Joe Goldberg is unhinged — and that is exactly the problem, and the pull.

Across its run, You follows Joe, a dangerously charming, insufferably well-read bookstore manager who inserts himself into the lives of the women who fascinate him — narrating every step of the stalking in a second-person monologue that keeps trying to pass for romance. What starts as a twisted love story keeps metastasising: new city, new identity, new obsession, and a body count that Joe can always justify to himself.

Let us be honest: the earlier seasons are undoubtedly better. The first two, anchored by the bookshop and a tighter cast, had an intimacy the later seasons trade for bigger, soapier setups as Joe's world widens. The plotting gets baggier, the coincidences pile up, and some seasons clearly outstay their welcome.

And yet the show still works, almost entirely because of Penn Badgley.

Joe remains unhinged the entire way through — charming, delusional, self-pitying and lethal in equal measure — and Badgley plays every flicker of it. If you are in for the character rather than the case-of-the-season, it is still a compulsive, guilty-pleasure binge.