‘You’ creator hints at what’s next for Season 5 of Netflix hit

The hit Netflix series “You” starring Penn Badgley has ended its fourth season, and although there’s no Season 5 renewal yet, creator Sera Gamble said that she’s planned Joe’s future.   

The following contains spoilers for the end of “You” Season 4. 

“There certainly could be more,” Gamble, 39, told The Post. “We have an idea for what happens next. But, we hope for the best and prepare for the worst. I feel like if your show hasn’t been picked up and you write a season finale that’s only satisfying if it’s a cliffhanger – and we’ll tell you what happens on the other side – it’s tempting the gods to cancel you.”

The thriller follows Joe (Penn Bagley), an obsessive stalker / serial killer who thinks of himself as a sophisticated romantic. Each season shows him relocating to a new city, becoming obsessed with a new woman, and ingratiating himself into a new circle of (obnoxious) friends, before the show veers into death and destruction. Season 4, which was split into two parts (both now streaming) followed Joe as he moved to London, posed as a professor, got himself into a friend group of posh Brits, and then bodies started falling.

The season ends by revealing that one of Joe’s new acquaintances, fellow killer Rhys (Ed Speelers) has been dead for a while, and when Joe continued spending time with him, that version of Rhys was simply in Joe’s mind. 

“The day we started talking about this, I walked into the writers’ room like, ‘We’re gonna do ‘Fight Club.’ It’s how we talked about it in the writers room,” said Gamble.

“We came from the perspective of Joe as a character becoming increasingly unhinged. The idea was that he would eventually reach a point where he couldn’t really lie to himself anymore. So, the part of him that needed to continue to behave like that in the world would just split off entirely, and just stop bothering the nice part of Joe with the details of it, so that Joe could go on believing that he was a good man.” 

The finale ended with Joe back in New York City, now famous and rich, with a wealthy new girlfriend, Kate (Charlotte Ritchie). Gamble said that if there is a Season 5, it will pick up from there. 

“We really like the idea of Joe coming full circle to New York, but being in such a different position – being among the people he was judging as a Brooklyn boy in Season 1, and having unlimited resources, but also having lost the anonymity that helped him get away with everything he got away with the last time that he was in New York.” 

Penn Badgley also recently made headlines for voicing his desire to have fewer sex scenes in the show. Gamble said that didn’t impact the story. 

“The conversation that he and I had was very much about what we were asking him to do as a performer, and physically what the script was demanding of him, in terms of contact with other people. And that is a fundamentally technical thing to address. There was no part of the conversation that was about rewriting the kind of show we were making. Penn and I  remained on the same page about that.

“But, when it comes to making sure that every person who is working on a show is heard about something as basic as consent to touch another person…that’s something where my job is simply to hear what he’s saying, what he needs, and to talk him through it to come back and what we can do to try to help with it.”