clear that all is not well with him. As his crush on Beck escalates to an actual relationship, Joe becomes increasingly more intent on keeping her around, by any means necessary.

You originally aired on Lifetime in late 2018, but it moved to Netflix for its second season. The second season dropped in December 2019, adapting the source material's sequel, Hidden Bodies. A third season launched in October 2021, with a fourth greenlit before the third's premiere. After sticking to the broad plots of the first two novels for the first two seasons, the third season of the series departs completely from the narrative of the books and bears almost no resemblance to the third novel, You Love Me. On March 24, 2023, it was announced that the show had been renewed for a fifth and final season.

Not to be confused with the 2013 novel of the same name.

Expect a whole conversation worthy of Abbott and Costello if someone happens to come up and ask you, "What are you watching?" or "What's on TV tonight?"


You contains examples of:

  • Abusive Parents:
    • It's revealed in his backstory that Joe's father was abusive to him, while his mom did nothing to protect him.
    • Joe's mother was abused as well, but she did neglect him in the grocery store while drawing herself to other men, and she did abandon him. Joe met up with her later and asked if she did not ever love him. She said she did, but she could not take care of him. She did ask him to come with her and her other son and start a new, but he did not.
    • Ivan Mooney, the owner of the bookstore, also counts. He took Joe in from foster care and was verbally abrasive to him, even going as far as to lock him in the book vault/cage whenever he acted out.
    • Played with in Beck's case. Her father is more neglectful than abusive, preferring to dote on his new wife and her children instead of trying to repair his relationship with Beck beyond giving her money for her tuition, rent etc.
    • Played straight with Love and Forty. Forty's father is a very critical, cold, and dismissive towards Forty, but this appears to be somewhat understandable as Forty is a drug addict. But this becomes so much worse when it's revealed that they covered up his rape by an au pair with money, and directly before, Love's mother slaps her hard across the face, blaming her for Forty's relapse.
  • Accidental Murder: Joe hadn't actually meant to kill Henderson, but figures he had it coming anyway.
  • Adaptational Attractiveness: In the books, Forty apparently looks a lot like Philip Seymour Hoffman, an actor not particularly known for his looks. In the show, he's a conventionally handsome young man.
  • Adaptational Badass:
    • Delilah. In the book, she is a Satellite Love Interest (at best) who is just used for sex by Joe, reduced to a Running Gag, and is Too Dumb to Live. In the series, she is a strong-willed survivor and feminist journalist who was previously assaulted by Henderson and manages to expose him for it under great pressure, and a very protective big sister who genuinely loves her sister and will go to great lengths to protect her.
    • Candace. She's already dead in the book. In the series, she comes back to New York to threaten Joe into not hurting anyone else and follows him to Los Angeles, stalks Forty and Love, gets in a relationship with Forty, and follows Joe around.
  • Adaptation Deviation:
    • The end of season two onwards marks the most significant change from the source material thus far. In Hidden Bodies, Joe is arrested for his crimes after learning Love is pregnant with his child. The season two epilogue, however, shows that Love is pregnant like in the book, but Joe evades imprisonment and moves with her to the suburbs, where she can keep a tight leash on him.
    • This continues with season three versus the third book in the series, You Love Me, which was released before the season dropped on Netflix but after development had already started. In the book, Joe starts a new life in Seattle without Love, whose family pays him to stay away from her. She eventually lures Joe back to LA as an opportunity for him to see their child, which she uses to shoot Joe in the head and then turn the gun on herself. Love dies, but Joe survives the incident. The main plotline involving Joe's new love interest, Mary Kay, also does not feature in the third season, instead continuing the cliffhanger ending of season two wherein Joe and Love move to the suburbs to raise their new child together.
  • Adaptation Distillation: The show's second season is a rather fascinating case of distillation and Adaptation Expansion, as relates to the sequel novel, Hidden Bodies. On the one hand, the second season cuts out most of Joe's work as a screenwriter from the novel, turning him instead into Forty's very reluctant collaborator (in the novel, Joe writes most of Forty's screenplays, only for Forty to screw him over and take credit for them). The show also cuts out a lot of Joe's time hanging out with the Quinn family, his murder of Officer Fincher in Mexico, Forty's trip to Vegas, Joe tracking him down and attempting to murder him in the desert and Joe ending up in jail at the end of the novel for his crimes from the first book.
  • Adaptation Expansion:
    • The first season adds new characters like Paco and Claudia, new subplots for Beck and her friends, expands some story moments (such as Joe being caught by Beck at the Dickens Festival and meeting her family) and a brand new Sequel Hook for the finale.
    • Although many things were left out or reworked from the book, the show adds a fair bit to the second season, including the character of Ellie, and Delilah's crusade against Henderson. Love's violent sociopathy is also completely unique to the series, and ends up becoming the driving force behind the plot of Season 3.
  • Adaptational Friendship:
    • In You (Kepnes), Beck and Blythe are acquaintances doing the same MFA, but Beck despises Blythe (at least partly out of jealousy). Because both Beck and Blythe receive Adaptational Nice Guy treatment in the series, they are good friends and Blythe is shown actively supporting Beck (especially with her writing) after Peach's death.
    • Delilah and Joe have a casual hookup in both the book and Season 2. However, in Hidden Bodies, Delilah is treated with contempt and even nicknamed "Don't Fuck Delilah." In the series, Delilah and Joe develop a genuinely warm friendship (in the book, it was just sex), and Delilah confides in Joe about being raped by Henderson.
    • In Hidden Bodies, Forty and Henderson don't know each other. In the series, they are friends (albeit not close friends) and Henderson gets a small Pet the Dog moment when he calms down the high and embarrassing Forty at his party. This sets up the series' addition that Joe and Love frame Forty for killing Henderson by claiming that he found out Henderson was a serial predator and dispensed some vigilante justice due to Forty's own Rape as Backstory.
  • Adaptational Heroism:
    • Joe, while still nowhere close to a hero, is toned down severely from the novels, especially after the first season. Joe is a remorseless killer in the novels with no redeemable traits. The series works harder to turn him into a Sympathetic Murderer by reworking most of his killings, such as making his victims even worse (Henderson), changing them into accidents/self defence (Henderson again), changing it so that other people kill them (Delilah, Candace), or omitting them entirely (Fincher). His most heinous action — Beck's murder — happens offscreen, since it probably would have been impossible to sympathise with him if it was shown. The series also expands on his tragic backstory from a broken home more, makes his narration less vulgar and vitriolic, and adds one child character per season who acts as his Morality Pet whereas he loathed children in the books.
    • Karen Minty. In the book, she's a kind but completely clueless nurse, who is heartlessly used by Joe even though she only wants a normal life with him. In the TV series, she's Claudia's best friend and co-worker, who, with extreme difficulty, helps Joe to get Claudia clean and takes care of Paco.
    • The cop that Delilah dates, Fincher, has his closest book counterpart in a cop who - at least in Joe's estimation - is a creepy fame whore behind the mask. He's actually a kind, heroic cop in the series who genuinely cares for Delilah and tries to reveal the truth about Henderson's perversity.
    • Forty. In the book, he finds out the truth about Joe and is happy to keep it quiet providing that Joe writes screenplays for him for the rest of their lives, on top of being a sleazy manipulator, animal abuser, and cruel pervert who heartlessly demeans everyone around him. In the series, he's not only more of a friendly (if not obnoxious and misguided) ditz who is genuinely devoted to his sister Love's wellbeing and when he finds out the truth about Joe, he takes a gun to Joe in an attempt to protect Love from him.
  • Adaptational Jerkass:
    • Very slight one. Joe is immediately remorseful after he kills Beck in the book and breaks down in tears, albeit having killed her very brutally and sadistically and getting over in a few chapters). In the show, his guilt is replaced with a sinisterly calm and wistful monologue about how he helped her, although he does break down and apologise while hallucinating her in the next season.
    • Beck's non-Peach friends come off much worse in the show than in the book, where they're actually fairly supportive of Beck, give her good advice, recognize Peach's toxicity and encourage her to pursue a healthy relationship with Joe (they don't know what he really is, of course). They're much more unpleasant in the adaptation, and there's a sub-plot (which isn't the book) where Annika goes viral when Peach shares video of racist remarks she made in college.
  • Adaptational Nice Guy:
    • While Joe is still firmly a Villain Protagonist, two changes help him to appear much more heroic: Paco and Claudia, his neighbors. Claudia is abused by her boyfriend, Ron, and Joe is the only person who takes care of Paco while this is happening. He's constantly shown to be looking out for Paco's best interests, and no-one is sad when Joe finally has enough and kills Ron. The Joe of the book, on the other hand, is incredibly unsympathetic to kids or anyone except his infatuations and maybe Mr. Mooney. Though at the end of Season 4, he becomes as bad as his book version as he murders one of his students and frames another for his crimes.
    • Beck, so much, which makes the negative reaction some viewers have towards her even more noticeable. Book Beck is cruel about Joe to her friends, telling them he has nothing but her in his life. She's also a Gold Digger (according to Benji, but she also takes advantage of Peach), admits that she doesn't care about Peach, and intentionally seduces most of the men around her. She even admits to Joe right before he kills her that she just wanted Nicky to break up with his wife for her and she wanted to screw up his kids, even though she had no interest in pursuing an actual relationship with him. Television Beck is much kinder to Joe, is never rude about him to her friends, genuinely tries to help Peach, babysits Paco, and most noticeably, while she does cheat on Joe with Nicky, she also permanently ends the relationship when she gets back together with Joe.
    • Blythe, Beck's classmate and friend. In the book, Beck dislikes her and complains about her endlessly. Blythe constantly criticizes Beck's stories (although Joe admits Jerkass Has a Point). When she and Nice Guy Ethan get together in the book, she is extremely rude to him and domineering. In the television series, Beck is still shown being jealous of her and Blythe is still self-important and snobby, but they become genuine friends. Blythe helps Beck with her writing without jealousy and ends up happy with Ethan.
    • Forty. Joe despises him in the book, and while in the series he does describe him as an "adult baby" as someone who needs attention and love from everyone, and clings on tight to Love, he actually is a very sweet, protective brother deep down and his main creepy behaviour only comes out when he's high, while book-Forty is actually even more of a creep constantly.
