This article contains spoilers for the final season of You.
For eight years and 50 episodes, Joe Goldberg has been getting away with murder. But the final season of You, which is now on Netflix, ends with the prolific serial killer and self-styled romantic finally facing justice, condemned by the public, rotting in a jail cell, and, worst of all, knowing that the women he spent so much time trying to convince that he was the perfect man are living their best lives without him. Although co-creator and showrunner Sera Gamble left the show in 2023, Michael Foley and Justin W. Lo, who took over for the fifth and final season, are both veterans: Foley has been in the writers room since the first episode, and Lo joined with Season 2, which is also when a show that had been canceled at Lifetime blossomed into a Netflix sensation. Season 5 finds Joe back where he started, in a sense, running a Manhattan bookstore whose basement houses the transparent cage in which he has imprisoned many a victim. But this time, he’s the husband of Kate, a wealthy British socialite, and the proud father of a young boy. Unfortunately, being a kept man doesn’t match Joe’s sense of self-importance, and he starts to fixate on yet another apparently vulnerable woman, an aspiring novelist named Bronte whom he finds squatting in his office one night. Viewers who’ve been watching Joe beguile and manipulate his victims since the beginning can see where this is headed, and they’re meant to, but Bronte isn’t what she seems—that’s not even her name—and Joe is in much deeper than he realizes and less capable of pulling the wool over people’s eyes than he’s ever been. As Kate struggles for control of the family fortune with her twin sisters Maddie and Reagan—both played, with delight and delirium, by Anna Camp—Joe tries to put his thumb on the scale, and pretty soon he’s back to his old homicidal tricks.
That’s just the beginning of Joe’s downfall, which, when it finally arrives, is as fitting and as final as any fan of the show could hope. Slate talked to Foley, who also co-wrote You’s final episode, about how the writers decided to seal Joe’s fate, and how they turned a series that has always played with its audiences’ affections into a damning, delectable condemnation of voyeuristic violence and toxic tropes. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Sam Adams: We’ll get to the ending of You in a minute, but I wanted to start with two words: Anna Camp. Her performances as Reagan and Maddie are such a delight, and she nails the tone of the show from the second she appears on screen. How did that all come together?
Michael Foley: The secondary characters in our show are often slightly outlandish. It’s almost as if you have to make them bigger, louder, just to call attention beyond a character like Joe Goldberg. I’ve always, every season, had reservations about whether we’ve gone too broad, like with [Season 3’s] Sherry and Cary. But then those would end up being fan favorites, and favorites for me. Maddie and Reagan were every bit that. I was a bit nervous about having twins. You don’t want to slip into telenovela territory. But Anna handled that with aplomb. Episode 4 is her real pièce de résistance as far as I’m concerned.
The show lives in a very specific tonal world, where it’s black comedy with notes of horror and melodrama and, especially in the final season, a kind of metaliterary riffing where you have characters embodying tropes and commenting on the tropes they’re embodying. How do you get new performers to fit into that?
It’s such a hybrid of so many different types of shows that I feel like the ceiling is pretty high, because it is romantic comedy, it’s horror, it’s a thriller. In the case of Reagan and Maddie, Anna largely brought those characters to us, tonally. There was not much refining that we needed to do. I think there’s already baked into the core of our show this sort of lunacy, that this guy is claiming himself to be a feminist while he’s killing women, and we’re going to root for him to get the girl. That allows for a certain bandwidth throughout the show when it comes to these secondary characters.
The show also takes on a slightly different shape with every season, largely tailored around the identity of Joe’s latest obsession. So what made Madeline Brewer’s Bronte the right female lead for Season 5?
So here’s the thing: We were so insecure about the idea of starting a fifth season with Joe laying eyes on a new girl and the audience thinking, “We know what happens. He’s going to fall for her, she’s going to end up in a cage and then dead.” So much so that we were going to reveal the catfish element, the fact that she was onto Joe and had a secret agenda, at the end of the first episode. We were that nervous about the audience saying, “Been there, done that, don’t need to watch this season.” So that was going to be our way of saying to the audience, “No, there’s more to this. She’s coming to get Joe.”
