May December (2024)

From the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/movies/may-december-review-natalie-portman-julianne-moore.html




By Manohla Dargis

Published Nov. 30, 2023


Much of Todd Haynes’s sly, unnerving “May December” takes place in and around a picture-perfect home, that favorite movieland setting for American dreams turned nightmares. This one comes wrapped in a dappled, hazy light that blunts hard lines and brightens every face, so much so that characters sometimes look lit from within. Even the evening has an inviting velvetiness, as if all of life’s shadows have been banished. In characteristic Haynes fashion, though, nothing is as it first seems in this shimmering Gothic, including the light that becomes more like a queasy, suffocating miasma.

“May December” is the story of two women and their worlds of lies. They meet when a TV actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), visits Gracie (Julianne Moore), the inspiration for her next role. Gracie lives in a large waterfront house in Savannah with her husband, Joe (Charles Melton), their teenage twins and two Irish setters. They have another kid in college, jobs they seem to enjoy and a complicated history that’s summed up by the box Elizabeth finds at their front door, and which Gracie opens with a shrug of familiarity. It’s feces, she explains coolly, and this isn’t the first such package.

That box is a blunt metaphor for the ugliness at the core of “May December” — years ago, Gracie became tabloid fodder after she was caught having sex with Joe when he was in seventh grade — a setup that Haynes brilliantly complicates with his three knockout leads, great narrative dexterity and shocks of destabilizing humor that ease you into the story. The first time I watched the movie, I almost clapped my hand over my mouth during one absurd moment, unsure if I was supposed to be laughing this hard. Of course I was: Haynes is having fun, at least for a while, partly to play with our expectations about where the movie is headed.

A progenitor of the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, Haynes likes to dig into that space between the world that exists (or we believe exists) and the world of appearances. He’s a virtuoso of paradoxes. That partly explains why he’s drawn to the woman’s film, with its focus on ordinary life, its domestic spaces, moral quandaries, political dimensions and tears. These films evoke what the critic Molly Haskell once described as “wet, wasted afternoons” and reveal what lies “beneath the sunny-side-up philosophy congealed in the happy ending.” She might as well have been talking about this movie.

Written by Samy Burch — it’s her first produced screenplay — “May December” is a woman’s picture in a distinctly Haynesian key. As he has in some of his earlier films (“Far From Heaven,” “Carol”), Haynes at once embraces and toys with genre conventions. He uses beautiful images (and people), bursts of lush music, pointed metaphors and floods of feeling to provide the familiar pleasures of a well-told, absorbing narrative film, even as he picks it apart at the seams. This can create an uneasy dissonance, and there are instances when it seems as if you’re watching two overlaid movies: the original and its critique, a doubling that works nicely in “May December,” which soon becomes a labyrinthine hall of mirrors.

Gracie’s character is loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who in 1997 was arrested for having sex with one of her sixth-grade students, abuse that started when he was 12. She pleaded guilty to child rape and eventually served time in prison, where she gave birth to their first two children. (They later married.) The case generated a predictable tsunami of grotesque media slavering and found putatively serious journalists referring (and continuing to refer) to the sexual assault as a “tryst” and “forbidden love,” language that prettied up the crime as a passionate romance.

Gracie rationalizes her relationship with Joe on her own terms, which emerge as Elizabeth gathers intel. As Elizabeth plays detective — she scans old tabloids, interviews family and friends — she helpfully establishes the back story. Gracie isn’t a teacher, and she and Joe met in a pet store, a seemingly incidental detail that takes on poignantly metaphoric resonance as the story unfolds. At one point, Elizabeth also accompanies Gracie and her daughter Mary (Elizabeth Yu) on a shopping trip. When the girl tries on a sleeveless dress, Gracie tells Mary she’s “brave” for baring her arms and not caring about “unrealistic beauty standards.” Mary looks crushed, Gracie oblivious and Elizabeth a bit stunned but oh-so fascinated.

