Near the end, she issued this directive: “This is a united challenge to everyone in this room: Tell a new story. This is the kind of gratuitous shit that made me quit The Handmaid’s Tale.ĭid any of you watch Natalie Portman’s speech at Variety’s Power of Women event? You should! It’s worth 15 minutes of your life. But we don’t get anything narratively meaningful out of watching Beck plead for her freedom and her life, over and over again, to no avail. I studied and ranked all the most horrifying moments on the most gruesome season of The Americans, and they were graphic. Was it necessary - was it even remotely good television - for an entire episode to be devoted to Beck’s being psychologically tortured until she gets killed? Look, my threshold for torture on television is pretty high. There is nothing edgy or original about a beautiful blonde’s being trapped in a cage of her bad boyfriend’s making, begging to be set free, and then, just as she’s close to freedom, getting murdered by him instead. But a story that gives a violent male character a full, complicated history (or, I should say, attempts to do that) while never revealing more about its female character beyond what said male character can discern and/or chooses to project onto her is not subversive, at all. It feels like You wants to be edgy and subversive. I am (almost) out of stairwell urchin jokes! For this and for so many of my ills, I blame society. But knowing now what it all builds up to - what it does and what it fails to do - I am reevaluating. I am surprised at how angry I got watching this last hour of the season, having viewed the previous nine episodes with the kind of lol, okay remove a series this crazy and ridiculous seemed to call for. There’s never really a good time to make a TV show that essentially says, “This abusive man has a backstory worth considering, but his female victim amounts to little more than a plot device in his demise.” But this year of our never-ending nightmare, 2018, brought to you by 4chan, is an especially gross time for this sort of thing. At its core, it is as toxic as the masculinity it purports to be taking down. It brings me no joy to tell you that after having given it more thought than I ever planned on giving this series, I am convinced that You wasn’t just the harmless-but-ridiculous semi-escapist fare I was expecting. And on our way to what felt like an inevitable conclusion, we got what turned out to be a totally muddled and sloppy treatise on violent men, the ways social media renders us basically helpless against those who would use it to do us harm, and how everything you think is romantic is actually creepy as hell. Isn’t that always how it goes? Remember, we are watching Lifetime.
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