“We would be saying to the audience, ‘This is what you’ve been rooting for since 2017. Are you sure about that?’ ”— Michael Foley
Fortunately, we had faith in drawing an interesting enough character that we didn’t give up the surprise until the midseason finale. And when it came to the creation of her character, the benefit of the fact that she was catfishing him was that she got to create the identity that he would most likely fall in love with. A wounded bird, a woman without purpose, a woman looking to figure out who she is: That’s all catnip for Joe Goldberg. We were in the writers room saying, “Let’s just have Joe fall in love with Joe.” So, a) she presents as a wounded bird, like the Beck of Season 1, and then b) let’s have her basically be Joe, and Joe’s such an egomaniac, of course he will fall in love with himself.
Sera Gamble has talked about how part of the initial pitch for You was that they would cyberstalk one of the executives in the room, to make the point about how much information about a person you can find online. But in the final season, it’s Bronte, or Louise, who’s been stalking Joe for years, along with the other people in her group of true-crime obsessives.
We had this idea all the way back while writing Season 3 of there being a podcast or a sort of a true-crime group, somebody catching on to Joe. It never quite fit, but we’re really happy that we saved our bullets for the final season, because when it was time to draw up a season about Joe getting his comeuppance, it helped that they would be the engine of that.
In addition to being a kind of egomaniacal reflection of Joe himself, Bronte seems, to an extent, the closest thing to a character on You who would be a big fan of You.
That’s well said. Our idea is that she was going to be an avatar for all of us. We wanted her to fall in love with Joe, just as we all have, and then show him at his most horrific, so she would ultimately see him for the monster he is. Our goal was to have her splash the cold water on all of us, and we would be saying to the audience, “Hey, this is what you’ve been cosigning. This is what you’ve been rooting for since 2017. Are you sure about that?”
Penn Badgley has talked about being unnerved, especially early on, by how much viewers seemed to like Joe, and about how he pushed back against that harder in each successive season. The show, and certainly this final season, definitely encourages us to question why and what we’ve been watching. Have you had moments in the writers room where you’re like, “What exactly are we doing here?”
I mean, the entire time. Season 1, we were really unsettled, sort of putting up guardrails so that we could sleep at night. It’s two sides of the same coin, right? We have to see exactly what he is and understand what he is in this writers room. And yet we want people to fall in love with him, and also see how far we can push in terms of the fact that we’re all coded to root for love. We want to see it realized, not just in film and TV, but in our own lives, so badly that we’ll give a pass to somebody who will kill in trying to love and be loved.
I saw one interview where Penn is asked how he feels about being “TV’s sexiest serial killer.”
Penn was always policing, I would say, to make sure that we didn’t lose our way and create a character we empathize with or sympathize with. This is a character we didn’t want to diagnose, even, because as soon as we do that, you invite empathy. When it came to not only the final season, but the finale, the point he kept hammering home was, “I need Joe to be as awful as possible.” It’s almost like he saw his last opportunity to wake up the very last of us to what we’ve been watching and rooting for.
You’ve been with You since the beginning, but this final season is your first as co-showrunner, after former showrunner and co-creator Sera Gamble left to concentrate on other projects. How much of the plan for Season 5 was in place at the end of Season 4, or before that?
I would say as early as Season 2, it was [co-creator] Greg Berlanti who, just as we were starting to really pop on Netflix, was able to say, “In success, it would be great if we went five seasons, and it would also be great if we can get Joe back home to New York.” As we were working through Season 3, Season 4, that started to look more like a possibility. So early on we knew we’re going to get back to New York, we’re going to end in five. Even if we’re given the opportunity to do more than that, let’s not overstay our welcome.
“We wanted to push the boundaries and see how far we could go with it. And the answer was: People will go all the way. They’ll go as far as Joe will go.”— Michael Foley
We already knew that that the final season was going to be asking, what does Joe deserve? Justin and I, the conversation with Greg Berlanti and Sera Gamble before we even opened the writers room, was, “It’s going to be the end for Joe. He’s going to get his comeuppance. We’re not willing to redeem him. He’s going to face those whose lives he ruined, and we’re going to do our damnedest to make him face himself.” So it really just became about how we were going to get there. You start working with the Louise character, the Bronte character, and the Reddit group and the true-crime group, and that’s going to get us to Joe being exposed for what he is. Then it’s a matter of figuring out who’s going to come back into the show, who are going to be the people to condemn him, like Marienne, like Nadia.
And then the other part that was late to take shape was just, is it going to be capture? Is it going to be death? If it’s capture, by whom? Is it the authorities or someone else? If it’s death, is it going to be by the loved one of a victim? Is it going to be by Bronte? Those questions were answered pretty late in the game, but we knew where we were going the whole time.