  • Adaptational Sexuality:
    • Peach is a Psycho Lesbian in the book, but here, she at least willingly has sex with Raj, suggesting she's a Depraved Bisexual instead. It is clear that she'd prefer for it to be Beck, though, so she may still be gay and just using Raj as a smokescreen.
    • Forty is straight in the book, but in the series, he's very Ambiguously Bi. Despite his relationship with Amy Adam, Forty loves Joe and clings on tight to him.
  • Adaptational Villainy:
    • Peach is a sedate version. While in the book she is not a nice person and a massively manipulative annoyance, Peach of the book never would've done something as bad as setting Beck up to be sexually assaulted by a famous writer and potential mentor.
    • Benji in the book is arguably more annoying (as a hopelessly entitled snob who still tries to condescend to Joe after he's been kidnapped and locked in the cage), but Benji in the series is a murderer who let a classmate die during a college fraternity initiation ritual, while the book's version of Benji is "only" a manipulative, sleazy, self-important drug addict.
    • Love and Forty's parents border on Too Good for This Sinful Earth in the book, except some individual problems that seem like they might be trying to help, like letting a hooker blow the fifteen-year-old Forty and accidentally making everything worse. However, in the TV series, they're nasty, perverse master manipulators that are perfectly willing to cover up that Love is a murderer and to let their au pair continue to rape their son and, while Love and Forty's father does dislike Forty, he isn't so cruel, and neither are physically abusive in the book.
    • Love herself. In the book, she finds out about Joe's crimes and willingly covers them up. However, in the series, she turns out to be a murderer and a major Yandere. She kills Delilah and Candace, two of the most sympathetic characters and past victims of Joe's. Although Forty's rapist was an Asshole Victim of the first order, she also had no problem making Forty believe he committed the crime.
    • Henderson was not a good person in the book, and his increased villainousness here might be chalked up to the Values Dissonance stemming from the Me Too movement. Book-Henderson was a lonely creep who habitually hit on and slept with women, including women he worked with and judged them on their appearance. Television Henderson is a serial rapist who drugs and sexually abuses underage girls.
  • Aerith and Bob:
    • There are characters such as Joe, Benji, Karen, and Roger alongside Guinevere, Annika and Peach.
    • The second series takes this up to eleven, as there are characters named Calvin, Dotty,
  • An Aesop: Loving a Shadow is not healthy and not something to be indulged in.
  • Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: After drinking with Delilah, Joe gets the bright idea to have sex with her in an alleyway, getting them both arrested for public nudity and almost having his prints taken.
  • Ambiguously Jewish: Joe's last name, Goldberg, is common among Ashkenazim, and Peach mentions going to "Jew camp" as a child. There's no other indication of them being Jewish though. (In the book, Joe and Peach are both half-Jewish and half-Christian.)
  • Asshole Victim: The Season 3 neighbor who gave Joe and Love's infant son measles because he refuses vaccinations for his own kids. Joe was actually willing to let him go until the guy spouts his talk on "putting chemicals in kids".
  • Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Sherry and Kerry are mostly portrayed as shallow, annoying douchebags with no real love or affection for each other. This seems to be reinforced when they descend into bickering after Love and Joe knock them out and throw them into the cage. But the experience ends up bringing them closer together, and they bond over memories of their early days together. They do end up writing a book about the experience and becoming motivational speakers, of course.
  • Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: Joe mostly kills toxic or abusive people, and while he's not above killing innocents as evidenced by his murder of Beck, he seems to have grown something of a conscience in the second season. He lets Will go, and tries to spare both Delilah and Candace. Love, meanwhile, has no such moral qualms, and is more willing to murder those who pose a threat to her and Joe, which leaves Joe's hands slightly more clean and makes him look like an Anti-Villain by comparison.
  • The Bad Guy Wins:
    • At the end of Season 1, Joe kills Beck and ultimately gets away with it.
    • Season 2 provides a more mixed example. Love definitely wins, as she ends up married and pregnant by Joe, able to control him whenever she wants. Joe also sort of wins, as he ends up living a life of privilege and unimaginable luxury, but he also has to do it under Love's watchful and often murderous eye, and it's clear the Quinns will dispose of him if he gets out of line.
    • Similarly, Season 3 is also a mixed bag. Joe wins, having killed Love and forged a suicide note in which Love claims sole responsibility for all of the season's murders. Sherry, Cary, and Theo recover from their injuries (with Sherry and Cary reinventing themselves as relationship coaches) and seem to have no interest in exposing Joe's participation in their respective imprisonment and assaults. However, Joe is forced to fake his death (and cuts off his toes to help sell the lie, no less!) and abandon his son—while simultaneously leaving him with a loving family to give him a chance at far more happier childhood than he had. But he is now free to start over in Paris with a new identity and a new object of obsession to pursue.
    • Season 4 presents this wholesale, The Eat the Rich killings are pinned on a fanatical stalker of Phoebe, and Joe manages to not only kill Rhys Montrose, a sitting mayoral candidate, but also place the blame on the two students who began to investigate him for the previous killings. He survives his attempted suicide and is welcomed into open arms by Kate, even though he murdered her father hours before. Kate's access to her father's resources allows Joe complete autonomy within the United States again, posturing the couple as survivors of abuse who turned to philanthropy. Instead of changing for the better, Joe completely embraces his dark side - with enough power and influence from the Lockwoods that the Quinns never managed to match.
  • Bait-and-Switch:
    • In episode 3, Joe discovers that Beck is planning to spend the weekend in a motel with a much older man, and the show frames it as Beck meeting her sugar daddy. Said man turns out to be her father.
    • A whole episode basically is devoted to showing that Joe probably killed Delilah while she was locked in the cage. It turns out that Love did it.
    • The final episode of season one launches an example with Beck's imprisonment by Joe and learning about everything he did for her. The audience has mostly been fed the story through Joe's warped perspective, which treats his obsessive behavior like a romantic comedy, and he insists that love can save his relationship with Beck. Beck, in response and getting time to process everything, admits how touched she is that Joe did all that for her, and that she now realizes how he was the only one who ever took care of her. This is what prompts Joe to let her out of the cage. But then only a few moments later, she attacks him, locks him up, and angrily demonstrates how a normal person who had just been locked up in a cage for several days would really feel: she loathes and despises him, and speculates that he's just a messed up "psychopath" using love as an excuse to hurt people.
    • Season 3 appears to set up Joe lusting after next-door neighbor Natalie and then Love murders the woman at the end of the first episode.
  • Bait-and-Switch Comment: After Joe has hit Peach on the head from behind, leaving her almost dead, a recovering Peach very grimly tells Joe that for all of his modest Boy Next Door behavior, it was him ...... who warned Peach that she might have a stalker.
  • Bait the Dog: At the end of Season 4, it appears that Joe will attempt to bribe Nadia into keeping silent about his crimes. Then she finds her boyfriend's corpse and realises his plan for her isn't so lenient.
  • The Beautiful Elite:
    • Most of Beck's friends are beautiful and glamorous, with Peach a particular example. Beck desperately wants to be one too, but she's constantly broke just from trying.
    • Season 4's social circle is a bunch of young, attractive, and wealthy English bluebloods and their social equals.
  • Because You Were Nice to Me: Averted by Joe, who won't let anyone stand between him and Beck. However, played straight at the end of Season 1 when Paco finds Beck locked up in the basement. Emphasised in that Beck was also nice to him, but Paco owes Joe for killing Ron and admires him, so he leaves Beck to die.
  • Betty and Veronica: Beck unknowingly plays the Archie to Peach's Betty and Joe's Veronica. Later, she becomes the Veronica to Karen's Betty for Joe's Archie.
  • Big Applesauce: The setting of the first season.
  • Big Fancy House: A lot of large, opulent houses for the Cast Full of Rich People:
    • Peach's Greenwich estate.
    • The Quinn family home.
    • Phoebe's "country house" which turns out to be a palatial estate.
  • Bittersweet Ending: The most upbeat of conclusions by far, Season 3 ends with Joe killing Love, faking his death and framing it and all their previous murders on her and escaping to Paris to possibly look for Marienne. On the other hand, their captives escape and move on with their lives and Henry is Happily Adopted by Dante and Lansing.
  • Boggles the Mind: Beck and Joe play Scrabble covered in romance / love-themed words.
  • Bookends: Joe and Love's relationship begins and ends with a roast chicken dinner.
  • Book Worm: Joe loves books, to an extent that it's genuinely obsessive. He's attracted to women who share that trait, though it's implied that's a bit of a self-delusional belief that Joe uses to cover up fairly basic lust toward attractive women.
  • Bourgeois Bohemian:
    • Love and Forty's parents fall into this trope, being obscenely wealthy business moguls who are into New Age/Eastern philosophy.
    • Love's circle of friends as well — hip, young LA natives who concern themselves with things like reiki and Ayurveda. Joe initially scoffs at their privilege but comes to appreciate them.
  • Black Comedy: The series is primarily a thriller/drama, but Joe's narration is full of snort-worthy lines, usually due to his snarker tendencies, or sheer Refuge in Audacity.
  • Bloody Hallucinations of Guilt: During an acid trip in season 2, Joe keeps seeing blood all over his hands as a manifestation of his repressed guilt for having killed Beck last season.
  • Breather Episode: “Ex-istential Crisis”, following Joe's failed attempts to win back Love and his burgeoning relationship with Delilah plays out like a straight romantic comedy amidst the drama and murder. Until the end.
  • Brutal Honesty: A more lighthearted version than usual. Joe gets off to a rocky start with Love's friends when he tries to play along with some hipster/Granola Girl topic of conversation and pretends to know about it when he doesn't, which just makes him look disingenuous and shifty. He wins them over by bluntly admitting that he has no idea what the hell they're talking about, an admission which draws appreciative laughter and some confessions from other people who feel the same way.
  • Bullying a Dragon:
    • In Season 1, Peach makes an enemy out of Joe with her disapproval, suspicion, condescension, and blatant hostility. If he really was nothing but a modest book store manager of no great means – and not, say, a Machiavellian, sociopathic Serial Killer with a mean streak on par with her own – she might have lived longer.
    • In Season 3, Sherry has no idea what she's getting herself into when she starts passive-aggressively bullying Love, a psychotic killer.