At this stage in her process, Elizabeth has begun to imitate Gracie’s gestures and expressions, a turn that Haynes expresses in the tricky shot that opens the shopping scene. As Mary tries on dresses, the women sit side-by-side facing the camera, two mirrors flanking them like drawn curtains. Because of the angles of the mirror, Elizabeth looks as if she’s seated between Gracie and Gracie’s reflection. It takes a beat to read the image and figure out why there are two Gracies, although as Elizabeth slips into character, suddenly there are three.

Moore and Portman’s synced performances give the movie much of its weird comedy. Elizabeth guides you into the story, and you’re tagging along when she pulls up to her Savannah digs and later to Gracie and Joe’s home. Portman gives Elizabeth the studied agreeability of someone who has to work to present a friendly front, an effort that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever interviewed a bored film star. Elizabeth is quick to smile, but Portman shows you the character’s brittle affect, so that you see the flickers of hesitation in her eyes and twitches around her mouth. Mostly, you see that Elizabeth isn’t a very good actress. (Presumably that’s why when she tries out Gracie’s lisping voice, she evokes Madeline Kahn.)

Gracie doesn’t need to put up a false front because her existence is nothing but a fully committed, melodramatically rich performance that Moore supplely delivers with alternating eerie calm and impressive histrionic mewling and caterwauling. Gracie has embraced her roles as a loving wife and doting mother, and seems to be living in a profound state of denial about what these roles have cost her husband and children, a lack of understanding (and remorse) that establishes the story’s inaugural moral crisis. It’s not at all clear, at first, if Gracie is lying to herself, blissfully self-unaware or just another garden-variety sociopath playing at the American dream, uncertainty that gives the story a frisson of mystery.

Gracie and Elizabeth dominate the first half of “May December.” Then, almost imperceptibly, the focus shifts to Joe, and the story grows ever more serious, heavy and very, very sad. Moore and Portman are tremendous, but it’s Melton’s anguished performance that gives the movie its slow-building emotional power. A stunted man-child with a hulking, ponderous body, Joe too has multiple roles as a father and husband, an object of desire and exoticized other. Yet none fit as persuasively, and he’s most at ease in the scenes of him with the Monarch butterflies he raises in little cages. It’s a sweet pastime and a potentially blunt metaphor, one that Haynes handles with enormous, moving delicacy, never more so than when these beautiful creatures emerge from their chrysalises and Joe tenderly watches them take flight.

All The Light We Cannot See

From Variety: https://variety.com/2023/tv/tv-reviews/all-the-light-we-cannot-see-review-1235762557/

All The Light We Cannot See

By Alison Herman






“All the Light We Cannot See” is not, in the strictest sense, a comfort watch. Like the Pulitzer Prize-winning Anthony Doerr novel on which it’s based, the four-episode limited series takes place in a walled city under siege by a bombing campaign, its trapped civilians unable to evacuate — hardly a relaxing break from today’s headlines. But the Netflix show is, in a way, a return to simpler times.

This particular walled city is located in Nazi-occupied France, on the verge of American liberation in August 1944. As written, “All the Light We Cannot See” is already set amid a conflict that’s far closer to good versus evil than most armed struggles. (This is one explanation for the enduring popularity of World War II stories, even as the period slowly passes from living memory.) As adapted by screenwriter Steven Knight (“Peaky Blinders”) and director Shawn Levy (“Stranger Things,” “Free Guy”), the series leans into sentiment and moral simplicity. Knight and Levy aim for an uplifting, inspirational tale of connection that transcends division, distance and prejudice, but instead deliver a flat, jumbled story that lacks the desired effect.

Most of “All the Light We Cannot See” unfolds in the story’s present tense, as residents of the Bretonese town of Saint-Malo await the imminent arrival of American forces. Marie (Aria Mia Loberti), a young blind woman, sends illicit radio broadcasts from her attic; Werner (Louis Hofmann), a German soldier and radio tech, listens rapt until his superiors order him to track Marie down. But sporadic flashbacks tell us how each character found themselves in the seaside hamlet. Marie and her father Daniel (Mark Ruffalo), a locksmith at a museum, fled Paris to seek shelter with her great uncle Etienne (Hugh Laurie) — and hide a potentially cursed diamond called the Sea of Flames that Daniel smuggled out of his workplace. Werner grew up in an orphanage, listening to scientific lectures on the same radio frequency where Marie now reads excerpts of Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” His skill with radio earned Werner a place in an elite Nazi training school, separating him from his sister Jutta (Luna Wedler).

