Every Step You Take

Soul mates on YOU and Forever.

- Emily Nussbaum

Lifetime’s “You” starts on a queasy note, with a cliff dive straight into the head of a stalker. Peering through the aisles of the bookstore he manages, Joe Goldberg ogles a pretty customer, taking in, via voice-over, her jingling bracelets (“You like a little attention,” he says) and her classy book choice (“Desperate Characters,” by Paula Fox). They flirt. When she leaves, he harvests her name from her credit card, dissects her Instagram, Google Maps her address—and, eventually, like a sleazy paparazzo, peeks through her windows.

To be fair, Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail), the poetry student who’s the object of Joe’s obsession, has no curtains on those windows—and she walks around in a towel, a lot. She has no password on her computer, either. “It’s like you’ve never seen a horror movie” Joe says to himself, alarmed, lurking on the stoop across the street. “Or the news.” From his perspective, he’s just doing due diligence, making sure that she’s really “the one.” Joe, who is played by Penn Badgley, from “Gossip Girl,” with a sinister pep, is quite explicitly the villain in a thriller—specifically, a woman-in-peril drama on Lifetime—yet he has somehow convinced himself that he’s the hero of a romantic comedy: the “nice guy,” cast, maybe, as a young Tom Hanks, except armed with a mallet. And, these days, doesn’t everyone Google his dates?