  • Bunker Woman: Beck becomes one at the end of Season 1 when Joe imprisons her in the glass box under the bookstore. He kills her there.
  • Burn Baby Burn: Alluding to previous fiery crimes and coverups, Joe tells Kate a half-truth to make her trust him: he burns things as a form of catharsis. Later he sees her dramatically set an ugly painting on fire.
  • Bury Your Disabled: James, Love's first husband who was deaf, is already dead by the time of the story-he thus appears only in flasbacks. It's somewhat downplayed though since Dante, a recurring visually impaired haracter, is introducted in the third season.
  • Camp Gay: Gabe (though he's technically pansexual) and Calvin in Season 2.
  • Cassandra Truth:
    • For most of the show, Joe is a twisted manipulator. But in an ironic twist, the one time he's being totally honest, that Peach is setting Beck up to fail, Beck doesn't believe him.
    • Love and Forty don't believe Candace when she tells them that Joe is a stalker and serial killer.
  • Casting Gag: A lot of the main actors play roles strikingly similar to the ones that made them famous:
  • Cast Full of Rich People: Just about everyone is unusually rich.
    • Beck in Season 1 felt out of place among her rich peers, especially the very wealthy Peach. Beck couldn't pay rent and often had to stay in demoralizing or bad jobs, as a TA, in order to make money. It's also clear in the book that Joe is very poor, but in the series, he has no problem packing up and leaving LA at the drop of a hat, and apparently doesn't struggle to pay rent despite all of this.
    • Joe marries the super-rich Love and the two move to an opulent California suburb in season three, where they rub elbows with several obnoxiously rich neighbors.
    • The fourth season's characters are an ultra-wealthy London social circle, comprised of several children of aristocrats and millionaires. They provide elite settings for plots, such as an extremely exclusive club, a posh art gallery, and a palatial country house.
  • The Chain of Harm: Joe was locked in Mooney's cage by Mr. Mooney and burned and abused in foster care. He physically tortures Benji and emotionally tortures Beck in the cage.
  • Character Narrator: Joe constantly narrates his often disturbing train of thought, and in episode 4 Beck takes over from him for a bit.
  • Cheated Death, Died Anyway:
    • Joe saves Beck from being crushed under train tracks at the beginning of the story after she drunkenly falls onto them because he's stalking her. At the end of the Season 1, he strangles her to death after she finds out that he was stalking her (and murdering her friends and exes.)
    • Candace managed to dig herself out after being buried alive by Joe before Season 1, as revealed in flashbacks throughout Season 2. She returns to find Joe and make him suffer before revealing what he did, and attempts to protect his new girlfriend, Love. When Candace manages to imprison Joe (after he makes several attempts to kill her), she actually gets him to feel some genuine remorse, she then makes the fatal mistake of bringing Love to see Joe. Love turns out to be a Joe-centred yandere, and she kills Candace via slashed throat for real this time.
  • Chekhov's Gun: Discussed in season 3, when Cary Conrad leaves a gun (through no fault of his) at Joe's house. Joe, a bookworm, namedrops Anton Chekhov and the trope of an unnoticed gun later going off several times and decides to keep it onhand so it won't "fire" against him.
  • Chekhov's Armoury: Season 3 has many, including a literal Chekhov's Gun that Joe lampshades. Others include a crossbow given to Joe as a gift, Sherry and Cary's drugs, Love's garden and the keys that Joe and Love each hide in the basement cage...just in case.
  • Chekhov's Gunman: The Hot Librarian and douchey background news reporter in Season 3.
  • Chick Magnet: Even during his brief break-ups with Beck and Love, Joe has immediate rebound hookups with Karen Minty and Delilah. He's also subjected to light flirting from Ellie and multiple women coming onto him during his online dating attempts. By the fourth season, it's almost a running gag that Joe can get out of most situations and suspicion simply because of how many women want to sleep with him.
  • Clingy Jealous Girl:
    • Peach, who gets noticeably upset whenever Beck talks about her love life with men.
    • Beck gets jealous when she sees Joe with Karen.
    • Love. She instantly wants Joe after one conversation in a supermarket, she wants him to meet her friends within days, and she kills his ex-girlfriend and a girl he has locked in the cage just to protect him.
  • Composite Character: Candace is one of Amy Adam (whose name she uses as an alias) as a surviving victim of Joe's, and even takes on some qualities of Love, as she becomes an indie film producer thanks to Forty, although she is still Joe's first love and victim as in the book.
  • Continuity Nod: When Joe first meets Ellie, she says she's fifteen, but "basically sixteen." In the season finale, when she tells Joe that she can't move across the country because she's only fifteen, he responds by saying, "Basically sixteen, right?"
  • Contrasting Sequel Setting:
    • Season 1 is set in New York, Season 2 in Los Angeles. While both are bustling cities, Joe (a born and bred New Yorker) dislikes the energy of LA. Justified — he is essentially in hiding at the start of season 2, so chose somewhere so different that the person chasing him would never think to look.
    • Season 3 moves the protagonists from the hustle and bustle of LA to the more sedate suburbia.
  • Covert Pervert: Joe checking Beck out when they first meet, which she isn't privy to.
  • Crazy in the Head, Crazy in the Bed: In "The Captain" Beck spends most of the episode dealing with troubles with her father. At the end of the episode, she invokes this trope when she arrives to Joe's apartment for some Sex for Solace, joking to him that "They say girls with daddy issues are really good in bed".
  • Creepy Uncle: In her final story, Beck alludes to her uncle groping her during Thanksgiving when she was twelve, and being scarred from the look her father gave her when she told him, implying that he blamed her for it.
  • Darker and Edgier: After the past two seasons and first half had Joe as a clearly villainous but usually Affably Evil, the second half of Season 4 takes a HARD turn to horror. Joe had developed a split personality that committed the Eat-the-Rich murders and imprisoned Marienne in a cage for weeks until forgetting about her entirely, the latter arc ending with her seemingly being Driven to Suicide by overdosing on oxycodone. There are two scenes where men are tortured before being killed, one at Joe's hands. Joe ultimately attempts suicide in order to stop hurting people, but unfortunately fails and lives on. The season ends with his most heinous act: framing Nadia, one of his students and his Morality Pet for the season, for the murder of her boyfriend.
  • Dating Service Disaster: In an attempt to make Love jealous, Joe goes on a dating site for readers and has three dates: a vapid woman who spends their date taking selfies, a weirdo with zero personal boundaries, and a charming literate woman who ends up getting too emotional and needs to be ubered home.
  • A Day in the Limelight:
    • 1.04 mostly focuses on Beck, with her taking over as the episode's narrator for some bits.
    • 3.06 cuts in and out with Love's Character Narrator, as she talks to her late brother.
    • 4.08 switches to Marianne’s POV for the first part of the episode, showing her perspective of the prior episodes reveal.
  • The Day the Music Lied: A non-action example: episode 2 has Beck and Joe on the balcony. Romantic music swells as she leans in towards him, but dies down when she just places her head on his shoulder and calls him a good friend.
  • Dead Person Conversation: Two cases, both which end when the living person writes the dead person a letter, saying "Goodbye, you," symbolizing moving on and putting it behind them.
    • Throughout season 2, Joe sees Beck haunting him, sometimes talking to him.
    • In season 3, episode 6, Forty appears to Love.
    • In season 4, episode 9, Joe has a nightmare where he sees Gemma, Beck and Love
  • Deconstruction: Joe is a deeply disturbed guy who clearly sees himself as the protagonist in a romantic comedy, even explicitly referencing how "guys like him" always experience hilarious mishaps in romcoms. The show is, among other things, a deconstruction of romantic comedy behavior and the audience's instinctual sympathy for romantic protagonists.
    • Season three is basically a deconstruction of the idea of the twisted perfect match. Joe and Love have similar pathologies, but it's not two peas in a pod — when you put two disturbed, violent people together into a marriage, you don't get a perfect match. What you get are two people who constantly worry their spouse is going to murder them and who actually make plans to murder their spouse. It's (understandably) a miserable atmosphere of paranoia and distrust.
  • Destructo-Nookie: When Beck has sex with a bartender in "Maybe" they end up breaking her bed.
  • Did You Actually Believe...?: When Katherine stands up to her father on building her own life without his help, her dad scoffs and asks Katherine if she really believes so many opportunities, from a plush internship to getting a great apartment to magazine appearances, just happened to fall into her lap, when he made sure they did.
  • Didn't Think This Through: Joe kidnapping Benji and braining Peach with a rock were premeditated actions with the intent to do harm. However, he didn't think of what to do beyond that and panics as he has to think of what to do next.
  • Dies Differently in Adaptation: Most of the deaths are different.
    • Candace... twice. Joe killed her by drowning her in the book. In the series, he buried her alive instead, but she survived, and then Love slit her throat.
    • Peach. In the book, Joe bludgeons her on the beach; in the series, they wrestle over her gun in her garden and he shoots her.
    • Beck, possibly. In the book, Joe chokes her with pages of The Da Vinci Code. The series makes nothing of the copy, so while we don't see how she dies, it's unlikely it was the same way. In season 2, when Joe sees a hallucination of Beck, she undoes her scarf revealing bruises around her neck, implying that Joe strangled Beck.
    • Forty. In the book, he is killed getting hit by a car after jaywalking. In the series, he gets shot by a police officer after threatening Joe.
  • Disappeared Dad:
    • Beck has issues with this, by her own admission, because her dad left the family after divorcing her mom to marry his sober coach who he'd met while giving up drugs. She is apparently the only one of his three children who he still even has contact with. Their relationship seems to consist of him paying for rent and her college tuition to a certain degree, along with occasional visits. She pretends he's dead with most people. Her step mom likes to guilt-trip Beck over allegedly only using him as a cash machine, and having not been religious enough to keep him from getting into drugs, which explains why she doesn't visit him more. Beck's clearly jealous because his two stepchildren see her dad far more than she does, and learning her step mom is going to have a baby just makes her feel worse.
    • We never learn where Paco's father is, but his mom's now single and has an abusive boyfriend. She later says he deserves better, hoping to find a good father figure for him.
