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You (2018)
(aka: You)
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You (2018) (Series)
"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. And when that inevitably goes awry, well...there are plenty of fish in the sea.

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 final three seasons of the series depart completely from the narrative of the books and bear almost no resemblance to the third and fourth novels, You Love Me and For You And Only You, respectively. Netflix aired the show's fifth and final season on April 24, 2025.

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:

    open/close all folders 
    A-F 
  • Abduction Is Love: Subverted. When Joe's love interests are kidnapped by him and taken to the cage, all of them hated Joe.
  • Abusive Parents:
    • Season 1:
      1. It's revealed in his backstory that Joe's father was abusive to him, while his mom did nothing to protect him.
      2. 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.
      3. Ivan Mooney, the owner of the bookstore, 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.
      4. 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 her beyond giving her money for her tuition, rent etc.
    • Season 2:
      1. Played straight with Love and Forty. Their father is a very critical, cold, and dismissive towards him, but this appears to be somewhat understandable as he 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, their mother slaps her daughter hard across the face, blaming her for her son's relapse.
    • Season 4:
      1. Tom Lockwood openly refers to his daughter as his "investment", he's creepily obsessed with her, has a private investigator stalk her and controlled every part of her life even after their estrangement, to the point of keeping track of her menstrual cycle and sexual partners.
  • Action Survivor: Marienne, Kate and Bronte are this. They did not have formal training when dealing with Joe, but were able to survive at the end of the series.
  • 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. In the book, she's already dead. 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. 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 added one child character in the first two seasons 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. In the book, Joe is immediately remorseful after he kills Beck 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 season 2.
    • 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. Being played by gay actor James Scully has a hand in this.
  • 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, Joe, and Jasper, alongside Love, Forty, and Sunshine.
  • All Art Is Autobiographical:
    • Season 2:
      1. In a change from the book, Forty becomes interested in adapting Beck's book into a movie. She noted herself in Season 1 that it was at least partly autobiographical, inspired by her mistreatment by men throughout her life. When he has a drug-fueled meltdown while trying to "write" the screenplay with Joe, it becomes clear that his attachment comes from identifying with Beck and her sexual exploitation by Dr Nicky due to his own Rape as Backstory.
      2. Forty's short film, "The Third Twin" (though never shown onscreen) is heavily implied to be based on his disturbing, codependent relationships with his twin sister, Love, and his and Love's nanny, Sophia, who raped him when he was a young teenager.
    • Season 5:
      1. Bronte admits that she uses her experiences with toxic men in her writing.
  • 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:
    • Season 1:
      1. Benji is coldly killed by Joe. But given how much of an pretentious, slimy, unbearable, manipulative jerk who has clearly made everyone's lives much worse, it's hard to really care.
      2. Peach — like Joe — wants to own and control Beck completely out of a twisted "love".
      3. Joe kills Ron right before the man can assault his stepson for standing up to him. Absolutely nobody notices he's gone, and nobody cares.
    • Season 2:
      1. Jasper only cares about money and is willing to hurt people to get it, and Joe kills him in self-defense.
      2. Henderson's death was an accident, but considering he was about to drug a 15-year-old so he could rape her, it's kind of hard to find any tragedy in it.
    • Season 3:
      1. Gil, the 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".
      2. Ryan goes out of his way to emotionally beat down his ex for no reason other than to assert his dominance. Despite having full custody of their daughter, it's clear that he only wanted custody as a power move, and he leaves his daughter's actual care to her grandmother.
    • Season 4:
      1. All the victims of the Eat The Rich killer (except Rhys) are Spoiled Brats.
    • Season 5:
      1. Reagan's bullying causes Maddie to make good on Joe's Sadistic Choice and kill her while they're both trapped in the cage.
      2. Dane is a He-Man Woman Hater that refers to women as "females" and goes on Suddenly Shouting tirades full of four and five-letter words against them.
  • Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other:
    • Season 3: Sherry and Cary 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:
    • There are several where it seems like Joe is about to get caught, but he manages to get out of the situation scot-free until the finale.
    • Season 1:
      1. 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.
      2. It seems like Joe is going to murder Dr. Nicky, but instead he breaks on his office to listen to Beck's sessions.
      3. The final episode 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 2:
      1. At first, with Love being married. Turns out she was married.
      2. 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.
    • Season 3:
      1. It appears to set up Joe lusting after Girl Next Door neighbor Natalie and then Love murders the woman at the end of the first episode.
    • Season 4:
      1. It shows Joe going after the Eat the Rich killer, after they start to stalk Joe, which is later revealed to be Joe himself with a Split Personality.
    • Season 5:
      1. In the first episode, it seems like Joe is going to punch the councilman... but he just removes a hair from his suit.
      2. It shows Joe eventually having an affair with Bronte, a young spirted homeless woman that used Mooney's as a place to sleep which is later revealed to a ploy with the rest of Bronte's friends to bring Joe to justice for the murder of Beck and others.
  • Bait-and-Switch Comment:
    • Season 1:
      1. 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.
    • Season 2:
      1. Ellie's experience when she spent the night for the first time at Henderson's, a pedophile. However, the second time she wasn't that lucky.
        Ellie: We were all watching a movie. There were snacks. I ate... something. Next thing I knew, I was lying on the balcony. [Beat] Henderson was a good guy. He chewed Jonah out for the edibles.
      2. Love tells Joe she hired a P.I. because someone near them seems suspicious... Candace. Subverted because at the end of the season is revealed that she also hired him to look into Joe.
