Hope you did the assigned reading and caught up on You’s first three seasons, because class is in session with Professor Jonathan Moore, aka Joe Goldberg. Although the show’s fourth season isn’t launching until Feb. 9, Tudum is unveiling the first six minutes from Part 1 of the thriller right now.
Picking up not long after Joe’s (Penn Badgley) life in Madre Linda literally goes up in flames and he follows new obsession Marienne (Tati Gabrielle) to Paris, the fourth season finds him living in London under a new identity as a literature professor. Despite his penchant for murder, the job appears to suit Joe. Just look at how casually he deploys the Socratic method while leading a discussion about redemption in the sneak peek above. (Hopefully, he’s also taking notes on this topic after everything that happened with Beck, Candace, his wife Love and many others.)
While the former indie bookstore manager may not have always intended to have a career in academia, Joe’s new profession has been a long time coming, showrunner and executive producer Sera Gamble tells Tudum. Gamble and the writers have been dying to put Joe in a classroom ever since You author Caroline Kepnes said that’s where she envisioned him ending up.
“Finally, he’s in a position that befits his level of understanding of the books he talks about all the time,” says Gamble. “He’s genuinely good at it and it’s a pleasure for him to do it. I can say this without spoiling too much: Even when his life is completely falling apart, he still does enjoy teaching class.”
Still, even though Joe is committed to living a quiet academic life, it wouldn’t be You if lesson plans and office hours were all he had on his mind. Enter Season 4’s twisty murder mystery. An anonymous foe known only as the Eat the Rich Killer starts targeting the circle of rich Londoners Joe has (reluctantly) befriended, including Charlotte Ritchie’s Kate, Tilly Keeper’s Lady Phoebe and Lukas Gage’s Adam. Thus, Joe must play detective and stop the murderer — who has also developed a concerning obsession with him.
“It’s fun to put someone who knows literary tropes into one of the tropiest stories possible, and it fits nicely with the idea that he’s genuinely going to be different now,” says Gamble, who credits executive producer Greg Berlanti with the idea of making Season 4 a whodunit. “He’s done murdering, he’s learned from his mistakes and he’s going to do what it takes to right the karmic scales. That doesn’t just mean grow a beard and teach about American literature, it also means maybe that you have to try to protect the very people [whose fate] previously would’ve had you at least look the other way, if not actively participate in what was going on with them.”
The Season 4 premiere sneak peek also introduces us to Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman), Joe’s whip-smart student who’s essentially this season’s Ellie (Jenna Ortega). “As a counterpart to the privileged, clueless people that he meets [every season], we always try to give you somebody more grounded and relatable for Joe. Those people are to be found in his class. Nadia, she’s both the young person that he cares a lot about in his mentoring, for better and for worse, and she also reminds him a lot of himself,” Gamble says.
Hopefully, Nadia doesn’t learn the wrong lessons from her very questionable teacher.
You Season 4, Part 1 launches Feb. 9. Part 2 arrives on March 9.