There’s a romantic tone to this story that borders on fairy tale-like fantasy, with Marie locked in an attic á la Rapunzel and a wicked jeweler-turned-Gestapo-officer (Lars Eidinger) on the hunt for a magical gem. “All the Light We Cannot See” can seem arbitrary in where it chooses to impose realism on this quasi-mythical story of two soulmates quite literally on the same wavelength. Both Loberti and Nell Sutton, the actor who plays Marie as a child, are visually impaired, a casting strategy Levy has championed for both “representation” and “authenticity.” Much of the series was also filmed on location in France. On the other hand, the dialogue is entirely in English; the French characters sound British, while the German ones have a noticeable accent while never actually speaking German (though they’re played by German actors). It’s a bizarre choice coming from Netflix, a platform that’s now synonymous with international hits that transcend borders and language barriers. An English-language show allows the participation of recognizable stars like Ruffalo and Laurie — but no “Squid Game” actor was widely known outside South Korea before that show became a record-breaking smash. A more comparable success might be “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Netflix’s German war film that became a major Oscar contender last year.



The confusion only compounds in how Knight has chosen to structure the story. To be fair, chronology is the greatest challenge in adapting “All the Light We Cannot See,” which hopscotches through time as Werner and Marie reflect on their lives in a moment of acute peril. Yet the show rushes some reveals before it’s had time to build up any suspense, and clumsily explains what it’s about to more effectively show. Etienne, for example, is traumatized by World War I and has spent decades holed up in his house, communicating with the outside world only through his radio. Before we even learn this, though, we’ve already seen him running around Saint-Malo as an agent of the French Resistance. This creates some tension around how the recluse got from Point A to Point B, but kills any catharsis when he finally resolves to go outside. For his part, Werner doesn’t just mention his harrowing time at school; he describes it in detail before several scenes set there make the description redundant.

A more substantial change is in how “All the Light We Cannot See” depicts, or doesn’t, the nuance of growing up in a fascist state. The symbolism of Marie’s condition is straightforward and left largely intact from the book: she’s both part of a population threatened by Nazi ideas of genetic purity and in tune with deeper truths than skin-deep appearance. But Werner has a more complex journey marked by moral, rather than physical, challenge. In Doerr’s telling, the German boy is conscious of the gains in quality of life the Nazi regime initially brought, and is excited to escape the coal mines of his hometown for a better opportunity. It’s only gradually, and through the access to other cultures and ideas the radio affords, that Werner unlearns the state propaganda he’s been steeped in for years.

On television, however, that inner evolution becomes external stasis. Werner is always pure and decent, while every Nazi adult he encounters is a menacing cartoon. (This evil, at least, is never banal.) “I have done bad things,” he admits as an adult, but we never witness any or hear them outlined in detail. Even Werner’s earliest brushes with the authorities happen under extreme duress; a Third Reich official demands he fix a radio at gunpoint, a successful effort that gets him shipped off to school. Because Werner isn’t under the Nazis’ sway to begin with, he never experiences an epiphany about the humanity of others — itself a cliché, but at least one that involves dynamic characters.

This doesn’t mean “All the Light We Cannot See” is wary of cliché elsewhere. Nazis “hate anyone who’s different,” Marie helpfully points out; “I will never give up hope,” another character vows. Such stirring rhetoric fails to make an impact. At four hours, “All the Light We Cannot See” is just barely longer than the feature film it nearly became when producer Scott Rudin first optioned the rights. A more extended story may have enriched its protagonists beyond figureheads for innocence, integrity or loving parenthood. In its current form, “All the Light We Cannot See” calls on viewers to acknowledge the complex humanity of others while failing to depict much itself.

from the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/05/movies/film-she-s-having-a-baby-from-john-hughes.html

She’s Having A Baby (1988)

FOR John Hughes's Ferris Bueller, it was only a day off; for his Jefferson (Jake) Briggs, it may be an entire life. In the first scene of ''She's Having a Baby,'' which opens today at the Paramount and other theaters, Jake is seen marrying a woman he can barely stand, and this is only the beginning of his half-heartedness and disenchantment. He takes a dismal job in advertising. He moves to a sterile suburb. He winces at his wife's cooking. Jake seems bored with his entire existence, and as such he may be an even less sympathetic character than his teen-age antecedent.