    • Season 3:
      1. It seemed like Matthew had found out about Joe's interest in Natalie, but then…
        Matthew: Natalie said you were becoming friends. You had a glass of wine. [Beat] Did she say anything to you about going to visit her sister?
      2. Gil's "Dark Secret" when he's kidnapped on the cage.
        Gil: Our church group went to a festival for Christ in Vegas.
        Joe's Inner Monologue: Christ? Vegas? Strong starter ingredients.
        Gil: We raised funds for the Santoses, who'd lost their home to a fire. And now, there's this woman, Cheryl.
        Joe's Inner Monologue: Christ. Vegas. Cheryl.
        Gil: Real, you know, fun-lover. You know the type. Anyway, everyone else had gone to bed, but she and I have a little more in our tanks. So, we take the 600 dollars that we'd raised, and...
        Joe's Inner Monologue: A room with a pile of blow and a dominatrix dressed as a nun. Why didn't I start here this morning?
        Gil: We put it all on red. And lost.
      3. After kissing Marienne, Joe gets back home. Love tells him that they need to talk. It seemed like she has found out… but she meant something completely different. (Eventually, she finds out).
    • Season 4:
      1. When Phoebe tells Joe about her friends hidden skeletons, so it seemed like she was accusing them.
        Joe: I can see why you might think that they...
        Phoebe: Oh, God, no, I'm just gossiping, darling. I can't see either of them hurting a fly.
  • Bait the Dog:
    • Season 2:
      1. Love is introduced as a nice and kind Manic Pixie Dream Girl, in the following episodes it is shown that she has to take care of his drug addict brother, which makes her more likeable. At the end of the season it is revealed that she is a psychopath who is as evil as Joe.
      2. Henderson looks after Ellie and is helping her to break into the film industry. No, he's grooming her so he can sexually abuse her at a later date.
    • Season 4:
      1. At the end, 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 isn't so lenient.
  • The Beautiful Elite:
    • Season 1: 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 his love interests.
    • Season 1:
      1. Played straight at the end 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.
    • Season 5:
      1. Teddy is loyal to Kate because she hired him after spending his whole life being ignored by the family.
  • Betty and Veronica:
    • Season 1: 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 Fancy House: A lot of large, opulent houses for the Cast Full of Rich People, like Peach's Greenwich estate, The Quinn family home and 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.
    • The first and last season takes place in New York City, and a good part of it at Mooney's. Joe's spree of murder and misogyny started with Beck entering his bookstore. He was eventually thwarted when a friend of Beck's entered his bookstore.
    • Joe's first (chronological) love interest is Candace Stone, a redhead that later pursue Joe in order to get justice for his crimes, and took on an alias to disguise her real name. Bronte is Joe's last love interest, a redhead that pursue Joe in order to get justice for his crimes, and took on an alias to disguise her real name.
  • 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:
    • Season 2:
      1. Love and Forty's parents (they're obscenely wealthy business moguls who are into New Age/Eastern philosophy).
      2. 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.
  • Bullying a Dragon:
    • 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.
    • Season 3: Sherry has no idea what she's getting herself into when she starts passive-aggressively bullying Love, a psychotic killer.
  • Burn Baby Burn:
    • Season 4: 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:
    • Season 2: James, Love's first husband who was deaf, is already dead by the time of the story-he thus appears only in flasbacks.
    • Season 3: It's somewhat Downplayed though since Dante, a recurring visually impaired character, is introduced in this season.
  • Cameo Cluster: A bunch of characters (and their actors) from previous seasons show up in a brief social media vignette in the final season. These include Paco, Ethan and some of Beck's friends from season one, Love's mother from season two and Sherry and Cary from season three.
  • Camp Gay: Gabe (though he's technically pansexual) and Calvin in Season 2.
  • Cassandra Truth:
    • It happens every time that Joe kills someone, sets it up as a suicide, an accident or frames someone else, and somebody else tries to uncover the truth. Until the finale.
    • It also happens every time that someone tries to expose Joe as a stalker and Serial Killer. Until the finale.
    • Season 1:
      1. For most of the season, 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.
    • Season 2:
      1. Delilah trying to convince her sister that she isn't spying on her and warning her about Henderson. Eventually, she believes her.
    • Season 4:
      1. Despite Dawn truthfully saying that she is not the Eat The Rich killer, however, her kidnapping and attempted murder on Lady Phoebe just gave the police further proof of her being The Mentally Disturbed.
  • 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.
    • Season 1: Beck 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.
    • Season 3: Joe marries the super-rich Love and the two move to an opulent California suburbia, 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.
    • In Season 5, Joe is married to Kate, and most of her family are very wealthy.
  • The Chain of Harm: Joe was locked in Mooney's cage by Mr. Mooney and burned and abused in foster care. He emotionally and physically tortures several people in the cage.
  • Cheated Death, Died Anyway:
    • Season 1:
      1. 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, he strangles her to death after she finds out that he was stalking her (and murdering her friends and exes.)
    • Season 2:
      1. Candace survived after being Buried Alive by Joe before Season 1, as revealed in flashbacks throughout Season 2. She returns to find him and make him suffer before revealing what he did, and attempts to protect his new girlfriend. 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.
  • 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:
    • Season 1:
      1. Peach, who gets noticeably upset whenever Beck talks about her love life with men.
      2. Beck gets jealous when she sees Joe with Karen.
    • Season 2:
      1. 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.
  • 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.
    • Season 4 moves from the rich suburbs to a subdued London.