  • Dismembering the Body: Joe Goldberg frequently divides up the bodies that he kills into pieces and then disposes them separately as to better cover up his tracks. The ways he cuts up the body actually varies quite a bit, and he has even used a meat grinder before.
  • Disproportionate Retribution:
    • Joe's reaction finding out that Dr. Nicky was sleeping with Beck while they were dating? Frame him for the three of the four onscreen murders Joe committed throughout the series.
    • He thinks Benji is a colossal douchebag. It's only natural that he kidnap and eventually murder him.
    • After he learns Nadia has been investigating him, despite having the resources to pay her off, he murders her boyfriend and frames her.
  • Domestic Abuse: Claudia's boyfriend is an abusive drunk. She's afraid to press charges when he struck her though because of his threats to have her son Paco taken away.
  • Double Standard Rape: Female on Male:
    • Subverted pointedly in Season 2. Love tells Joe that Forty thinks his first love was a nineteen-year-old au pair who "seduced" him when he was 13. She immediately says that this was abuse and the lie is simply Forty's way of dealing with the trauma.
    • Also subverted in Season 4, with Gemma's harassment of the wait staff making her a Hate Sink.
  • Downer Ending:
    • Season One ends with most of the main cast dead because of Joe, who isn't punished for his actions at all.
    • Season Two ends with him and Love, both murderous stalkers, living in a fancy house in a great neighborhood. Meanwhile, Delilah and Forty are both dead and Ellie is forced to run away.
    • Season Three despite ending positively for the surviving residents of Madre Linda, also ends with Joe murdering Love, passing it off as a suicide and framing her for all the seasons murders, Joe fakes his death (even cutting his toes off to sell the ruse) and burns his and Love’s house down, Henry is left technically orphaned, Dottie has lost both of her children and is still an alcoholic, and Joe is once again free to start over with a clean slate and carry on his obsessive and murderous activities.
    • Season Four is by far the worst, with Joe now a billionaire and one of his students being pinned for his crimes.
  • Dramatic Irony:
    • When Joe confronts Beck about accusing him of being a murderer, she tells him that she doesn't believe that Joe is capable of doing anything like that.
    • Late in the third season, Matthew Engler, after months of illegally monitoring neighborhood security camera feeds, pieces together that the Quinn-Goldbergs killed Natalie and framed Gil for it. However, it is dismissed as [[Occam's Razor too much of a nutjob conspiracy theory compared to the simpler and public answer: that Natalie was a flawed and unhappy woman who made mistakes. The audience knows Matthew is completely right.
  • Dramatically Missing the Point:
    • Joe does this a lot of the time in regards to his stalking and creepy behavior, but in particular there's a point early in season 1 where he gives Paco Don Quixote to read and explains the plot as a man who goes around as a knight because he believes in chivalry, using that to explain how chivalry is about protecting the helpless and how important it is. In the books, however, Don Quixote is a man who went insane from reading too many chivalric novels and actually causes more harm than good over the course of his time as a "knight." It almost describes Joe to a T, especially as those he perceives as "helpless" are grown women with their own autonomy.
  • Drowning My Sorrows: Beck does this a lot. It almost gets her killed in the first episode when she drunkenly falls in the subway tracks.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending:
    • At least in Paco and his mom's case. After spending so much time being stuck under the thumb of Ron, Joe finally kills him and Paco and his mother move to California once they're free from his abuse.
    • Unlike earlier seasons, The 3rd one ends on a more positive note with all of the sympathetic supporting characters finally getting a silver lining after all they've been through. Marianne finally moves to a new place with her daughter for a fresh start, Sherry & Cary grow stronger together and talk about their survival to others and Matthew & Theo begin to reconnect their bond and be at peace with Natalie's death.
  • Eat the Rich: Season 4 is based around the "Eat the Rich killer", a Serial Killer apparently targeting members of an extremely elite London friend group.
  • Entitled to Have You: Joe tells himself he is entitled to his victims' love because he is so devoted to them.
  • Everyone Has Lots of Sex: Played straight in that Beck, Benji, and even Peach who never has sex with anyone in the book due to the Incompatible Orientation between her and Beck, but has sex with a random guy after Beck rejects her. Joe deliberately avoids sex with everyone except Beck, which backfires when their first time ends in an uncomfortable Instant Turn-Off as Joe lasts only a couple of seconds. Even Joe gets laid minutes after he and Beck break up. Love replaces him within less than a day with Milo after they break up, too.
  • Everyone Went to School Together: Season 4 centers around a group of wealthy young aristocrats who were all friends at Oxford. Tellingly, they don't appear to be very fond of each other in the present, and hang around each other mostly for the clout.
  • Evil Is Not a Toy: In season 4, when Tom Lockwood learns that his daughter Kate is dating a killer, rather than turning him in, he decides to use him to assassinate a political rival, with the intention of then having Joe get caught. As could expected, this blows up on his face quite spectacularly, as Joe ends up killing Lockwood.
  • Evil Versus Evil:
    • Joe vs Peach, both of whom vie for Beck's love and affection and see the other as a threat. They're both deplorable people, but both of them raise entirely accurate (if thoroughly hypocritical) points against the other.
    • In Season 3, Joe vs Ryan. Both Joe and Ryan are horrible people, but Ryan proves himself to be extremely sadistic and takes extreme pleasure in abusing and torturing Marienne and enjoys hurting people as if it's a normal sport for him to have fun with.
  • Exact Words: In the Season 4 finale, Joe assures Nadia that he wouldn't hurt her. True enough, he doesn't physically attack her. The same didn't apply to her boyfriend, however, and Joe was fine with framing her for it.
  • Faux Yay: Joe pretends to be gay in order to prevent Dr. Nicky from figuring out that Beck, his other patient, is his girlfriend. During the sessions he refers to her as "Ronaldo" while Karen becomes "Brad".
  • Five-Second Foreshadowing: Before Joe confronts Rhys, the latter can be seen arguing with his ex-wife, being uncharacteristically distressed and agitated. Moments later, he is revealed to have nothing to do with Joe.
  • Food as Characterization: Love believes in this very heavily. She insists on taking Joe to restaurants all around Los Angeles to find his "perfect bite", analyzing him all the way through. In the end, the dinner she makes for him encompasses not only what he likes in a meal, but his personality and interests in general—old fashioned, done right, not gimmicky, but real.
  • Foreshadowing:
    • Lots and lots of shots of people in the glass cage in the basement of the bookstore, hinting that Beck will end up trapped there in the first season finale.
    • When talking about Candace and how their relationship imploded, Joe says he's so paranoid about Beck because he was so into Candace, he "missed the signs." In the second season, he's so into Love and trusts her completely... so he utterly misses all the hints that she's not "all there."
    • In the first episode of the second season, Joe walks past a camera crew filming a dead woman who looks a lot like Candace. This foreshadowed her death later in the season.
    • Joe and Love substitute the word "love" with "wolf" when they tell each other they love each other, and Love playfully attacks Joe's neck with a toy wolf. In the penultimate episode of the second season, Love exposes herself as A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing with a knack for slicing people's necks open.
    • The scenes of Joe chopping Jasper's body are juxtaposed with Love cutting meat, signifying that Love too is a killer.
    • When Ellie finds out that Joe and Delilah are in a relationship, she threatens to run away from home if she sees anything between them. She does run away at the end after being suspected of Henderson's murder.
    • Candace warns Forty "Don't come crying to me when Joe kills your sister". Come the end of Season 3...
  • For the Evulz: In Season 3, Psycho Ex-Boyfriend Ryan abuses and tortures Marianne merely for his own sadistic amusement and takes absolute pleasure and joy in her misery.
  • Frame-Up:
    • At the end of season one, Dr. Nicky is arrested for Beck's murder after Joe buries her body on his property. He also hides his box of incriminating evidence in an old drainage, which includes Benji's teeth and Peach's phone, implicating Nicky in both their murders as well.
    • At the end of season two, Love and Joe frame the now-dead Forty for Henderson's death.
  • Framing Device: While most of the narration is Joe's inner monologue, a lot of the narration in Everythingshipis Joe relating his story to Dr. Nicky.
  • "Friends" Rent Control: Played for drama. Beck has a very nice living situation, but struggles to pay rent. It turns out that her dad helps sometimes with that.
  • Gaslighting:
    • Candace explicitly calls Joe out for gaslighting when he angrily insists that he never tried to kill her or bury her body. He did, of course.
    • Love tries this on Forty, insisting that he's just spouting wild conspiracy theories about Joe because he's relapsed and back on drugs.
  • Gayngst: Once Joe discovers Peach's secret, he's initially confused that she's not more open about her sexuality. It's Manhattan in 2018, after all - who cares if she likes women? Then he acknowledges that being part of a famous family is a lot of pressure and could have caused Peach to internalize a lot of fears and keep parts of herself secret.
  • Gilded Cage: The heavy implications of Season 2's ending. Joe ends up with the pregnant multi-millionaire Love, who has gotten rid of all his enemies or anyone who could threaten him by murdering them. Joe, having finally got what he wanted, is actually not happy at all and the season closes with him continuing to fantasize about a neighbour girl. He's being watched by the Quinn empire and it's going to turn out very badly for him if he stepsc out of line again.
  • Girl on Girl Is Hot:
    • Subverted in season 1. Joe vividly imagines Beck and Peach Salinger kissing and making love, but it's decidedly not an arousing sexual fantasy for him, but one of jealousy and paranoia. It's what prompts him to try to murder Peach the next morning, to prevent her from "winning" and stealing Beck away.
    • Played straight in season 3. When Sherry and Cary discuss boundaries with Joe and Love for their "swinging," they ask the "easy one" first, if Joe is okay with Sherry and Love fooling around. Cary then remarks that girl-on-girl is always the easiest thing for the guy to okay.
  • Give Him a Normal Life: In the Season 3 finale Joe, realizing he truly loves his son but that he's not fit to raise him, leaves the infant on a neighbor's doorstep in hopes he doesn't follow Joe's dark life.
  • Good Adultery, Bad Adultery: Benji is treated as a scumbag for cheating on Beck, although they're only informally together. Joe cheats on Karen with Beck, but this is treated as less bad on both sides than Beck cheating on Joe with Dr. Nicky.
