Season 5 of You kicks off with an eerie smirk in "The Luckiest Guy in NY," a return-to-roots premiere that doubles as a chilling reminder: no matter how much Joe Goldberg tries to outrun himself, the cage is always waiting.
Three years have passed since Joe (Penn Badgley) escaped the bloody wreckage of his London misadventures. Now, he's rich, rebranded, and back where it all began: New York City. Mooney's Bookstore is on the market, he’s in the tabloids thanks to his marriage to British heiress and corporate queen Kate Lockwood-Goldberg (Charlotte Ritchie), and—perhaps most importantly—he has custody of his son, Henry. On paper, Joe finally has it all. But You has never been about what’s on paper.
What’s impressive about this premiere is how it balances familiar elements with fresh tension. Joe narrates with his usual sardonic poetry, but there’s a jitter in his cadence now, a sense that the cracks are already spiderwebbing beneath the surface. It’s not long before the dark currents swirl.
Enter Teddy (Griffin Matthews), Joe’s brother-in-law, Lockwood-adjacent and deeply underappreciated. He tips Joe off to an incoming PR disaster: a hit piece is about to drop, threatening to expose Kate’s less-than-saintly past business deals. Naturally, Joe plays fixer, suspecting cutthroat CFO Raegan Lockwood (Anna Camp, razor-sharp) of being the mastermind. But this is You, and everyone is suspect. Especially when they’re family.
Raegan, who exudes ruthless ambition in every frame, denies it. But Joe digs deeper and learns she’s not working alone. She’s teaming up with Maddie Lockwood (also Anna Camp, this time with a martini glass and a smile full of knives) and Kate’s former mentor Bob (Stephen Kunken), a powerful corporate figure with the dead-eyed charm of a man who’s never heard the word "consequences."
Joe, of course, does what Joe does best: he spirals. He fantasizes about killing Bob, writes it down in his apartment above Mooney’s out of sheer compulsion, and is immediately caught in the act by Kate. It’s a surprisingly raw moment between them, one that teases a major tension to come. Kate wants to believe he’s changed. Joe, deep down, knows he hasn’t.
Later, when Kate confronts Bob, he confesses. Not only did he leak the story, but he threatens to unearth the darker secret: her complicity in the cover-up of Rhys Montrose’s death. This is Joe's breaking point. That night, he murders Bob, frames it as a suicide, and resets the narrative.
The ease with which he slips back into old habits is the point. The glamour, the wealth, the marriage—it was all scaffolding. Beneath it, the same old Joe is waiting, knife in hand.
But then comes Bronte (Madeline Brewer), a free-spirited playwright who’s been borrowing books from Mooney’s and gives Joe a whiff of something he can’t quite name: intrigue? Hope? Obsession? Whatever it is, it’s enough for him to offer her a job. Brewer brings an off-kilter energy to the role, suggesting there’s far more to her than meets the eye. She’s not just a new face; she’s a wildcard.
The final scene is pure You: Joe descends into the basement beneath Mooney’s, and there it is. The cage. Restored. Waiting. No matter how much the world around him changes, Joe will always come back to this. To the box. To control.
"The Luckiest Guy in NY" is a strong, stylish premiere. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it doesn’t need to. It sharpens it. The script is tight, the direction sleek, and the performances locked in. Badgley remains magnetic, a man constantly at war with the version of himself he wants to be and the one the world keeps bringing out. Ritchie plays Kate with a brittleness that threatens to snap, and Anna Camp is having a blast playing both ends of the Lockwood chaos spectrum.
What this premiere gets right is that it doesn’t rush. It sets the board, introduces the players, and lets the tension simmer. There’s no question Joe is going to fall again. The only question is who he’ll take down with him.
You may be back in New York, but Joe’s story is far from a homecoming. If anything, it feels like a reckoning. And if this opener is any indication, Season 5 isn’t just about finishing Joe’s story. It’s about making him look in the mirror while it happens.
And we’ll be watching, trapped in the cage with him, one episode at a time.
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