''She's Having a Baby'' is supposed to be about how Jake changes, but there's nothing in the first 98 percent of the film to indicate he's even capable of that. This character is shallow, smug and lazy, which is not to say Mr. Hughes can't make such qualities amusing; in the past, he has. But in this film's case, misanthropy in general and misogyny in particular are greater problems. Even when Jake, imagining his wife at death's door, is finally prompted to have some nice thoughts about her, there's no changing the fact that he hates his house, neighbors, job, in-laws and everything else about his life.

Kevin Bacon is likable even when Jake is not, which is most of the time. But Elizabeth McGovern has a dreadful role that seems fatuous even by the standards of the 1950's, which is where this film's sense of social satire lies. (There is actually a fantasy sequence in which men with lawnmowers and women carrying trays of drinks do a little mock-suburban dance around the lawn sprinklers.) As Jake's wife, Kristy, Miss McGovern is made to seem a sexless, listless drone, an embodiment of domesticity at its most life-denying. However, while the film throws other women at Jake (most notably a fantasy creature with a European accent), it doesn't have the nerve to give him any more libido than his wife has.

Aiming at a target as easy as suburban sterility, ''She's Having a Baby'' might be expected to hit its mark every now and then. But the film's mood is simply too sour, despite the best efforts of a cast filled with appealing actors, a number of whom have had walk-ons in other Hughes efforts. Another modest plus is the pop-music soundtrack, which is as lighthearted as the comedy is leaden. When Jake and his wife have fertility problems and Kristy insists they take a more scientific approach to sex, Sam Cooke's ''Chain Gang'' is heard in the background.

''She's Having a Baby'' is rated PG-13 (''Special Parental Guidance Suggested for Those Younger Than 13''). It includes some sexual references and strong language. Mating Rituals SHE'S HAVING A BABY, directed, written and produced by John Hughes; director of photography, Don Peterman; music by Stewart Copeland; production designer, John Corso; released by Paramount Pictures. At Guild 50th Street, 33 West 50th Street; Paramount, 61st Street and Broadway; New York Twin, Second Avenue and 66th Street; 34th Street Showplace, between Second and Third Avenues. Running time: 106 minutes. This film is rated PG-13. Jake Briggs... Kevin Bacon Kristy Briggs... Elizabeth McGovern Russ Bainbridge... William Windom Jim Briggs... James Ray Sarah Briggs... Holland Taylor

Under The Banner of Heaven (series)

from Roger Ebert: https://www.rogerebert.com/streaming/under-the-banner-of-heaven-fx-hulu-tv-review-2022

Under The Banner of Heaven

FX's Under the Banner of Heaven is a Shocking, Fascinating Investigation of Faith
Nick Allen April 28, 2022

Based on the novel by Jon Krakauer and created by Dustin Lance Black, the FX series “Under the Banner of Heaven” concerns a grisly murder in an unlikely place—a heavily Mormon community in Utah, where a cop like Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield) says that everyone leaves their doors unlocked. Pyre is one of many devout followers to the visions and whims of Mormonism founder Joseph Smith, which has since fostered tight-knit, wholesome, peaceful, but silencing places like Pyre’s.