  • Granola Girl: Just about everyone in LA is like this except for those who come from New York (Joe and Candace) and addict Forty. Love, all Love's friends, and Love and Forty's parents are very extreme versions.
  • Gut Punch: In general, this show is really good at giving its audience a nasty wake-up call any time they might be viewing our Villain Protagonist too sympathetically.
    • Joe’s cold-blooded murder of Benji. Before this, the audience could be forgiven for thinking that the show is just another straightforward Stalker with a Crush fantasy.
    • The first season finale. Surely, as the object of his affections, Beck will be spared from Joe's violent streak, right? Nooooooope.
    • The last scene of the Season Two premiere, where we find out Joe kidnapped a man and stole his identity, and orchestrated almost everything we've seen thus far in order to get close to Love, whom he was stalking almost as soon as he arrived in Los Angeles. What, you didn't really believe Joe had changed, did you?
    • Right when it looks like Joe has turned over a new leaf, realized the error of his ways, and resigned himself to his "punishment" of being trapped with Love for the rest of his life, we find out he's developed an obsession with his neighbor, and is already planning to find a way for them to be together. Lather, rinse repeat...
  • Hand Signals: Love's husband James was deaf, and spoke to her solely in American Sign Language. They had some bilingual dialogue with her signing back in ASL and speaking aloud, since he could read her lips.
  • Happily Ever After: Weirdly played straight in the season 3 finale. Despite several innocent characters seeming to be in mortal peril or already thought dead, the only character who dies in the finale is Love. Baby Henry gets two surrogate daddies who dote on him. Joe's narration even lampshades this, saying that without his family there to poison it, Madre Linda began healing.
  • Happy Marriage Charade:
    • Love and Forty's parents. Ray and Dottie Quinns' public image is that of an influential and loving Bourgeois Bohemian business super-couple. In truth their marriage is quite bitter and they don't get along with their children. In season 3 they finally go through a very acrimonious divorce, reflected in Dottie's deteriorating mental state.
    • By mid-season 3, Love and Joe keep up the facade of the handsome young suburbanite couple, but the ennui of the suburbs and their increasing distrust each other causes their marriage to implode.
  • Heel–Face Door-Slam: Season 2 ends with Joe deciding to accept the punishment for his crimes, throwing away his escape key and waiting for the cops to come... and then Love promptly kills Candace, prevents him from being turned in, and tells him she's pregnant and that he'll have to go on evading the law for the baby's sake.
  • Here We Go Again!: Whenever it looks like Joe has shaken an obsession, don't be fooled. He'll find another one soon enough. He goes from Candace to Beck to Love to Natalie to Marienne, with very short gaps in between.
  • Hope Spot:
    • In the season 1 finale, Beck manages to bludgeon Joe and steal his keys. She runs for the exit and it looks like she just might make it. She doesn't.
    • Joe, truly not wanting to kill Delilah, rushes back to the cage to set her free... and finds her with a slashed throat.
    • Season 3 has several moments where it seems like Joe and Love are perfectly matched, and that their marriage could work out. It doesn't, and we instead get a mix of marital ennui, mistrust, and explosive drama.
    • Marienne, Joe and Dante walk out of a major custody hearing convinced that Marienne utterly nailed it, with Joe and Dante praising her to the skies and even Marienne feeling optimistic. Then they see Marienne's abusive ex-husband convivially chatting up the judge, and it's immediately clear Marienne never had a chance.
  • Hypocrite: Joe. While it's a by-product of his obvious mental issues, it's still notable how countless times, Joe talks of someone being horrible for Beck and outraged by their lying to her when he's doing the same:
    • Notable is his attitude toward Peach, citing it as the stalker behavior of "a person who wants her to herself, wants to control her life and not truly loving you at all." That Joe is the biggest stalker of them all never crosses his mind.
    • When he finds Beck has been looking into his past, Joe rails at her on how "what kind of monster just goes ahead and dives into a person's past without permission?"
    • In the first episode while watching Beck and Benji have sex he smugly notices they had Speed Sex and Benji is a bad lover that fails to make her orgasm. When he finally sleeps with Beck for the first time he lasts ''even less'' and doesn't even say anything or at least go down on her after, leaving her dry.
    • All best summed up in the season finale where Joe goes on and on about all the dangerous people in Beck's life and how they could hurt her... all while she's locked up in a glass cell, begging to be let out.
    • At the end of Season 2, Joe judges Love for killing two people so that she could be with him.
    • In Season 3, Joe muses at how horrible it is at a party to put up with everyone else showing "narcissistic delusion."
  • Horrible Hollywood: Joe considers Los Angeles to be the ideal hiding spot because most people who know him would know he hates L.A. Over the course of Season 2 we see Joe's point. The place is infested with loan sharks, sex offenders with good publicity, over-privileged drug addicts and uncultured hipsters.
  • Hypocritical Humor:
    • Joe’s indignation over Peach (sort of) stalking Beck is played for a Black Comedy variant of this. Most obvious in the scene where he catches Peach staring covetously at an unaware Beck while the latter is taking a bath, whilst hiding in the house he followed Beck down to and broke into, and while also watching Beck bathe.
      Joe: How dare she [Peach] invade your privacy like this?
    • Joe frequently condemns others' lying, despite constantly doing so himself and building his whole relationship with Beck around one.
    • When found by Love while hooking up with "swinging" neighbors, Joe thinks "great, somehow I became the bad guy."
  • Idiot Ball:
    • Beck doesn't have curtains, which allows Joe to spy on her. She also has no passcode on her phone or computer, despite the fact that she's a writer and her whole life is presumably on there.
    • Delilah has a Friends with Benefits relationship with David Fincher, the only good cop in Los Angeles (or so it seems). When she enters Joe's cage and finds cast-iron evidence that he's a murderer alone, she calls Fincher to tell him something incredibly vague...but doesn't tell him where she is or even reference what she's found, which ultimately makes it easy for Joe and Love to cover up her death.
  • If I Can't Have You…: Joe kills Beck when she discovers his true nature and is repulsed by it.
  • I Have No Son!: Inverted. Beck tells people that her father died of a drug overdose when she was twelve. While the overdose did happen, he survived it. The reason Beck claims he died is because he divorced her mom after he got sober and took up with his sober coach.
  • I Reject Your Reality: Joe has an astounding gift for ignoring any evidence that should tell him about his actions being horrible and that his "loves" don't feel the same way about him. Flashbacks show Joe has had this since a kid as, at a foster home, he still holds to the idea the mother who abandoned him will come back.
  • The Immodest Orgasm: Peach is very loud in bed, as Joe discovers when he's stalking her and hides beneath her bed. He spends the whole night having to hear her moans.
  • Improvised Weapon:
    • Joe uses a hammer to knock out Benji, a rock to knock out Peach and Cary and a brick to knock out Will.
    • While locked inside the glass cage, Beck pulls out a key from her typewriter and stabs Joe with it after convincing him to come inside and kiss her.
    • In Season 2, when he is left locked in a cage and convinces Love to enter, Joe attempts to stab her in the throat with the tip of a strand of the handcuffs he put on Delilah.
    • Love uses a fire axe, a rolling pin and a fire extinguisher to attack Natalie, Gil and Theo respectively.
  • Incest Subtext: Between Love and Forty—who she calls her "codependant brother". Even more so after his death.
  • Insidious Rumor Mill: Joe pulls this on Candace, both in-universe and to the audience, since up until now we've only seen or heard about Candace from Joe and his hallucinations. When she shows up in season 2 and starts casually dating Forty, she tries to warn him and Love that Joe is a psychopathic Yandere, but Joe has spun the narrative that Candace, and not him, is the actual obsessive stalker in their relationship for far longer than they've known her at this point and they don't believe her.
  • Internet Stalking: Joe becomes obsessed with Beck. He tries looking her up on Facebook but can't find her profile. He reverse-image searches a photo of her, and uses meta-data to find out what location she's from to narrow his Facebook search.
  • It's All About Me: Joe, Joe, Joe. It's astounding how the man's belief everyone else revolves around his story dominates his life. While it can be funny, it gets dark when others "refuse to accept" why Joe should always get his way...
  • Ivy League for Everyone:
    • Beck and her friends all went to Brown University. Benji went to Yale.
    • The aristocrats in season 4 were buddies in Oxford.
  • Jerkass Has a Point: Both Peach and Joe have this in their conflict. Joe is right that Peach is manipulative, possessive and controlling of Beck as well as very snobby and elitist. Peach is absolutely correct to be wary of Joe for various reasons, and all of her accusations against Joe (that he stole her book and her laptop) are completely true. Similarly, while Claudia's boyfriend is a Domestic Abuser, he isn't far off in his insistence that Joe is a "freak".
  • Killed Offscreen: Beck's death is not shown. As soon as Joe catches her, it Smashes To Black and time skips to the aftermath a few months later.
  • Kinky Spanking: Invoked and subverted. Benji tells Joe that Beck likes to be spanked with a ladle and Joe seems to find the idea exciting. Later when she casually mentions her dad's red ladle he assumes that it was an implement he used to spank her as a child, but she reveals that he just used it to make pancakes.
  • Let the Past Burn: At the end of season three, Joe fakes his death as a Murder-Suicide at his wife's hands and burns down their suburban home in order to start anew in Paris.
  • Lighter and Softer:
    • While it's not light by any stretch of the imagination, the adaptation cuts plot points that make both Beck and Joe appear less sympathetic, like Beck telling Dr. Nicky she can't break up with Joe because he's pathetic and depends on her, Beck cheating with just about everyone, and Joe being implied to be a rapist. It also tones down parts that are much more graphic in the book, such as Joe and Beck having sex in the cage just before he kills her, also shortening most of the torture Beck suffers in the cage. In the TV adaptation, Beck and Joe just kiss before she tries to escape, and we don't see Joe murder her, while originally Joe strangles Beck and suffocates her with a book.
    • Again, it's still spectacularly dark, but Season 2 cuts back a little on the psychological aspects and plays slightly more like a straight romantic comedy. Joe is far less reckless with murdering folks and his relationship with Love has few obstacles. That is until the last two episodes when it's revealed that Love is just as Ax-Crazy as Joe.
  • Like Parent, Like Spouse: The show periodically cuts back to flashbacks from Joe's childhood and his relationship with his mother, as well as the other parental figures in his life.