    • Season 5 is set in New York, Where It All Began.
  • Covert Pervert: Joe checking his love interests out when they first meet, which they aren't privy to.
  • Create Your Own Hero:
    • Season 5: Bronte, who was Beck's friend before she was murdered by Joe, got involved in a Reddit group in order to take Joe down.
  • Damsel in Distress: Joe projects this onto his love interests. To his credit, there are plenty of instances where they need to be saved, it's just that Joe won't view them outside of this trope for fear of diminishing his place in their life.
  • 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.
  • A Day in the Limelight: Beck, Love, Marienne, and Bronte each have an episode that focuses from their point of view, including Character Narration to boot.
  • 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.
    • In season 5, Maddie has hallucinations of Reagan, reflecting her guilt for killing her.
  • 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.
  • Did You Actually Believe...?:
    • Season 4: When Katherine stands up to her father on building her own life without his help, her dad scoffs and asks her 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:
    • Season 1: 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.
    • Season 2: Candace's plan is filtrating Joe's social circle to eventually reveal he's a Machiavellian sociopath. This is repeatedly undermined by her own lack of forethought or planning and relative lack of charisma, or actually keeping an eye on said-sociopath, the latter of which actually allowed him to move on to Beck and eventually kill her.
    • Season 3: Literal Ax-Crazy Love killed Natalie impulsively, and has to deal with the consequences.
  • Dies Differently in Adaptation: Most of the deaths from the first two books are different compared to the TV show.
    • Season 1 vs the first book:
      1. 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.
      2. 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 her in a hallucination, she undoes her scarf revealing bruises around her neck, implying that Joe strangled her. Fully confirmed in Season 5, as Joe attempted to kill Bronte, Beck's friend and current Love Interest.
    • Season 2 vs the second book:
      1. Candace... twice. In the book, Joe killed her by drowning her. In the series, he buried her alive instead, but she survived, and then Love slit her throat.
      2. 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:
    • Season 1:
      1. Joe killed his biological dad when he was a kid.
      2. 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 Wicked Stepmother likes to guilt-trip her 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. She'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.
      3. 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.
    • Season 2:
      1. Delilah and Ellie's father died several years ago.
  • 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.
  • Disowned Parent:
    • Season 1: 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 she claims he died is because he divorced her mom after he got sober and took up with his sober coach.
    • Season 5: Henry, Joe and Love's child, told Joe that there are monsters, meaning Joe.
  • Disproportionate Retribution:
    • Season 1:
      1. He thinks Benji is a colossal douchebag. It's only natural that he kidnap and eventually murder him.
      2. 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.
    • Season 3:
      1. Gil's daughters infected Henry because Gil is an antivaxxer who prevented them from getting measles vaccines. As thanks, Love smashes his face in with a rolling pin and she and Joe are forced to lock him up while the dig up blackmail material. Then he kills himself when he learns that his son sexually assaulted his classmate and Love frames him for Natalie's murder, ruining his reputation. At least Joe clears his name by the end.
    • Season 4:
      1. After Joe learns Nadia has been investigating him, despite having the resources to pay her off, he murders her boyfriend and frames her.
    • Season 5:
      1. Reagan tries to press charges against Joe and Kate and have their son expelled from school because he punched her daughter for calling his mother a killer.
  • Double Standard: Rape, Female on Male:
    • Season 2: Subverted pointedly. 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 Romanticized Abuse and the lie is simply Forty's way of dealing with the trauma.
    • Season 4: also Subverted, 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, accepted his dark side and one of his students being pinned for his crimes.
  • Dramatic Irony:
    • Season 1: 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.
    • Season 3: Late in the 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 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.
    • 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.
    • Several characters do this after Joe kills their loved ones.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending:
    • Season 1: 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 they move to California once they're free from his abuse.
    • Season 3: Unlike earlier seasons, it 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.
    • Season 5: In the finale, Joe’s surviving victims get happy endings.
      1. Kate Galvan survives the bookstore fire, has her relationship with her half brother repaired and receives full custody of Henry who loves her as his true mother.
      2. Henry finally sees his father for who he is but is able to receive the love his father did not, implying that he won’t go down the same dark path.
      3. Nadia Fareedi has her name cleared and teaches convicted women in writing.
      4. Marienne Bellamy is finally safe to tell her story and has some sense of peace.
      5. Teddy is able to turn the Family Business into a 100% non profit.
      6. Maddie and Harrison are both cleared of the charges surrounding Reagan’s death, they are free to celebrate the their love publicly, Gretchen loves them as her parents and they have twins on the way.
      7. Brontë is the one to turn Joe in, is celebrated as a hero, cleans Beck’s novel of Joe’s writing and has her whole life ahead of her.
      8. Phoenix and Dominique receive notoriety for their part in exposing Joe and start an initiative to clear the names of the falsely imprisoned and expose those who have escaped justice.
      9. Dr. Nicky, who is mentioned throughout the season, is exonerated for the murder of Beck, Benji as well as Peach.
  • 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:
    • Season 1:
      1. 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.
      2. 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. However, Joe gets laid minutes after he and Beck break up.
    • Season 2:
      1. Love replaces Joe within less than a day with Milo after they break up.
  • Evil Is Not a Toy:
    • 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.
    • Season 5: Kate asked Joe to murder her Uncle Bob, in a Moment of Weakness for her, that results in reawaking his bloodlust after three years of normalcy.
  • Evil Versus Evil:
    • Season 1: 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.
