Penn Badgley Wants ‘You’ To End With Season 5

You is back with the second half of season 4, and as you may expect (mild spoilers), Joe manages to escape with his life. But star Penn Badgley sees the end ahead of him, and believes both that You should end with one more season, and that Joe probably should not survive it.

“It feels to me like we need to do another season. It feels to me like Joe needs to get what’s coming to him, and now he has further to fall because he has all this power and wealth,” Badgley told IndieWire. “But of course, that’s not up to me. I don’t know where it’s going. But to me, with this concept and with this character, we always wanted to be responsible and it’s not just the kind of thing we can let keep going because it’s doing well.”

It’s probably one of the more reasonable takes I’ve seen from a Netflix star, a service where fans and sometimes even the cast have to constantly be begging executives to renew their series. But for a show like You, which has had little trouble finding greenlights for new seasons, you start thinking about how you want to end things on your own terms before you get into say, late-season Dexter territory, another serial killer drama that lasted a bit too long.

While You has not been officially renewed for season 5 yet, it’s easy to see that it’s going to happen in short order here. Both Part 1 and Part 2 of season 4 of You have topped Netflix’s Top 10 list when they arrived, unseating everything else, and it’s easily performing well enough for another season. Though Badgley is saying that if it does happen, it should be its last.

I do find myself thinking about Dexter in the sense that the show not only went on too long, it also didn’t end how it felt like it was supposed to, with Dexter being discovered and meeting his end for his crimes. Year later, that is what happened with a series reprisal, but not in the original finale. Here, it seems like Badgley thinks that Joe needs to get what’s coming to him aka, he should die.

Apparently this was always the plan for You, to end with season 5, according to Badgley:

“I know the creators of the show always had this next season in mind as its last, should there be another one. And then it will probably be a spectacular resolution because it feels to me like something is in the works by the very end of this season.”

At the end of season 4, Joe emerges as “victorious,” but Badgely doesn’t believe that’s how things should end. He’s always been pretty cautious about Joe being seen as a hero. Again, to go back to Dexter for the third time, the justification there was that Dexter (usually) was just killing other killers. Joe has stalked and killed women and plenty of innocents, just to avoid being caught, or because they got in his way. He is far from a hero. He’s not even an anti-hero, he’s just a villain that is constantly getting away with his crimes.

We’ll see if Penn Badgley and the showrunners get their wish of one more final season, but yes, I do believe that’s where we’re headed, given how well season 4 has performed. If anything Netflix could demand more seasons than they want to make, in this case, but hopefully they just let them end it how they want to.

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