    Will: Your deal is we're all subconsciously trying to date our moms over and over. Patterns are set young, and all romance is basically reenacting parental dynamics—
  • Lousy Lovers Are Losers:
    • Beck on-again-off-again cheating boyfriend Benji is terrible in bed, something that Joe smugly notices when he's stalking Beck and happens to see them having sex. Benji not only finishes quickly, but he's uncaring about making her climax and leaves instead, leaving a frustrated Beck to relieve herself via masturbation. In a later episode, she also says that he used to nod off when trying to go down on her.
    • Ironically, when Joe finally manages to sleep with Beck for the first time, he proves to be just as selfish as Benji when he lasts even less and doesn't even say anything, leaving her dry. He only notices something's really wrong the next morning when Beck texts her girlfriends about how quick he was and the girls all promptly mock him and act like it's a deal-breaker, much to Joe's anger and humiliation (who can see their messages because he stole Beck's previous phone).
  • Love at First Sight: A dark example; Joe's obsessive behavior towards Beck began from the very instant he saw her walk into the bookshop. The show implies at the end of its second season that Joe's "love at first sight" is really just superficial lust toward attractive women to whom he attributes qualities they don't really have. Joe sincerely believes it's love at first sight, of course, so the trope still fits.
  • Love Makes You Crazy:
    • Subverted, because while Joe's infatuation with Beck does make him act out, it's more or less implied that the aforementioned craziness is just who he is.
    • While he's up to his old tricks, Season 2 gives us another, even bigger example: Love.
  • Love Makes You Evil:
    • Deconstructed. Joe thinks that he's playing this trope straight in killing anybody that is between himself and Beck. However, the show demonstrates that Joe lashes out at anybody in Beck's life he views as better or closer to her than he is.
    • Played straight, however, with Love. She seems like a genuinely sweet girl...but she killed Forty's babysitter for sexually abusing him, and she killed both Delilah and Candace solely for being a threat to Joe.
  • Mad Love:
    • Joe towards Beck, which quickly gets out of hand after they start dating.
    • Joe feels this towards Love...which she reciprocates. He loses some interest after finding out just how mad she is.
  • Making Love in All the Wrong Places: There's a fair number of sex scenes outside beds: on the grass, in a kitchen, up against a wall etc.
  • Manic Pixie Dream Girl:
    • Joe sees Beck this way, but she's not actually a straight example of the trope.
    • Love tries to be one to Joe (aka Will). The problem is that she's insane and this is proof of her serious sociopathy. She castigates him for ignoring all the signs of her issues and seeing her only as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
  • Manipulative Bastard: Henderson is an experienced manipulator by the time he turns his eyes on Ellie in the second season. At one point, he lures Ellie to his house with the promise of a larger gathering, only to reveal when she arrives that their friends aren't coming. He then feigns reluctance to allow Ellie into his house, saying that it's not smart for him to be alone with a young girl. This puts Ellie into a position where she insists that he let her in, and Henderson eventually "gives in."
    • Joe, of course, is a pretty gifted manipulator himself, aided by the information he gleans from his stalking.
  • Master Poisoner: Love has become something like this, albeit after some botched experiences in the past. In the finale of the third season, she manages to poison her husband with aconite, not by dosing the food or drink, but by coating the handle of a nearby knife.
  • Men Use Violence, Women Use Communication: When Sherry and Cary Conrad are trapped in the protagonists' murder cage, fitness enthusiast husband Cary wants to punch his way out of it; influencer wife Sherry tries to appeal to her friendship with Love. Neither approach works, but it's a well-timed "Eureka!" Moment at the alst minute when Sherry finds a hidden key that saves them.
    Cary: Do you have a plan?
    Sherry: Yes, use everything that's at our disposal.
    Cary: My brute strength...
    Sherry: Our relationships.
  • Misogyny: Joe doesn't respect women much, but the show and the books present Joe's sexism in different ways. In the books, Joe's sexism is fairly clear to the reader early on, as they're told entirely from his point of view, and his narration is shot through with sexist thoughts and language. In the show, however, Joe is actually pretty good at performing a kind of progressive egalitarianism, and even refers to himself as a "feminist." It's unclear to what extent he's sincere about at least believing that, as he gets very ugly and unpleasant with women when he's angry.
  • Missing White Woman Syndrome: Discussed in season 3. When the rich white suburban woman Natalie Engler goes missing, it causes a local scandal. Marienne (who is black) and Dante (who is blind and gay) explicitly namedrop missing white woman syndrome and say that victims from other demographics wouldn't have gotten as much attention.
  • Modesty Bedsheet: After Joe and Karen have sex, she leaves the bed wrapped up in one while still leaving him with a blanket to cover his modesty.
  • Modesty Towel: Beck's wearing one when Joe first peeks at house, which immediately catches his attention.
  • Moody Trailer Cover Song: The third season's trailer sets Joe's murderous shenanigans to a slow, crooning atmospheric cover of Britney Spears's "Hit Me Baby One More Time" by J2.
  • Morality Pet: Joe's affection for Paco, a kid who lives next door. Ellie fills the same role to a lesser degree in Season 2.
  • Most Writers Are Writers:
    • Beck is a poet.
    • Forty is an aspiring screenwriter.
  • Moving-Away Ending: All three seasons end with Joe moving to a new location, both to get away from his crimes and the people who're suspicious of him, and to try and start fresh, hoping this time he won't hurt anyone. This shuffles away the old cast, forces him to adapt to a new setting, and acts as a continuing sign of his growing desperation for normalcy.
  • Murder Is the Best Solution: Joe feels this way about anyone who comes between him and Beck, then him and Love, then anyone who threatens his new life at all. So does Love.
  • My Girl Is Not a Slut: Joe is fixated on this, believing that Candace is being sexually harassed although it's implied that she is sleeping with the record exec consensually. This is also invoked in that viewers tend to judge both Candace and Beck very harshly for their sexual promiscuity, and think nothing of the fact that Joe, at the very least, cheats on Karen with Beck.
  • My God, What Have I Done?: Joe gets a rare dose of this in Season 4 when he realizes his Rhys alter pushed him to abduct Marianne and put her in a cell to "win" her back. When he tries to reach her family, he discovers Juliette's grandmother became convinced Marianne had relapsed and abandoned her daughter and suing for custody, wrecking her.
  • Negated Moment of Awesome: Joe saves Beck from an oncoming subway train, which leads to an accidental embrace on the ground... but then she vomits on him.
  • Never Suicide:
    • In Season 1, Joe kills Peach and sets it up to appear like a suicide. This is helped due to her having attempted suicide in the past.
    • In Season 2, Joe kills predatory comedian Henderson and makes it look like a suicide.
    • In Season 3, Joe kills Love via poisoning and sets it up to look self inflicted, complete with a suicide note.
  • New Media Are Evil: Joe's view of social media, even as he exploits it for his gain.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Due to the loose definition of villains and heroes in this show, it's more or less expected that the heroes will break it sometimes because the protagonist (the villain) has to get away with what he does sometimes.
    • Dr Nicky, while only a loose definition of a "hero", has the best shot at taking down Joe later in the season. However, having found God, he is utterly disinterested in doing so, which inadvertently leads to Forty's death.
    • Candace wants Love to see Joe for what he really is at the end of Season 2. Bringing Love to the storage locker and spelling out everything she knows was an absolutely horrible idea, though, as it got her killed.
  • Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: See above. Referring to "villain" in a literal sense, though:
    • Joe makes Beck lowkey famous near the end of Season 1, as murdering Peach gives her the inspiration to write the article that goes viral.
    • Joe would've ended Season 2 dead or in prison if Love hadn't murdered both Delilah and Candace.
  • Not Afraid of You Anymore: Joe and Candace say this to each other in Season 2. Needless to say, Joe completely misses the point.
    Why would you be AFRAID of me?!
  • Not His Sled:
    • The novel makes it very clear that Joe killed Candace. The first season tries to imply the same thing without actually showing the moment she died, only for her to show up alive at the very end.
    • Most of Love's arc remains more or less intact from the book. Book Love was married multiple times, and she did end up accepting that Joe had killed Beck and trying to protect him, she never killed anyone herself, and she certainly hadn't before meeting Joe.
  • "Not So Different" Remark: Henderson was abused as a child, and quickly realizes that Joe is also a victim. Even Joe is momentarily shaken by the revelation.
  • Not Quite Dead:
    • Beck's father is very much alive, despite her telling her friends and Joe that he died when she was young. She has fairly good reasons for it, though.
    • Candace, who turns up very much alive at the end of Season 1.
  • Obfuscating Stupidity: Forty. Forty is depicted as a complete doofus for most of the season, however, he eventually becomes the only one who figures out the truth about Joe and what really happened to Beck and Dr. Nicky. On top of that, he admits that he knew all along that Love framed him for the au pair's murder.
  • Oblivious Guilt Slinging: In Season 4, ”Rhys” blackmails Joe into planting Simon’s mutilated ear on someone to frame them as the Eat-the-Rich killer. Joe settles on Connie, only for Connie to check himself into rehab and thank Joe for “inspiring” him. Joe ultimately instead plants the ear on a woman who was stalking Phoebe.
  • Obvious Villain, Secret Villain: In Season 2, Joe is the obvious villain, as a Villain Protagonist who killed Beck and got away with multiple other murders at the end of Season 1. The Hidden Villain is his new girlfriend, Love, who framed her brother Forty for the murder she committed, set herself up for Joe due to being a Monster Fangirl, and killed both Candace and Delilah for threatening Joe.
  • Oh, Crap!:
    • At the start of their relationship, Joe gets a few when he accidentally lets slip a piece of information about Beck that he shouldn't know, but he's usually able to pass it off.
    • Joe, when he realizes he's forgotten to feed Benji all day.
  • Old Hero, New Pals: Each season takes place in a new location (the first in the Big Applesauce, the second in Horrible Hollywood and the third in Suburbia) and tells a mostly self-contained story about Joe and a new supporting cast, with some minor exceptions (like Love in Season 3).
  • One-Word Title: You.
  • On the Rebound:
    • Beck sleeps and goes out with a lot of guys after breaking up with Benji.