    • Season 3: Joe vs Ryan. Both are horrible people, but the latter proves himself to be extremely sadistic and takes extreme pleasure in abusing and torturing his ex and enjoys hurting people as if it's a normal sport for him to have fun with.
  • Five-Second Foreshadowing:
    • Season 4: Before Joe confronts Rhys, the latter can be seen arguing with his ex-wife, being uncharacteristically distressed and agitated. Moments later, it's revealed to have nothing to do with Joe.
  • Food as Characterization:
    • Season 2: 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:
    • Season 1:
      1. Joe's first spoken word in the show is "guilty", which is his verdict when he is sentenced to life in prison at the very end.
      2. 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 finale.
      3. 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."
      4. Beck's poem at the end of the season foreshadows Joe's later relationships, up to Bronte, who mentions fairytales in her relationship to Joe.
        Beck: You used to wrap yourself in fairytales like a blanket, but it was the cold you loved. Sharp shivers as you uncovered the corpses of Bluebeard’s wives. ... And you knew somewhere deep it was too good to be true. But you let yourself be swept because he was the first strong enough to lift you. Now in his castle, you understand Prince Charming and Bluebeard are the same man.
      5. Beck tells Joe "You're going to spend the rest of your life in prison". Four seasons and dozens of deaths later, it finally comes true.
    • Season 2:
      1. In the first episode, Joe walks past a camera crew filming a dead woman who looks a lot like Candace. This foreshadowed her death later in the season.
      2. 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, Love exposes herself as A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing with a knack for slicing people's necks open.
      3. The scenes of Joe chopping Jasper's body are juxtaposed with Love cutting meat, signifying that Love too is a killer.
      4. 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.
      5. Candace warns Forty "Don't come crying to me when Joe kills your sister". Come the end of Season 3...
    • Season 3:
      1. When Joe and Love disown Dottie for recklessly endangering Henry, she whines "One day you'll lose everything and you'll know how I feel!" At the end of Season 3, Love loses her life, and the end of Season 5, Joe loses everything that he values.
      2. Love's dying words to Joe are "Henry will know what you are". In the finale, Henry indeed sees his father for what he is and calls him "a monster".
    • Season 4:
      1. Before The Reveal, Joe protests to the Eat the Rich killer that he had to frame an innocent woman (Dawn) for his murders. By the end of the season, Joe, who turns out to be the Eat the Rich killer, frames another innocent woman (Nadia) for his other London murders.
  • For the Evulz:
    • Season 2: It seems like Ray loves to torture his son emotionally just to spite and hurt him for sadistic fun.
    • Season 3: Psycho Ex-Boyfriend Ryan abuses and tortures his ex merely for his own sadistic amusement and takes absolute pleasure and joy in her misery.
    • Season 5: Reagan is Big Sister Bully to all her half siblings, but her favorite target is her own twin Maddie, who she has been seemingly bullying their entire lives just because.
  • 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.
    • At the end of season 3, Love is framed for killing people she didn't kill and killing Joe, with Joe cutting off his toes for additional evidence.
    • At the end of season four, Joe framed Nadia for the death of Rhys Montrose, and the killing of her boyfriend.
      • At least for Dr. Nicky and Nadia, their names were cleared after Joe was arrested.
  • "Friends" Rent Control:
    • Season 1: 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.

    G-Z 
  • Gaslighting:
    • Joe does it to everyone that tries to uncover that he's a Serial Killer.
    • Season 1
      1. When Beck grills Joe about what happened to Candace, he shows her an obviously fake Instagram of Candace in Italy and claims that Candace's brother, who suspected that Joe killed her, was mentally insane.
    • Season 2:
      1. 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.
      2. Love tries this on Forty, insisting that he's just spouting wild conspiracy theories about Joe because he's relapsed and back on drugs.
    • Season 4:
      1. Taking advantage of her mental breakdown, Adam does it to Phoebe, getting on a hurry to marry her and turning against her every person that worries about her.
  • Girl-on-Girl is Hot:
    • Season 1: Subverted. 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.
    • Season 3: Played straight. When Sherry and Cary discuss boundaries with Joe and Love for their "swinging," they ask the "easy one" first, if he is okay with the two women fooling around. Cary then remarks that girl-on-girl is always the easiest thing for the guy to okay.
  • Good Adultery, Bad Adultery:
    • Season 1:
      1. Benji is treated as a scumbag for cheating on Beck, although they're only informally together.
      2. Joe cheats on Karen with Beck, but this is treated as less bad on both sides than Beck cheating on Joe with Dr. Nicky.
    • Season 3:
      1. Joe cheats on his wife with Marienne , and he justifies it. However, he doesn't think it's ok when Love cheats on him with Theo, although he doesn't get that angry because he doesn't care about her anymore.
    • Season 5:
      1. Joe cheats on his wife with Bronte , and he justifies it.
  • Granola Girl:
    • Season 2: 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.
    • Season 1:
      1. 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.
      2. The finale. Surely, as the object of his affections, Beck will be spared from Joe's violent streak, right? Nooooooope.
    • Season 2:
      1. The last scene of the 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?
      2. 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:
    • Season 2: 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:
    • Season 3: Weirdly played straight in the 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.
    • Season 5: Fully played straight in the series finale, where Joe is locked in prison, and all of the surviving characters, including Nadia and Marienne have their own happy endings.
  • Happy Marriage Charade:
    • Season 2: Love and Forty's parents. Their 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 her deteriorating mental state.
    • Season 3: By mid-season, 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.
