Review: Lifetime’s ‘You’ Lets You Stalk the Stalker

Lifetime’s new stalker drama, “You,” has two major flaws: Its name is near impossible to use in conversation or to Google in any meaningful capacity, and it is premiering Saturday as part of the fall TV season rather than a few months ago, when it could have been the steamy summer show we needed.

Other than that, “You,” based on Caroline Kepnes’ novel, is a vicious thrill; smart and mean in all the right ways, with a devilish sensibility and a clever, inviting pessimism, like the friend who wants you to sit in the back with her and make jokes. “You” rolls its eyes at trying-to-be-cool people the same way actual cool people do.

Penn Badgley, best known as the Brooklynite Dan Humphrey on “Gossip Girl,” stars as Joe Goldberg, a bookstore manager who is immediately smitten with Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail), a poetry grad student. She goes by Beck, so you can immediately tell how cool and irreverent she is — well, how cool and irreverent she wants to be. She’s actually tedious and self-absorbed and way too into Instagram.

And that’s good news for Joe, because Joe is a stalker, and social media makes his stalking all the easier. He narrates most of the series, so we spend a lot of time in Joe’s head, hearing his musings on his neighbors (too noisy) and exercise (challenging) while also following him through his surveillance and kidnapping errands. Keeping constant tabs on someone else is a ton of work!

Benji’s awfulness is one of the real treats of “You,” and the show relishes in poking fun at the performatively hip. Peach (Shay Mitchell), Beck’s spoiled, rich bestie, pouts that because of a medical condition, she can only have alcohol with a certain pH, “like Ketel One, or Goose, or pear juice.” Joe’s co-worker at the bookstore raves about his balalaika teacher. Beck’s other friend, Annika (Kathryn Gallagher), is an Instagram influencer whose vacuous self-empowerment posts are absolutely dead-on. Beck is deeply intimidated by a fellow grad-school student, and marvels with utter reverence and jealousy: “She wrote this piece about how she and her mother got bulimia together while in Italy. She was 12.”

That’s why beyond the Badgley overlap, “You” is a lot like “Gossip Girl.” It’s very New York. (Joe might be a violent and dangerous person, but even he bristles at having to schlep all the way to Greenpoint.) It’s very salty. It’s very class-conscious. It’s also occasionally beyond absurd, as when Joe’s bookstore has a soundproof glass vault in the basement, where he can repair antique books or imprison people, and sometimes both.

“You” comes from megaproducer Greg Berlanti, whose empire includes most of The CW comic book shows, and Sera Gamble, most recently of “The Magicians.” It shares that show’s canny awareness of its characters’ insecurities. Thanks to Joe’s twisted narration, there’s an occasional “Dexter” moment, too, and thanks to gentle hypnosis of swinging between budding romance and calculated foul play, there’s a “Gone Girl” vibe. This is much more a story show than an acting show, though Mitchell’s soapy performance makes everything that much juicier.

In the five episodes made available to critics, “You” zips along, never dwelling in its least-believable moments long enough to ruin the ride, and never indulging in its romances too much that you lose sight of the toxicity and danger underlying all the bonds. It’s not just Joe who sees the world in a grotesque and entitled way. Peach sees through some of Joe’s scam, but she herself manipulates and harms her friends, too. Beck is a habitual liar.

“You” knows they’re all terrible, and it also knows the real fight isn’t against terribleness, it’s against boringness. “You” is never boring, which sounds like faint praise. But in an era of glassy dramas defined by sad-man montages, weary characters standing dead still in moody showers and bewildering mysteries that are often just covers for poor characterization, it’s a relief.