In addition to the overarching themes about love and obsession, the show also has this satirical element, where you’ve sent up a different social stratum every time: the literary scene of Season 1, the wellness influencers of Season 3, the pampered aristocrats of Season 4. What were the thoughts as far as what you wanted to take on in Season 5?
Well, what was new about this was that the world that Joe was skewering was something that he was now going to be a part of, and his hypocrisy would reach new heights, because he would be in a tuxedo at the party and getting out of the Escalade onto the red carpet, and therefore his contempt would be coming from a much closer place. We were spending a little less time exploring that world than with the tech bros and the biohacking optimizers of Madre Linda, because we had work to do in terms of the true-crime group, in terms of the love story, in terms of the dissolution of his marriage with Kate, in terms of fatherhood, and then the whole back half of the season with the walls closing in. So we had a little less room for “let’s skewer this,” “let’s skewer that.” But inevitably it was the fact that Joe was finally part of the 1 percent, and he’s trying to separate himself from something that is very much himself.
You do have this gap between Joe and Bronte that feels both gendered and generational, where they’re both, broadly speaking, into literature, but he’s all about the Great Books, and she’s unashamed to just say, “I write dark romance.” She’s self-aware about storytelling conventions even as she and Joe are doing enemies-to-lovers in real life, and even once we discover she’s been playing a part, it’s not clear what’s real for her. To an extent, that’s what the show has always been about: Joe is quite explicitly a man who believes he’s living out one kind of story, while actually embodying a very different one.
I mean, we were deliberately unsubtle about that, especially as far as his aspirations to write and his love of romantasy and the vampire business and whatnot.
There are, in a sense, two mysteries that the final season solves. One is: What happened to Guinevere Beck? And the other is: What is Joe’s writing actually like? In a way it’s a greater humiliation than having his lies exposed or even having his penis shot off to reveal that what he’s been working on this whole time is an erotic vampire novel that is, for him, literally masturbatory.
Oh, a hundred percent. Very deliberate. He could consider himself a budding Fitzgerald or Faulkner, but at the end of the day, we couldn’t give him that. And we also wanted to protect The Dark Face of Love and Beck’s fledgling writing aspirations, in terms of just having more integrity, if you will.
It plays as more of an ironic twist at the end of the first season when Joe completes Beck’s unfinished manuscript and it goes on to become a bestseller. But the final season really underlines what a violation that was, that he not only killed her but took it upon himself to rewrite her work, to “fix” it.
That was really important for us, not just that Louise calls Joe out to make him see himself, but it’s also giving a gift to Beck, giving her back what Joe stole from her. It was important for us at the end of the finale, with the idea of Louise/Bronte as an avatar for women, to say, “My story is not to be written by Joe Goldberg. My identity is not to be defined by Joe Goldberg. I’m going forth into the world and I’ll figure it out for myself.”
She literally supplants him as the voice of the narrator.
Yes, yes, yes. In fact, in the initial talks, we were thinking, the show has to end with her voice, because Joe’s voice is dead. But then once we got to it, we felt we need to hear from him, and we need him to be, of course, not holding himself accountable and blaming everyone else.
And yet, even in Bronte and Joe’s final confrontation, there’s still a pull that Bronte feels, if not to love Joe, at least to feel for him.
“It was time to show the violence, show him at his worst.”— Michael Foley
It’s funny, having been there on set when that was filmed. This is the moment where she’s saying, “You don’t get to be a dad. You don’t get to have me. You can’t have any of this. You’re a fucking murderer, Joe.” It’s the good guy saying to the bad guy, “Game’s up.” And you know what? There’s a part of me standing there on set, like, “Yeah, but it’s fucking Joe.” You just look at him and you still want the best for him. You want to see them talk through it, work it out. The ensuing moment in the woods, that is supposed to be the moment that perhaps we can cut the cord, but you feel it, right? She’s saying it very plaintively, “I’m not supposed to feel this way about you.” That’s really shining a light on our entire viewing experience. We’re not supposed to love a guy that fucking kills like this. Right?
Bronte sums it up when she says, “The fantasy of a man like you is how we cope with the reality of a man like you,” which is really a mission statement for the entire show. This isn’t a crime procedural about why the bad man does what he does. It’s about why we’re interested in knowing that. When did that formulation of that idea come into focus?