  • 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.
  • Homewrecker Gets Wrecked: Enforced by Love, who is a very strong example of Love Forgives All but Lust. While Joe is also a Serial Killer, adultery is less of a Berserk Button for him. Love, on the other hand, brutally axes Natalie to death after finding out that Joe has a burgeoning obsession with her (though Natalie herself is portrayed as cold and manipulative). Joe makes it clear that Love would kill Marienne if she found out about their relationship, and she ultimately tries to kill Joe instead after she finds out about it.
  • Hope Spot:
    • Season 1:
      1. In the 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.
    • Season 2:
      1. 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:
      1. It 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.
      2. 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:
    • Season 1:
      1. 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.
      2. 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?"
      3. 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.
      4. All best summed up in the 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.
    • Season 2:
      1. At the end of the season, Joe judges Love for killing two people so that she could be with him.
    • Season 3:
      1. Joe muses at how horrible it is at a party to put up with everyone else showing "narcissistic delusion."
  • Hypocritical Humor:
    • Joe frequently condemns others' lying, despite constantly doing so himself and building his whole relationship with his love interests around one.
    • Season 1:
      1. 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 invade your privacy like this?
    • Season 3:
      1. When found by Love while hooking up with "swinging" neighbors, Joe thinks "great, somehow I became the bad guy."
  • Idiot Ball:
    • Season 1:
      1. 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.
    • Season 2:
      1. 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.
    • Season 5:
      1. Bronte has been smart enough to break into the bookstore multiple times, talk out of the situation when Joe catches her and even making him like her enough for him to give her a job in the bookstore. She also breaks into the basement and discovers the cage... only for her to not be mindful of the door while she's inside.
  • If I Can't Have You…: Joe with his love interests when they discover his true nature and are repulsed by it.
  • 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.
  • Improvised Weapon:
    • Season 1:
      1. Joe uses a hammer to attack Benji and a rock to attack Peach.
      2. 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.
    • Season 2:
      1. Joe uses a brick to attack Will.
      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 handcuffs.
    • Season 3:
      1. Love uses a fire axe, a rolling pin and a fire extinguisher to attack Natalie, Gil and Theo respectively.
      2. Joe uses a rock to attack Cary.
  • Innocuously Important Episode:
    • Season 3: The episode "Hands Across Madre Linda", has Joe conversing with an imaginary, (more) evil version of himself, a hallucination brought on by his sickness. This concept is never referenced or becomes relevant the rest of the season and viewers can be forgiven by thinking that this is just the series referencing Dexter’s relationship with Ghost!Harry. This is actually setting up the story arc of season 4 where the concept of Joe having an evil imaginary friend drives the plot of the entire season.
  • Insidious Rumor Mill:
    • Season 2: Joe pulls this on Candace, both In-Universe and to the audience, since up until now we've only seen or heard about her 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 she, 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.
  • Intimate Haircut:
    • Season 2: From conversation, it's implied that Love always cut Forty's hair, instead of going to the hairdresser, as a moment of connection/codependency. She gives him one in 2x04.
  • Internet Stalking: When Joe becomes obsessed with a new love interest, he tries looking her up on social media. When he 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:
    • Season 1: Beck and her friends all went to Brown University and Benji went to Yale.
    • Season 3: Theo goes to Stanford, despite not seeming either particularly intelligent or focused. His family is wealthy, though.
    • Season 4: The aristocrats were buddies in Oxford.
  • Jerkass Has a Point:
    • Season 1:
      1. 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.
      2. Similarly, while Claudia's boyfriend Ron is a Domestic Abuser, he isn't far off in his insistence that Joe is a "freak".
    • Season 2:
      1. Delilah's original Gut Feeling about Joe being a creep turn out to be more true than she realized. In a sad moment of reality, the reason why she never spoke up about her sexual abuse — she knows that testimony alone wouldn't get her anywhere, since Henderson is famous, rich, and well-loved. If she did, she loses credibility as a journalist for not having brought it up previously, as though she were chasing headlines. While stuck in Joe's cage, she angrily states that Joe has a "fucked up" view on friendship.
      2. Forty is an immature, self-destructive Attention Whore who does have the occasional insight. When Love gets angry at him for butting into her love life, he shoots back that she hired someone to spy on his girlfriend. Even Love can't deny his point. As his sister can also attest, both of their parents are assholes. In his final confrontation with Joe and Love, he angrily but accurately points out that his sister is just as messed up as him, she's just better at disguising her pain. He is also correct about the danger Joe poses towards Love.
      3. Dr. Nicky is indolent and frankly lazy in hiding behind religion instead of trying to help Forty - when the latter rightfully points out that Joe is dating his sister and, as a murderer, obviously can't just sit back and allow this to happen - but he is completely right that Joe is very dangerous.
    • Season 3:
      1. Dottie commenting that her daughter is sabotaging her own life out of nothing but self-destructive boredom and calling out her immaturity is not totally off the mark. Even if she's aware of her flaws and failures, she never wonders if her own mistreatment might have played a role in that.
    • Season 4:
      1. Although she is unnecessarily rude and snobbish to Joe, Kate has repeatedly caught him peeking at her through the window, following her and proclaiming that he needs to protect her, so there is reason for her to be annoyed at him.
      2. Possibly the worst thing Kate does to Joe is reveal that he was the last to see Malcolm and send them over to his apartment, risking him being arrested. However, she says that she just told the whole truth and if he truly was innocent, all the detectives did was clear his name. Not to mention, Joe is the killer, he just didn't remember it.