The message of Joseph Smith has different meaning to the members of the Lafferty family, whose story turns Black’s series into much more than an in-depth murder investigation, but an American saga of faith, gender roles, and radicalism. Known locally as the Kennedys of Utah, the Laffertys are initially shown as a high-energy, eclectic bunch under the imposing patriarch Ammon (Christopher Heyerdahl), who leads his sons with a tight fist that sometimes has a whipping belt: Ron (Sam Worthington), Dan (Wyatt Russell), Jacob (Taylor St. Pierre), Allen (Billy Howle), Robin (Seth Numrich), and Samuel (Rory Culkin). That masculine intensity is only masked so much when we first meet them, through the eyes of Brenda (Daisy Edgar-Jones), who married into the family via Allen. She is not too ready for the submissive roles that the Lafferty women (played by the likes of Britt Irvin, Chloe Pirrie, Megan Leitch, Michele Wienecke, Denise Gough) have more or less accepted. It’s a calm, outdoor lunch, and the pleasant setting contrasts with how uncomfortable it becomes: the harmonious nature of the Laffertys turns disquieting, and that's before one brother tells Brenda’s future husband Allen to “mind [his] property.”

In a gripping pilot episode, the present part of the timeline in the early 1980s is chaos. After showing up with blood all over his clothes at the crime scene where his wife Brenda and their 15-month-old baby have been brutally murdered, Allen is quickly taken into police custody. Allen becomes one of many messengers who clues us into the progressively sinister ways of the Laffertys, which started with espousing rebellious anti-government ideals to later preaching about polygamy and embracing fundamentalism. The roads within “Under the Banner of Heaven” are windy and ominous, and learning about former Mormon traditions like a “blood atonement” is just a piece of its shocking true story. 

As much as the series concerns the Lafferty family history, charting how their already conservative ways became even more toxic, much of it hinges on Garfield’s performance. He plays one of the most gentle, wholesome cops to have been in a true crime story—perhaps too soft, why is he in this business? But he’s able to talk the quiet talk, with Garfield’s soft voice given a great showcase as he learns more about other family men of his church. As more information comes to light, about the Laffertys but also the history of fundamental Mormonism, the story becomes all the more about him seeing the makings of his whole world perspective. It’s a personal case, with the show’s unique stakes being that of his belief in an institution he seems to have never questioned.

Garfield’s gentle nature brings us into this from the very beginning—the series’ handheld cinematography initially presents him playing with his two daughters on a sunny day. But then he’s called into work. With Jeff Ament’s building score prodding at the moment, we follow Pyre through a gruesome crime scene, noticing shot by shot the blood that has been scattered. Garfield's face and stillness give us a visceral sense of his dread, of having to approach a point of no return. He doesn’t want to know what horrifying sight is behind a bloodied door to a nursery, but he must confront it head on.

Using its nuanced emphasis on faith, “Under the Banner of Heaven” gradually depicts in extensive flashback how their ways became so monstrous. The performances, however, are sometimes too overzealous in their manic nature—like how Culkin transforms into complete mania and guttural scripture-spewing. (It doesn’t help that by design we don’t see until later the connective tissue of how these changes came to be until into later episodes.) And while Worthington is especially stiff in a role that also calls for him to be gradually monstrous, Wyatt Russell gives the standout performance here. He uses his salesman-ready warmth and sometimes cracking voice to illustrate the growth of thinking, from why he shouldn’t have to pay taxes, to why he should have multiple wives. Like his father, he can readily claim a challenge from Heavenly Father as just more fuel for his destructive fire.

“Under the Banner of Heaven” moves about its expansive story of toxic faith with the rhythm of a true-crime page-turner, thanks to its growing list of witnesses who provide more and more background, and its select moments of action. Courtney Hunt (“Frozen River”) has an assured touch for tense standoffs that end in revealing conversations, and David Mackenzie (“Hell or High Water”) adds fire to scenes that are largely built from police questioning, while creating a robust buddy cop chemistry between Garfield and Birmingham’s unamused, non-religious outsider Bill Taba. Meanwhile the plotting stays tight, motivated by a mystery about the possible suspects seen at Brenda and Allen’s home, along with the uncertainty of where certain Lafferty brothers have vanished to in the modern timeline. 

The series is so expansive that it even takes time to recount the history of Joseph Smith, his wife Emma, and the competing prophet Brigham Young, which is told in sizable snippets throughout. Used to complement what the Laffertys have come to believe, these reflections can feel more sinister and eyeopening than the regular History Channel-ready passages they resemble in production value. It’s more that the editing can be overzealous in flashing back between them, as if overemphasizing how these stories all overlap, but disorienting the viewer in the process. It’s easy to imagine “Under the Banner of Heaven” without these moments, or in so much detail. But they prove part of the show’s own wrestling with Mormonism, and its intricate albeit often horrific reckoning with messengers who use the message to serve themselves.