That was over the course of the season, if not the series. That was just an idea that we had come to, and it just felt right to state it plainly in the very end, that perhaps we wouldn’t be going too far in terms of hitting the nail a little bit on the head. We just felt like, maybe that’s what it’ll take. We’re coded to want a certain kind of romantic resolution so badly that we can watch this guy kill in the name of it and somehow lose our objectivity. We wanted to push the boundaries, use that as our operating principle, and see how far we could go with it. And the answer was like, Oh, people will go all the way with you. They’ll go as far as Joe will go.
Bronte wins that confrontation with Joe, and you follow it with a montage that essentially gives all of the story’s other characters a happy ending: Kate turns her family’s predatory corporation into a benevolent nonprofit, Nadia publishes her book, Marienne becomes a successful painter, and Beck’s original version of The Dark Face of Love becomes an even bigger hit than the one Joe completed. You left some of the characters in a place where that seemed pretty implausible—Kate should have died in the basement fire, and it sure looked like Joe drowned Bronte—but it’s as if Bronte, or Louise, has taken over, and she’s going to write the ending she wants to read.
We’ve been asked about Kate living, because historically, on the show, Kate would’ve died. But we felt like she had absolved herself by being willing to go back down to the basement and die with Joe, and didn’t think it was necessarily a value add to just add another number to our body count. So yeah, funny enough, in the darkness there is some wish fulfillment.
You has always been a show about a man who murders women, often quite brutally, but Sera Gamble talked from the beginning about how the show was going to make you feel those consequences without lingering on the violence itself. The final fight between Joe and Bronte gets quite physical, but you show it almost as a series of snapshots, so you’re not allowed to savor the spectacle of her fighting for her life.
And yet, despite the style with which we filmed that fight, there’s a punch in there. And also the strangling on the lawn. That’s all very intentional, after four and a half seasons of cutting away from his violence against women. Our conversations with Penn were about, let’s finally go there with him. It’s also why he’s down to his boxer shorts. It’s why he’s covered in blood. Let’s go as monstrous, as animalistic as possible. Let’s finally see the violence against a woman. If we saw that earlier in the series, perhaps we would’ve lost the viewers. Right? That’s part of walking that tightrope. It’s letting us go, “Oh, but he’s charming. Oh, but it’s Joe.” “Oh, but,” right? You can’t really pull that off when you’re seeing him chop up Beck and put her into a meat grinder. You can see it when he puts Jasper, this secondary or tertiary character, into a meat grinder, but you can’t do it with the women and continue to walk that tightrope. That walk was over in the finale. It was time to show the violence, show him at his worst.
So everything ends happily, or as happily as possible, for the show’s female characters. But we’re not done yet. We go back to Joe and his voice-over, and even in prison, he’s still getting letters from women who have fantasies about him. So he decides, once again, that he’s the real victim, a product of a sick society—and what better evidence is there of our morbid attraction to murderous men than the fact that this show ran for five seasons? “Maybe the problem isn’t me,” Joe concludes, and stares straight into the lens. “Maybe it’s you.”
It’s such a perfect final note for the series—a condemnation of the audience that’s also Joe’s last-ditch attempt at manipulating the only people who are still listening to him—that it feels like it could only have ended this way. But as you said, when you started writing the final season, everything was up for grabs. How did you end up there?
We actually did a fun thing as we were nearing the point where we needed to make the decision. One of our writers, Neil Reynolds, said, “Let’s try an exercise where everybody takes a half a day, a day, whatever it is, and really thinks about what they alone would do with this show in terms of the final beat.” And everybody would get to come in and say their piece, whether that took five or 45 minutes. Nobody talks, nobody weighs in, nobody responds. We just go writer by writer, and then we go home and we sleep on it. There were tears in the writers room. There were a lot of women speaking about what they’ve endured in terms of violence, or what they’ve witnessed in terms of violence, and all of us talking about the need to be loved and the want to be loved, and how Joe has sat with us all these years.
It was an intense couple of days in the writers room. And out of that came a majority decision that Joe should live, because death is too easy. Some of this was coming out in the wake of Jeffrey Epstein, and it just felt like we wanted Joe to live without his freedom, and he wouldn’t suffer if he was dead. We needed him to suffer alone. And then it was Greg Berlanti who had the idea, “Let’s shoot him in the dick.”
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