      3. All the characters that accuse Joe of being the Eat The Rich killer.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: A common trait for each "You" is that they're not as sweet and innocent as Joe imagines they are, having their share of character flaws which are more or less balanced out by various redeeming factors.
  • Lady and Knight: Deconstructed. Joe's love interests are framed as the Lady to Joe's Knight, which in a real-life setting means being kept in a gilded cage until Joe either loses interest or kills them for not appreciating his favors.
  • Lighter and Softer:
    • Season 1 vs the first book: 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.
    • Season 2 vs the second book: Again, it's still spectacularly dark, but the season 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—
  • Let the Past Burn:
    • Season 3: Joe burns down their suburban home when he fakes his death as a Murder-Suicide at his wife's hands in order to start anew in Paris.
    • Season 5: Maddie, after getting out of jail, and angry at Joe for framing her and Harrison, lit a fire at Mooney's, trapping Joe and, unknown to her, Kate.
  • Lousy Lovers Are Losers:
    • Season 1:
      1. 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.
      2. 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-Interest Traitor: As Joe is not the best guy to be in love with, all those who find out of Joe's true self are considered this.
  • Love Makes You Crazy:
    • Subverted, because while Joe's infatuation with his love interests 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 his love interests. However, the show demonstrates that Joe lashes out at anybody in their lives he views as better or closer to them than he is.
    • Played straight, however, with Love, who seems like a genuinely sweet person... 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 all his love interests, which quickly gets out of hand after they start dating. When he feels this towards Love... 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 his love interests this way, but they aren't actually straight examples of the trope.
    • Season 2: Lampshaded when Love tries to be one to Joe (aka Will) and it's shown 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.
    • Season 5: Bronte crafted herself in a way to appeal to Joe, initially in order to get justice for Beck's death.
  • Manipulative Bastard:
    • Joe, of course, is a pretty gifted manipulator himself, aided by the information he gleans from his stalking.
    • Season 1:
      1. Peach will backstab, manipulate, and gaslight just about everyone, even her close friend and hopeless crush Beck, just so she can control them and feel superior to them.
    • Season 2:
      1. Henderson is an experienced manipulator by the time he turns his eyes on 15-year-old Ellie. At one point, he lures her 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 her into his house, saying that it's not smart for him to be alone with a young girl. This puts her into a position where she insists that he let her in, and he eventually "gives in."
  • 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:
    • Season 3: 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.
  • Mo' Money, Mo' Problems:
    • Season 5: When Joe moves back to New York with Kate, he's suddenly a wealthy celebrity and half of a Celebrity Power Couple. This is generally a safe and comfortable life, though with some family drama on her side, and a yearning for his old life on his side. When he meets Bronte, though, she repeatedly speaks to him as though he's some detached capitalist who will never understand people like her, even giving him a hard time when he offers a $5 raise and laying into him for closing the bookstore, suggesting he'll sell it to make condos with. He is frustrated by this, given his actual history was far from the cozy, rich lifestyle he now has; she only stops giving him this attitude when he finally snaps and rants to her about what he's been through.
  • 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:
    • Season 1: For Joe, Paco.
    • Season 2: For Joe, Ellie fills the same role to a lesser degree.
    • Season 4: For Joe, Nadia also did it somewhat. For London's high society, Phoebe is one.
  • Most Writers Are Writers:
  • Moving-Away Ending: Seasons 1-4 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 his love interests and/or anyone who threatens his new life at all. So does Love.
    • Season 5:
      1. Kate briefly thought so when she asked Joe to kill Bob.
      2. This is what Kate and Nadia thought after initially hearing that it would take years for Joe to be brought to justice. One of the reasons Kate eventually turns on Joe is that she comes to realize he believes murder is an appropriate solution for just about any problem or inconvenience — it's not something he does with extreme reluctance in extreme situations, but instead the main tool in his toolbox.
  • My Girl Is Not a Slut:
    • Season 1:
      1. 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.
      2. 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?:
    • Season 2: Forty is riddled with guilt because he believes he killed the au pair who molested him. Turns out that was actually Love.
    • Season 4: Joe gets a rare dose of this 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.
  • Never Suicide: in all the following cases, is Joe who had killed them.
    • In Season 1, 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, predatory comedian Henderson, and makes it look like a suicide.
    • In Season 3, Love via poisoning, and sets it up to look self inflicted, complete with a suicide note.
    • In Season 5, Bob, and sets it up to appear like a suicide.
  • 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.
    • Season 2:
      1. 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.
      2. Candace wants Love to see Joe for what he really is at the end of the season. Bringing her to the storage locker and spelling out everything she knows was an absolutely horrible idea, though, as it got her killed.
      3. Fincher shoots Forty —who was willing to shoot Joe to protect Love from him—before he could kill Joe, allowing Joe to continue killing.
    • Season 4:
      1. Nadia saving Marienne from the cage, which did save Marienne, but lead to Joe killing Nadia's boyfriend and framing her for the murder of Rhys Montrose.
  • Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!: See above. Referring to "villain" in a literal sense, though:
    • Season 1: Joe makes Beck lowkey famous near the end of the season, as murdering Peach gives her the inspiration to write the article that goes viral. This would come back to bite him in Season 5.
    • Season 2: Joe would've ended dead or in prison if Love hadn't murdered both Delilah and Candace.