In the midst of this story is Edgar-Jones' Brenda, sometimes forgotten about in the story’s emotional scope, but a vital voice. Her story, told by Allen in jail, has a more welcome type of radicalism: she went to Brigham Young University with hopes of becoming a TV journalist, she outsmarted creepy professors who then told her only men could read the news, she became a voice of vital reason while the Lafferty men were starting to lose their minds to the gods in their head. Edgar-Jones creates a rich, spirited performance out of a tragedy for how fruitful a progressive mind can be, and similarly how conservative ideals can so readily eat people alive.

“Under the Banner of Heaven” is a mighty busy show, sometimes to the detriment of its many ideas, its many stories, and all those Laffertys. But it is held together by its fascinating, unique way of presenting faith—it’s not as reverential as stories so deep in these communities can be, and it’s also more empathetic to earnest believers like Brenda and Jeb. The show is a gripping investigation in many ways, especially as it preaches the clarity that comes in not being afraid to ask questions.

from Roger Ebert: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/blazing-saddles-1974

Blazing Saddles

by
Roger Ebert




There are some people who can literally get away with anything -- say anything, do anything -- and people will let them. Other people attempt a mildly dirty joke and bring total silence down on a party. Mel Brooks is not only a member of the first group, he is its lifetime president. At its best, his comedy operates in areas so far removed from taste that (to coin his own expression) it rises below vulgarity.


"Blazing Saddles" is like that. It's a crazed grabbag of a movie that does everything to keep us laughing except hit us over the head with a rubber chicken. Mostly, it succeeds. It's an audience picture; it doesn't have a lot of classy polish and its structure is a total mess. But of course! What does that matter while Alex Karris is knocking a horse cold with a right cross to the jaw?

The movie is, among other things, a comedy Western. The story line, which is pretty shaky, involves some shady land speculators who need to run a railroad through Ridge Rock, and decide to drive the residents out. The last thing they want there is law and order, and so the crooks send in a black sheriff (Cleavon Little), figuring the townspeople will revolt.

Well, they almost do, but the sheriff (Black Bart is his name, of course) wins them over, and signs up a drunken sharpshooter (Gene Wilder) as his deputy. Meanwhile ... but what am I saying, meanwhile? Meanwhile, six dozen other things happen. The townspeople decide to stay and make a stand, even though, as the preacher intones, "Our women have been stampeded and our cattle raped." Bart rejects the advances of a man-killing woman who has been sicced on him (Madeline Kahn as Marlene Dietrich -- Lili von Shtupp), and the people build a dummy town and lure the bad guys into it.

One of the hallmarks of Brooks' movie humor has been his willingness to embrace excess. In his "The Producers," one of the funniest movies ever made, we got the immortal "Springtime for Hitler" production number, and Zero Mostel seducing little old ladies in the bushes, and Gene Wilder (again) choreographed with the Lincoln Center water fountain. Brooks' "The Twelve Chairs," not as funny, still had such great scenes as Brooks himself as an obsequious serf clinging to his master's leg.

And "Blazing Saddles" is like that from beginning to end, except for a couple of slow stretches. The baked bean scene alone qualifies the movie for some sort of Wretched Excess award. Then there's the whole business of Mongol (Alex Karris) who is a kind of dimwitted Paul Bunyan. He rides into town on an ox, sent to eliminate Bart, but is seduced by a black powder bomb in a Candygram. It would take too long to explain.

One of the criticisms of "The Producers" was that it took too long to end after "Springtime for Hitler." Determined that "Blazing Saddles" wouldn't end slowly, Brooks has provided for it a totally uninhibited Hollywood fantasy that includes a takeoff on "Top Hat," a scene at Graumann's Chinese Theater, a pie fight and, of course, a final fadeout into the sunset.

