How Long Will Penn Badgley's You Continue After Season 4? The Showrunner Weighs In
Netflix's "You" has undergone drastic changes season by season, but Season 4 might be the biggest switch-up so far. This time, Joe isn't the murderer — he's the detective.
Penn Badgley plays the abhorrent main character, a serial killer whose romantic obsessions allow him to justify his own patterns of violence. After having met his match in Love and narrowly escaping, Joe flees to Europe in search of his latest fixation, Marienne Bellamy. He is not only on the run from his wife's powerful family, but also from his own behavior. He wants to change, to prove to Marienne he is worthy of her love. He runs into trouble very quickly when a band of London socialites starts dropping dead around him, and he himself is framed for their murders.
The tables are often turning on Joe, but this time he's not the criminal or the unwilling accomplice — he himself is a target, the subject of a framing. With the show on a totally new narrative track, it's hard to see where the writers will take the series from here. The final episodes of season 4 premiere on March 9, but what can viewers expect after that?
Thankfully, fans can rest easy knowing there is at least one more season on the horizon.
"We have an idea for season five that we're excited about," showrunner Sera Gamble revealed to The Hollywood Reporter. There might even be a season six, according to Badgley.
"I signed a six-year contract right out the gate," the actor said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. "So they could do two more if they wanted."
There's one more season on the horizon
Despite the length of Penn Badgley's contract, it's unlikely that "You" will be on air for more than five seasons.
"I think if there's another season, I think it's only going to be one," the "Gossip Girl" star explained. "I know that everybody is concerned, from the top on down — nobody wants this show to become tired."
The show has been a smash success, but it's important to Badgley and creatives like Sera Gamble that "You" maintains its "intelligence," as the actor described it. The showrunner and actor want to avoid taking the show past its natural conclusion.
"It was never anyone's intention to run this one into the ground," Gamble told The Hollywood Reporter. "When we're done, we'll be done. And we'll pack it up. Even in the early conversations with Penn [Badgley], the idea was not to crank out episodes forever; it's to feel like we have told the complete story."
It was important to all the creative minds behind "You" that the series didn't lose sight of its original point of view. Joe isn't supposed to be a likable protagonist that can show up anywhere, like, say, Natasha Lyonne's character in "Poker Face." The intention for Joe was always to display his descent further and further into darkness, like Walter White in "Breaking Bad."
"I feel like tonally, we're very different and we are not trying to sell Joe as any kind of a hero with a straight face," Gamble explained. "This is a show that is in the tradition of these single-lead shows with a guy who does increasingly bad things. The beautiful thing about it is that when his arc is complete, so is the show."
But season five will probably be the last
Halfway through its fourth season, "You" still feels far from any sort of conclusion. Joe has just started on a brand new journey posing as Professor Jonathan Moore. It's difficult for him to empathize with spoiled and entitled victims, and yet he does; he even comes to their rescue. This is a huge moral turning point for Joe, far greater than any point during his tumultuous marriage. Between Marienne and the confrontation of a new murderer, might Joe finally change his ways?
Even if Joe stops killing, he seems to think that this should be proof enough for Marienne that he is worthy of her. It doesn't seem like Marienne would reward him for simply managing to not slit her throat. Could Joe be successfully framed for the socialite murders, or even tied back to his murders back in the states? Would that be the way he is finally forced to truly reconcile with his past, or would it only alienate him further from society and from any potential for good?
Season 5 could finally see Joe in prison, back home in New York where it all started, or maybe even further than he's ever run before — somewhere the authorities couldn't find him. South America, maybe? Asia? Fans will have to wait to find out.