  • 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 Quite Dead:
    • Season 1:
      1. Beck's father is very much alive, despite her telling everyone otherwise. She has fairly good reasons for it, though.
      2. Candace, who turns up very much alive at the end of the season.
    • Season 4:
      1. Marienne gets out of the cage alive, even if she made Joe believe otherwise.
  • Obfuscating Stupidity:
    • Season 1: Peach whenever Beck suspects that she's sabotaging her.
    • Season 2: 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:
    • 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:
    • 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!:
    • Joe when his victims surive to his Tap on the Head. He starts freaking out and is either justifying his actions or coming up with convoluted reasons as to how he wouldn't be caught.
    • Season 1:
      1. 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.
      2. Joe, when he realizes he's forgotten to feed Benji all day.
      3. When Dr. Nicky realises that one of his patients is Joe Goldberg and therefore how dangerous he is; that he must have killed Beck and framed him.
  • 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 and major exceptions (like Love in Season 3 and Kate, with the setting in New York for Season 5).
  • One-Word Title: You.
  • On the Rebound:
    • Season 1:
      1. Beck sleeps and goes out with a lot of guys after breaking up with Benji.
      2. Joe ends up together with Karen right after breaking up with Beck.
    • Season 2:
      1. 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.
      2. 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.
  • Parental Abandonment:
    • Season 1:
      1. 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.
      2. 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.
  • Parents as People:
    • Season 1:
      1. Sandy loved Joe, but she wasn't the most present or competent parent. When Joe was with her, she was neglectful — albeit in a Struggling Single Mother, "trying but in a terrible situation" sort of way, until she abandoned him.
      2. 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.
    • Season 3:
      1. Matthew would be the first to admit he wasn't the best or most attentive parent to Theo due to having him at a fairly young age and being so focused on his career and their relationship is tense and distant even before Natalie's murder made him even colder and more obsessed. But he does love him and makes an effort to be a better father.
  • The Peeping Tom: Joe constantly does this to his love interests, including learning their schedules and watching them having sex with other men.
  • Plot-Relevant Age-Up: Henry ages up to 6 in Season 5, after being a baby in Season 3.
  • Polyamory:
    • Season 3: Sherry and Cary turn out to be polyamorous, and they swing with Joe and Love one night. It Goes Horribly Wrong, 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 photos of his love interests, like teenage Beck in a bikini or Marienne's nudes.
  • Porn Stash:
    • Season 1:
      1. Lynn has one consisting of over 200 dick pics various men have sent her.
      2. Peach also has a secret stash which becomes a plot point.
    • Season 3:
      1. Ryan has several nudes from his ex.
  • 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.
  • Present Absence:
    • Season 5: Beck's death lead to Bronte crossing paths with Joe, with her consistently being mentioned, and showing up in flashbacks.
  • 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:
    • Season 1:
      1. 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."
      2. 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.
    • Season 2:
      1. 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.
      2. 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:
    • Season 1: Joe and Peach are in one with Beck, as both of them are obsessed with her and want her to themselves.
    • Season 2: 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 them.
  • Punny Name:
    • Season 2: 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:
    • Season 1:
      1. Peach is white in the book, but played by mixed-race actress Shay Mitchell in the series.
      2. Karen Minty is white in the book, but played by black actress Natalie Paul in the series.
  • Really Gets Around:
    • Season 1:
      1. Beck sleeps around a lot after breaking up with Benji, which makes Joe and Peach very jealous.
      2. Annika and Lynn are also said to sleep with lots of men.
    • Season 3:
      1. Sherry and Cary have an open marriage and are very seasoned at organising bisexual swinging sessions with other couples; they also imply to have brought most of Madre Linda into the fold to try that at least once. However, they live their sexual proclivities with positivity and mutual respect as a way to feel liberated, keep their marriage healthy, and if anything strengthen it. Ultimately, they are shown to genuinely love and care for one another even under severe duress (for the most part).
    • Season 4:
      1. Tom Lockwood has fathered seven children, and they don’t all share the same mother.
  • Rescue Romance:
    • Season 1: Beck first gets to know Joe when he saves her from being run over by a train.
  • Rescuing the Abused: Joe's backstory and motives for murder are rife with the concept of saving the people he loves from abusers, but as the series goes on, it becomes less and less justifiable. He shot his abusive father to save his mother as a child, getting his first taste of blood. As an adult, he took out many people who were using and abusing Beck, such as her possessive best friend and her sexually abusive teacher, as well as the violent stepfather of his young neighbor. He murdered the Serial Rapist celebrity who threatened his friend, Kate's abusive father, and later the people trying to expose Kate's dark past. However, each one is displayed as extreme, and by season 5, his insistence on "protecting" Kate reaches a point of delusion as even she begs him to handle things the legal and normal way...which enrages him, because in his mind, he's just keeping his family safe.
  • Revenge Before Reason:
    • 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.
    • Season 5: Bronte points out that Clayton was so focused in avenging his dad that he didn't care to get enough proof with Joe or putting her in danger.
  • Rewatch Bonus:
    • Season 2:
      1. 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.
      2. Love figures out the perfect meal for Joe just by reading some very subtle hints to his personality. Her ability to read Joe is revealed to be a massive clue that she's just as analytical and possessive as he is.
      3. 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.
      4. 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:
      1. It's 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.
    • In Season 5:
      1. There are several clues of Bronte connecting her to Beck, including her green phone case, the Dark Face of Love being on her Goodreads account, and trying to see more of Joe's writing, to see if it matched the writing in the book.
  • Right Through the Wall:
    • Season 2: 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.