You S4

from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/mar/09/you-season-four-part-two-review-utterly-terrible-and-yet-it-is-perfect

You season four part two review – utterly terrible … and yet it is perfect


The cast is inconsistent, the satire is shallow and the twists are laughable – but somehow this hottest of televisual messes is impossible to resist

Leila Latif
Thu 9 Mar 2023 04.57 EST

In a 2014 episode of the US sitcom Community, a character named Abed is driven round the bend by his quest to determine whether Nicolas Cage is “good or bad”. This is the same gibbering state that awaits those trying to assess the merits of season four of You. The cast is inconsistent, the satire is shallow, plot lines materialise out of nowhere and are unceremoniously dropped with jarring frequency, and its largest twist is laughable.

And yet, it is perfect.

While the first half of season four vacillated between bad, good and so-bad-it’s-good with aplomb, the second broadens the spectrum from astonishingly terrible to utterly brilliant. It picks up where we left off: Joe AKA Prof Jonathan Moore (played by Penn Badgley) is back in London having evaded being immolated by the “Eat the Rich” Killer, who was revealed to be Rhys Montrose (a delightful Ed Speleers), a working-class man repulsed by the elite circles he now mixes in. Rhys is passionately campaigning to become London’s mayor, and Joe is stalking his nemesis, convinced that he must best him before he pins a slew of murders on him – ignoring the lengthy monologue in which Rhys stated his intention to pin the murders on maniacal aristo Roald. Not that “pinning” the murders on anyone seems wholly necessary, given that the investigative forces behind a highly publicised serial killer haven’t noticed that a man with a fake identity, whose only disguise is a baseball cap, has been at every crime scene.

A certain breeziness seems to permeate virtually every character. Aside from Lady Phoebe, no one seems particularly perturbed by their recent murder-filled weekend away. The second half of the season spends less time with the group of snobs we’ve come to love to hate, but we still get plenty of Lukas Gage’s seriously appalling playboy, Adam. He joins Shay Mitchell’s socialite, Peach, from season one, James Scully’s trust fund baby, Forty Quinn, from season two and Shalita Grant’s swinging momfluencer, Sherry, from season three as this season’s MVP. His scenery-chewing helps to distract from the low stakes of his storyline about whether a private member’s club will secure sufficient financial backing.

To keep the wheels in motion, and to get around the liberties this show takes with plot structure and human behaviour, we get a lot of characters monologuing. But this “tell don’t show” approach somehow works in its favour. The camp joys are at their finest when characters stare into the middle distance and unveil diabolical schemes. Charlotte Ritchie proves particularly adept at this as Joe’s love interest Kate, looking haunted as she reveals some of the most dumbfounding motives imaginable.

You succeeds because its flaws are so enjoyable. Never mind Greg Kinnear and Ritchie being the worst father-daughter casting in living memory. Never mind that there are so many “you”s referred to in Joe’s narration that it’s impossible to follow who he’s talking about half the time. Never mind that the performances are pitched so differently that it could be an ungodly collage from a dozen disparate shows. You is having a riot unencumbered by the pursuit of nuance. Joe’s snarky Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde internal monologue, the ridiculous leaps in logic, and the sizzling homoeroticism between Rhys and Joe are all part of the fun.

A brief reappearance from Victoria Peretti as Joe’s wonderfully deranged ex-wife, Love, only serves to highlight the dusty void of chemistry between Ritchie and Badgley. But that also works to the show’s advantage, when even the most heavily signposted developments maintain an air of surprise because it’s never clear if Joe and Kate actually like each other.

The final episode proves to be the best/worst, with a series of plotlines concluding either off-screen, with unhinged twists or with actual magic. Whereas earlier seasons ended by trying to subvert our expectations of romcoms and white male privilege, the conclusions of seasons three and four both seem to have been freed from the need to mean anything at all. It’s just a chance for the writers to play whack-a-mole with a many-headed hydra of plot. But as with watching Joe scheme his way out of a murder, there’s a similar meta-textual joy in watching the writers figure their way out of chaos.skip past newsletter promotion

There are hints as to what the future could hold (season five has not been announced, but given the show’s popularity it seems assured) but at this point, every shark has been jumped. Despite having adored this hottest of messes, the show, like Joe, should probably quit while he’s ahead.