    • Joe ends up together with Karen right after breaking up with Beck.
    • In season 2, Joe is pressured into using dating apps to rebound, or at least to make Love jealous. They don't work, but he briefly hooks up with Delilah right after his break up with Love
  • Once More, with Clarity:
    • The end of the season two premiere reshows events to reveal to the audience that all the accidental events of the episode were all Joe's plan to get closer to Love.
    • At the end of season two, we get to see events from Love's eyes, and learn that she has been psychotic like Joe the entire time.
    • Season 4, Episode 7 has "Rhys" walk Joe through the entire fourth season for Joe to realize "Rhys" is an alternate persona and he never met the real guy.
  • Operation: Jealousy: Love deliberately tries to make Joe jealous by rebounding with Milo, though Joe doesn't believe it even when Forty insists it's true.
  • Orphan's Ordeal: Joe was abused or at least severely neglected in foster care and, although he seems very attached to Mooney, Mooney is an emotionally abusive Drill Sergeant Nasty. The bulk of this has to do with Joe realizing at a young age that his mother no longer wanted him in her life anymore. All of that, on top of being abused at an orphanage by bullies.
  • Papa Wolf: Mooney is a very, very dark example to Joe. Although he locks Joe in the cage and is implied to have taught him to kill people, he also protects Joe and helps him cover up his crime after Joe reveals that he killed the owner of Candace's record label.
  • Parental Abandonment: Poor Beck. She grew up with an addict father, who then left her mother once he got sober. The result of this is her developing abandonment issues and is constantly seeking validation from others, but also panicking and shutting herself off once she gets said validation because she thinks it's going to be taken away from her.
    • This is also what happened to Joe. His mother left him leading him to live in foster homes, of where he was continuously abused by other boys.
  • Parental Neglect: Joe's mother to Joe. Big time.
  • Parents as People: Very much the case for Paco's mother Claudia, who has to struggle with an abusive boyfriend as well as an addiction to pills and other drugs, knowing how it's affecting Paco but not knowing how to begin to deal with the problems in her own life.
  • The Peeping Tom:
    • Joe constantly does this to Beck, even watching her having sex with other men through her window.
    • In the second season, he has a telescope set up just to spy on Love.
  • Polyamory: Sherry and Cary turn out to be polyamorous, and they swing with Joe and Love one night. It goes badly, because Joe is just trying to manipulate Love so that he can be with Marienne, Love figures that out while Joe is (reluctantly) having sex with Sherry and then Sherry and Cary overhear Love and Joe talking about their past murders.
  • Police Are Useless: More implied than explicit, but there are numerous occasions when a minimum of investigative effort into Joe's crimes or background would rumble him pretty quickly. It's always non-police characters who figure him out and come closest to bringing him down.
    • A couple police officers question Joe outside his building early in the first season over some issue related to Paco. They're initially suspicious of him, but he's able to get out of trouble simply by acting like a pleasant, good-humored white guy. At that very moment he has Benji's dead body in the trunk of his car.
  • Poor Man's Porn: Joe is a little too excited by a photo of teenage Beck in a bikini.
  • Porn Stash: Lynn has one consisting of over 200 dick pics various men have sent her. Peach also has a secret stash which becomes a plot point.
  • Privilege Makes You Evil: Joe winds up among several Casts full of Rich People throughout the show and is invariably disgusted at how badly people act with money: the uncaring attitudes of New York socialites (season 1), the fake smiles of California suburbia (season 3), and the extremely violent classism of London aristocrats (season 4). That said, they all wind up A Lighter Shade of Black to Joe himself, especially when he starts killing them.
  • Product Placement: Beck uses Tinder to find casual hookups.
  • Protectorate: Joe takes it upon himself to protect minors, like Paco and Ellie. He even ends up killing Ron to keep Paco safe.
  • Psychological Projection:
    • Going over Peach's photos of Beck, Joe notes "this is not what love is. Let's call it what it is, this is perversion. She wants to control you like she controls every inch of your life. Beck... you have a stalker."
    • Joe sarcastically refers to Benji as "the poster boy for white male privilege", conveniently ignoring that white male privilege is also what helps give predatory guys like Joe the blind spot they need to manipulate and abuse others.
    • Joe criticizes Forty for his misogynistic and shallow writing, while having very misogynistic beliefs himself, and dedicates himself to "fleshing out" Beck's character in the script - after spending an entire season showing what a shallow, poor idea he had of who she really was.
    • In a sadder example, Forty clearly empathizes a lot with Beck's affair with Dr Nicky - especially when he's on LSD - because of being abused himself by an authority figure (his babysitter) and being in deep denial about it.
  • Psychotic Love Triangle:
    • Joe and Peach are in one with Beck, as both of them are obsessed with her and want her to themselves.
    • An especially psychotic one develops - kind of - between Joe, Candace, and Love. Zigzagged in that while she and Joe dated, Candace doesn't want Joe back; she simply wants to stop him from hurting anyone else. Nevertheless, she becomes the biggest obstacle between Joe and Love.
  • Punny Name: Love and Forty are both terms used for keeping score in tennis, and one of their first scenes alone together involve them playing that very sport.
  • Race Lift:
    • Peach is white in the book, but played by mixed-race actress Shay Mitchell in the series.
    • Karen Minty is white in the book, but played by black actress Natalie Paul in the series.
  • Railroad Tracks of Doom: Beck drunkenly falls onto subway tracks in the pilot, but is saved at the last minute by Joe, who just so happens to also be on the platform with her.
  • Really Gets Around: Beck sleeps around a lot after breaking up with Benji, which makes Joe and Peach very jealous.
  • Rescue Romance: Beck first gets to know Joe when he saves her from being run over by a train.
  • Revenge Before Reason: In season 2, it becomes clear that Candace doesn't really have a plan to expose Joe, and she is making it up as she goes. In the finale she wants Love to see Joe caged up so badly that she doesn't even call the police after contacting Love. This proves to be her undoing.
  • Rewatch Bonus: Several in Season 2.
    • The entire first episode shows things going seamlessly for Joe. By the end of the episode we find out he'd plotted everything to the letter. At the same time, Love's dinner date with Joe plays out several rom-com cliches, which are revealed to be deliberate on Love's part.
    • Joe disposing of Jasper's corpse using butcher utensils is match cut with shots of Love preparing a fancy dinner. This is a big hint that they're not that different.
    • Love gags Joe the first time they have sex, which makes her look like a rapist. Then we find out she's a Yandere.
    • Season 4 is this after it's revealed "Rhys" has been an alternate persona in Joe's mind all this time and Joe has been imagining every conversation they had.
  • Right Through the Wall: When Joe and Love bang for the first time, Love mentions that Forty's in the next room and that they need to be quiet… but they disregard this once they get into it. Forty overhears.
  • Romantic Rain: Discussed. When Joe is running to Beck's house to confess his love for her, he notes how it should be his running in the rain moment.
  • Safe Word: "Mama Ru" is the safe word to get out of the hotel towards the end of Season 2. Also, "falafel" seems to be one for Joe and Beck whenever one of them isn't in the mood for sex. The safe word in season 3's swinging scene is "hakuna matata."
  • Screw the Rules, I Have Money!:
    • The Quinn family is very rich and they use their power and influence to pass of the murder of their children’s au pair as a suicide.
    • Tom Lockwood takes this to a whole new level, mentioning that there is no crime so heinous that his wealth and influence can’t wash away. This proven true in the season 4 finale, where Kate, using the Lockwood empire’s resources is able to completely rehabilitate Joe's image and even turn him into a hero.
  • Sequel Goes Foreign: After setting three season in the United States, You's fourth season takes place in London, UK as Joe has taken on the new identity of a professor at a university in the city.
  • Sherlock Scan: Deconstructed. From the moment Beck walks into the store, Joe has a running monologue analyzing everything about her and drawing conclusions about her personality. This comes off as deeply creepy, because it shows how closely he’s watching her, his assumptions about a stranger are wildly presumptuous, and it’s clear that he’s interpreting things the way he wants them to be.
    • When Candace walks into the store in the last scene of season one, Joe does the Sherlock scan again, and his "observations" are functionally identical to what he observed about Beck back in the first episode, with the added benefit of being based entirely off Candace's skirt, shoes and jacket, since he can't even see her face. It illustrates just how shallow and superficial Joe's obsessions really are.
  • Shoot the Shaggy Dog:
    • Candace. She survives being buried alive, nobody believes her that she was, and a restraining order won't do any good. She goes into hiding and stays that way until she hears about Beck's death. She returns, solely with the intention of stopping Joe from hurting anyone else. When Joe flees to LA, she follows him, gets in a relationship with Forty, and despite her serious trauma, stays close to Joe so she can stop him from hurting anyone, especially Love or Forty. When she tries telling Love and Forty the truth, neither of them believe her. When she believes she has proof that he is a killer, she takes Love to prove it...and Love turns out to be psycho and kills her. It's ultimately All for Nothing.
    • Forty to a lesser extent. A past victim of sexual abuse, he seems to have no real friends except his sister Love, and he thinks he killed his first "love" (his rapist) and this seems to be a large contributing factor to his instability and drug addiction. Actually, it was all Love; she made him believe he was responsible. He doesn't believe Candace's accusations about Joe because he genuinely cares about him, but when he begins to fear that Candace is dead, he attacks Joe with a gun to protect Love. Actually, Love is also insane and killed Candace, but it's a police officer who finally kills Forty. He then gets framed for all the crimes Joe and/or Love committed.
  • Shout-Out:
    • In general, there are too many literary references made in the dialogue to list here. Makes sense, since our protagonist is quite the bookworm.
    • Beck's Twitter handle is @BeckdelTest.
    • Forty calls Joe "old sport". Unlike others on this list, this probably isn't deliberate on the character's part, as Forty doesn't seem to read much.
    • Joe also lives opposite Love and frequently spies on her from his house, reminiscent again of The Great Gatsby.
    • The Season 3 finale "What is Love?" shows a lot of homages to movies such as Audition (Love paralysing Joe and later getting killed herself) and Skyfall (Joe burning down his house to escape).
    • Season 4 has a nod to The Shining when Joe has a conversation at a bar lit from below with bright white light, with a man who isn't actually there.