  • Safe Word:
    • In Season 1: "Falafel" seems to be one for Joe and Beck whenever one of them isn't in the mood for sex.
    • In Season 2: "Mama Ru" is the safe word to get out of the hotel towards the end of the season.
    • In Season 3: The safe word in the swinging scene is "Hakuna Matata."
    • In Season 4: Adam's safe word is "sweet potato". Not that it helps him, as he uses it in what turns out to be an execution instead of an S&M session.
  • Screw the Rules, I Have Money!:
    • Season 2: 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.
    • Season 3: Love was used to this, but it's no longer an option after her parents' divorce; thus, she can't just hire someone to clean up her spur-of-the-moment murders, attempted or otherwise, which inevitably draw attention and put her and Joe in jeopardy.
    • Season 4: 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 seasons 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 her 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:
    • Season 2:
      1. 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 them the truth, neither believe her. When she believes she has proof, she takes Love to prove it...and Love turns out to be psycho and kills her. It's ultimately All for Nothing.
      2. 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 she 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.
    • Season 1:
      1. Beck's Twitter handle is @BeckdelTest.
    • Season 2:
      1. 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.
      2. Joe also lives opposite Love and frequently spies on her from his house, reminiscent again of The Great Gatsby.
    • Season 3:
      1. Marienne's name (and its pronunciation) calls to mind another famous librarian.
      2. The 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:
      1. It 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.
  • Soapbox Sadie:
    • Season 1: Joe perceives Benji as being this way, derisively noting his penchant for posting about social causes like #BlackLivesMatter to a performative degree.
    • Season 2: 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:
    • Season 3: 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.
    • Season 5: Bronte showing up at Mooney's in order to hasten the plan to take down Joe for the murder of Beck, eventually led to his arrest and imprison.
  • Speed Sex:
    • Season 1: Benji (he can't even satisfy her) and Joe (he doesn't even last 8 seconds the first time) with Beck.
  • Spot the Imposter:
    • Season 3: 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: The premise of the series; every time Joe gets a love interest, he begins stalking her to find out everything about her and endeavors to form a relationship with her based on said stalking. 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, Andrew, Jackson, Dante and Lansing in Season 3 and Teddy in Season 5.
  • 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:
    • Joe isn't able to fool everyone, so several people suspect of him.
    • Season 1:
      1. Paco tries to bear his stepfather down by giving him sleeping pills, but being a child against a strong adult man, he gives him a too small dose, so he doesn't last to wake up.
      2. 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.
    • Season 2:
      1. Joe runs to catch Milo but, unlike him, Joe is not on shape, so his physical incompetence prevents him from even keeping pace.
    • Season 4:
      1. Tom Lockwood figures out Joe's real identity quite easily, as for someone of his resources, Joe's paltry attempts to start over would be very easy to see through.
    • Season 5:
      1. Bronte developing Stockholm Syndrome after getting into a relationship with Joe and seeing her friend die in front of her, even with trying to discover him as the person who murder Beck.
  • Suspect Existence Failure:
    • Season 4: Discussed. 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.
  • Therapy Episode:
    • Season 3: In "So I Married An Axe Murderer", Joe and Love are in couple's therapy together due to their disagreements surrounding Love's murder of Natalie Engler. It's played for Black Comedy; both are unable to tell the therapist what's really going on, so they resort to passive-aggressive comments and vague, intentionally ambiguous statements. Interspersed are scenes of the direct aftermath, many of which take the form of an Answer Cut. It serves to show the true feelings of both Joe and Love as they're forced to talk to a professional, while the audience gets to see what went down that night.
  • Til Murder Do Us Part:
    • Season 3:
      1. 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.
      2. In the 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.
    • Season 5:
      1. Discussed by Kate and Joe towards each other.
  • Trickster Twins:
    • Season 2: 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:
    • Season 2: 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:
    • Season 1: Beck is shown like this for a lot of her sex scenes. A lot of Peach's photos of her show are of her topless from the back.
  • Upper-Class Twit:
    • Season 2: Joe clearly views Forty this way.
    • Season 4: 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:
    • Season 1: When Beck vomits on Joe after he saves her from getting hit by a subway train, the shot doesn't pull away.
    • Season 2: Joe vomits on Delilah after an ill-advised celery diet makes him sick, and Love gets one at the end of the season.
  • Wham Shot:
    • Season 4: 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.
    • Season 5: Bronte moving to her friends who recorded Joe murdering Clayton.
  • "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: All the seasons end like this, where we see what happened with the surviving characters.
    • Season 5: It ends with not only the surviving characters in New York, but past season characters as well, with Nadia and Marienne.
  • Wicked Stepfather:
  • Wicked Stepmother:
    • Season 1: 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 Bastard!: The first season engages in a fair amount of audience critique, foregrounding Joe's obsessive criminality and then pushing viewers to ask why they seem to sympathize with him and wish him success when they know what he does and who he is. The series finale is rather blunt about this, with Joe commenting on the sickness of society and saying, "Maybe the problem isn't me. Maybe the problem is...you."
  • You Can't Fight Fate:
    • Season 1: Beck is almost killed by an oncoming subway train in the pilot, but she's saved by Joe... who later kills her himself anyway.
    • Season 2: 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.
  • You Wouldn't Shoot Me:
"Maybe we have a problem as a society. Maybe we should fix what's broken in us. Maybe the problem isn't me. Maybe... it's you."

 
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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.

Example of:
Moody Trailer Cover Song

Alternative Title(s): You

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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 (11 votes)

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