  • Single Woman Seeks Good Man: Invoked by Joe. Though he's not a good man by any means, he pretends to be more caring and understanding towards Beck than her fuckboy boyfriend Benji so he will seem like the more appealing partner.
  • Slashed Throat: Bloodily shanking people across the throat appears to be Love's preferred method of killing people.
  • Snobby Hobbies: In season 4, Joe is living in England and manages to fall into a much richer, more eccentric, and snobbier crowd than he's used to. He's invited to several of their events, which include Kate and Simon's art exhibit, a game of croquet (which involves, at one point, a servant being humiliated and used as a hoop), and their tech-free getaway at a massive old mansion. He's also invited on a "hunt" (which turns out to be a murder attempt) with Roald, who had originally wanted to play tennis with Kate.
  • Snooty Sports: The London aristocrats play a game of croquet on the grounds of Phoebe's estate. Pointedly, the horrifically classist Gemma humiliates one of the servants by demanding that he get on his arms and knees to act as a hoop.
  • Soapbox Sadie:
    • Joe perceives Benji as being this way, derisively noting his penchant for posting about social causes like #BlackLivesMatter to a performative degree.
    • Love's friends are also basically exactly like this, although Joe actually puts up with it this time to impress Love.
  • Spanner in the Works: Joe tries to ruin Ryan by dosing the man's drinks, figuring the recovering addict will be rattled badly for a public event. When Ryan shows up looking normal, Joe is confused...then realizes that Ryan has never been "recovering," the man is still doing drugs and thus built up a resistance to the light ones Joe put in his drink.
  • Speed Sex:
    • Benji can't satisfy Beck due to this, and she has to resort to masturbation.
    • Joe himself doesn't even last 8 seconds the first time he has sex with Beck.
  • Spiritual Antithesis: To Gossip Girl. Both feature Penn Badgley as a tech-savvy sociopath stalking a blonde girl in a New York setting, but while Gossip Girl presented that character as a good guy, You emphatically does not.
  • Spiritual Successor: A charming sociopath with a genial Mask of Sanity who frequently uses First-Person Smartass to hide his utter disdain for the people around him, and who has to balance his personal life with his work and frequently finds the two crossing over despite his best efforts. Basically this is what happens when Dexter switches genres from a Crime/Police porcedural to a Romance.
  • Spot the Imposter: Joe stalks Ryan at an addicts recovery meeting. However, Ryan, a full-fledged drug user, is quickly able to tell someone who only sips a champagne glass now and then does not have a drinking problem and Joe has an ulterior motive.
  • Stalker with a Crush: Joe Goldberg meets Beck by chance in the bookstore he works and subsequently finds out everything he can about her and begins stalking her. Joe is a deconstruction of this, as he's handsome, charming and very sociable, but his obsessiveness with whoever he becomes enamored with tends to turn their lives topsy turvy. Then it turns out he'll kill anybody in his way, or the love interest should they reject him.
  • Straight Gay: Peach in Season 1 and Andrew, Jackson, Dante and Lansing in Season 3.
  • Suburban Gothic: The setting for Season 3. With Madre Linda, CA's large houses, rich neighbors, and good schools come duplicitous snakes like Sherry who smile in your face and gossip behind your back, surveillance cameras everywhere that are hacked into and used to spy on everyone, an anti-vaxxer who gets his children sick with diseases, a troubled librarian trying to win custody of her daughter from her abusive, sadistic ex-husband, oh yes, and the two fucking serial killers and their four murders. Welcome to Madre Linda, Joe.
  • Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
    • A common bit as what Joe thinks will be typical rom-com antics run into reality. When Joe runs to Beck's apartment to win her back he lampshades how it's a scene right out of a romance, he then throws a pebble at Beck's window to get her attention...only to scare her when he breaks the window.
    • In season 4 Tom Lockwood figures out Joe's real identity quite easily, as for someone of Lockwood's resources, Joe's paltry attempts to start over would be very easy to see through.
  • Suspect Existence Failure: Discussed Trope. Under the assumption that Joe is writing a mystery (and unaware that he's actually involved in a murder plot), the Genre Savvy Nadia discusses common mystery fiction tropes. She mentions that the first suspect tends to be the second victim. She is proven right when the person Joe initially thought would be Malcolm's murder, Simon, with whom there was blackmail involved, turns up dead.
  • Tap on the Head: There are so many examples to list here that it's surprising more people on the show don't have brain damage. Most notably when Joe hits Peach in the head with a brick to try to kill her. Like every other surely-fatal blow on the show, however, it doesn't work.
  • The Family That Slays Together: By Season 3, Joe and Love have become this, although both of them cheat and distrust each other.
  • Themed Party: For Beck's birthday, her friend talks Joe into throwing a party at his bookstore, where people dress up as their favorite literary characters and writers.
  • Til Murder Do Us Part:
    • Discussed. When Natalie Engler goes missing, it becomes a local sensation, and the true-crime enthusiast suburbanites claim that in cases like these, it's always the husband who does it. Natalie's husband, Matthew, is not the most approachable of multimillionaire tech bros, which doesn't help his public image.
    • In the season finale, married couple Love and Joe make murderous moves against each other, with Joe eventually coming out on top by stabbing her, faking his death, and burning their house down.
  • Trickster Twins: Forty and Love are a remarkably serious version of this, although she initially doesn't appear to be one. Forty is a flighty drug addict, and Love is a murderer.
  • True Companions: Joe is prepared to utterly hate Love's friends (who are very LA), and they are pretty weird, but they actually turn out to be incredibly supportive. And they really like Joe.
  • Toplessness from the Back:
    • Beck is shown like this for a lot of her sex scenes.
    • A lot of Peach's photos of Beck show are of her topless from the back.
  • Upper-Class Twit:
    • Joe clearly views Forty this way.
    • While in London, Joe unwittingly becomes involved with a collection of the most insufferable and overbred group of British aristocrats anyone is ever likely to meet.
  • Vomit Indiscretion Shot:
    • When Beck vomits on Joe after he saves her from getting hit by a subway train, the shot doesn't pull away.
    • Joe vomits on Delilah after an ill-advised celery diet makes him sick.
    • Love gets one at the end of Season 2.
  • Wham Episode:
    • "Candace" in Season 1. Joe and Beck's relationship goes through standard-ish ups and downs as evidence begins to pile up that Joe killed his ex. Then, at the end, after Paco tips Beck off about Joe's hiding place in the bathroom ceiling, she discovers a box of Creepy Souvenirs that prove that her boyfriend is a Serial Killer, which earns her a one-way ticket to the glass cage when Joe finds out.
    • "P.I. Joe" and "Love, Actually" in Season 2. After spending all of "P.I. Joe" trying to find out who killed Delilah and desperately hoping it wasn't him, Joe discovers that Love killed her, Forty's au pair, and Candace, and is a psychopath just like him. Then, in "Love, Actually", Joe finds out that Love is pregnant, Forty figures out that Joe is a Serial Killer and is shot dead trying to protect Love from him, and the soon-to-be-parents move to the suburbs, where Joe finds a new "You" to lust after.
  • Wham Line:
    • "Looking forward to getting to know you...Joe" - Tom Lockwood
    • "Do I know you?" Rhys when Joe meets him, revealing to the audience he's never met Joe.
  • Wham Shot: After strangling Rhys, Joe is thrown...and then "Rhys" walks right up to his dead body, revealing he's been an alternate personality of Joe's all along.
  • What Does She See in Him?: A non-romantic example in season 4, during which Joe wonders why the nicer members of the friend group of British aristocrats he becomes involved with continue being friends with the rest, who are some of the most despicable collection of upper class twits anyone is ever going to have the misfortune to meet.
  • "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Season 3 ends like this where we see the residents of Madre Linda starting a new peaceful life.
    • Season 4 also ends with the surviving members of the rich clique. Sophie and Blessing co-own the Sundry House after Adam's death, Roald killed someone during a hunting party in Germany but it was covered up as an "accident", Connie followed Joe's advice, went to rehab, and is currently progressing on his sobriety and Phoebe is teaching English lessons to Thai children.
  • Whodunnit: The plot of season 4 sees Joe end up with a body in his apartment. He suspects that the murderer is from the victim's extremely wealthy friend group, of which one may have intended to frame him. The well-read Joe instantly recognizes he's in a whodunnit and derides it as the lowest form of literature.
  • Wicked Stepmother: Beck has one: a Christian fundamentalist 'mommy blogger' who constantly makes jabbed comments to Beck about how much better her father is with her and her children, instead of Beck's mother and her siblings.
  • Yandere: Joe is a rare male example of this trope. He kidnaps Beck's on-again, off-again boyfriend Benji in the very first episode and kills him not long after. Most of the show is devoted to rather viciously taking this trope apart and demonstrating exactly how horrifying it is.
  • Yandere Couple: Season 2 is one long deconstruction. The climax reveals that behind Love's "perfect girl" exterior, she is a cunning, remorseless murderer who killed Forty's au pair for molesting him, and she murdered Delilah and Candace for threatening to expose Joe, when Joe himself couldn't. However, when she does this - and reveals she knew all along that Joe killed Beck, and planted herself to find him - Joe is repulsed by her, and only doesn't kill her because she's pregnant with their baby. They stay together, but Joe is miserable and loathes her.
  • You Can't Fight Fate:
    • Beck is almost killed by an oncoming subway train in the pilot, but she's saved by Joe... who later kills her himself anyway.
    • Candace saves herself from Joe and manages to escape with her life. However, when she captures and tries to get revenge on Joe, Love kills her.
  • Zip Me Up: Knowing that she has a lot of sexual tension with "Jonathan", Kate asks him to untangle her necklaces. There's a lot of focus on Joe touching her neck (complete with soft music), followed by a quick makeout session which they quickly abandon. Kate has another moment with Joe when she helps him adjust his cufflinks and they have another, longer makeout session.

What if you're not the one? No, now is not the time to abandon principles. I have to believe love conquers all. And if you love me, it's only a matter of time...

 
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"Hit Me Baby One More Time"

The third season of "You" uses a slow, atmospheric cover of the poppy "Hit Me Baby One More Time" to underscore the murderers' rapidly deteriorating marriage and their mutual distate for suburbia.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (8 votes)

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