Released on March 9, 2023, the second part of the fourth season of You has spiked the interest of the fans and they couldn’t wait to get more of it. Based on the books written by Caroline Kepnes, You has become one of the most critically acclaimed thrillers, with its popularity skyrocketing with the release of every new season.
Originally, the show was streaming on Lifetime before Netflix licensed it and made it an Original. Developed by Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti, the series stars Penn Badgley as Joe Goldberg, who has stalked his favorite women in the world’s most attractive places, including New York, Los Angeles, fictional Madre Linda, and now, Paris.
With the second part culminating in gory bloodshed that left a trail of bodies in his wake, the psychic stalker of Netflix can’t seemingly wait to renew his life once again. But would Netflix want to do that? In simpler words, has Netflix renewed You for a fifth season? At the time of writing this article, the thriller has not been renewed for a fifth season. But give it a few weeks, will the streaming giant renew it for a fifth season? If you’ve been wondering the same, then you have landed at the right place, because we have gathered all the information on You season 5.
Has Netflix renewed You for a fifth season?
As mentioned previously, the streaming giant has not renewed the show for a fifth season currently. Considering the frequent cancellations that Netflix has brutally ordered, it has left many fans of the thriller show wondering whether it will face the same fate or not. In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, the showrunner Sera Gamble hinted at the possibility for the show to have more future, saying, “We have an idea for season five that we’re excited about.” Be that as it may, it did not come without a condition:
“It was never anyone’s intention to run this one into the ground. When we’re done, we’ll be done. And we’ll pack it up. Even in the early conversations with Penn, the idea was not to crank out episodes forever; it’s to feel like we have told the complete story. And though I feel like tonally, we’re very different and we are not trying to sell Joe as any kind of a hero with a straight face. This is a show that is in the tradition of these single-lead shows with a guy who does increasingly bad things. The beautiful thing about it is that when his arc is complete, so is the show.”
In addition to this, leading star Penn Badgley corroborated this sentiment while engaged in a Happy Sad Confused podcast concerning You’s future. He said, “I think if there’s another season, I think it’s only going to be one. I think — this is my understanding, but I don’t know, I really don’t know. But I know that everybody concerned, from the top on down, nobody wants this show to become tired. That’s when Joe is the most disgusting. That’s when the show stops having the intelligence that it has.”
What is the overall performance of You season 4?
Based on the data gathered from the first several weeks of streaming the first half of the season, we can speculate on the overall performance of the show and determine the potentiality of its renewal. The first half of the fourth season was successful in garnering 183,880,000 million hours of viewership which is relatively less in comparison to its predecessors. To make matters worse, it also dropped out of the global top ten by the fourth week.
But we also need to take into consideration that the show was released in two segments and as a result of which, many fans vowed that they won’t watch the show until both segments are available for streaming on Netflix. According to Netflix’s top 10 data, all four seasons have managed to gather over 1 billion viewing hours on the streaming platform. Be that as it may, this is just the weekly data released since Q3 2021. Upon adding the viewing data from season 2, the viewing hours can be extended to approximately 1.5 billion.
Once Netflix releases the viewing data for the next several weeks, we can determine the chances of a fifth-season renewal. We presume that the show will be renewed for a fifth season owing to its popularity and reach. However, if the potential new season is also going to follow the same format of Joe stalking someone new and that ending on a bloody note, the content will be too hackneyed for the audience to appreciate and come back again.
What can we expect to happen in You season 5?
The fourth seems to have tied up all the loose ends of the main characters, which rules out the possibility of a fifth season. But that does not mean Jenna Ortega’s Ellie will never show up again. Although most of the characters are in the ground or behind the bars and with no real story arcs to elaborate more upon, a fifth season can still be created focusing on Joe Goldberg’s past, considering that he has now fully come tete-a-tete with the cavernous parts of his real self.
However, the possession of money and power that his girlfriend Kate (Charlotte Ritchie) boasts, he can use that to further his own privilege and shield himself from the ramifications of his crimes. By the end of the fourth season, the viewers see a completely new, invincible Joe Goldberg, flanked by an entire PR Team at his disposal who would help him clean up all the messes. What’s more, he has also managed to find a partner who can fully overlook all the darkest parts of him.
If there will be a You season 5, we would certainly see a more callous Joe who might not even justify his killings anymore. But how would he juxtapose his part-time criminal life with his romantic life with Kate? That’s the question. But we know one thing for sure: Joe surely does not possess a Midas touch, in fact, something quite opposite to it. Everyone that he loves, ends up dead. What does this mean for Kate?
Speaking to Hollywood Reporter, Sera Gamble stated that the plan is for Joe to suffer through some consequences of his actions because that would be the perfect ending for You. She said:
“The conversation we have among the writers, between Greg and I, and a lot with Penn is about the fact that it would be nice to end his arc with some form of justice. Guys like this don’t usually see a lot of justice from the world. That’s challenging to plot. How does Joe Goldberg go down in a world where he’s been branding people with bricks in broad daylight for years? And he’s cute! And he gets away with it. The deeper question that we frequently pitch in the writers’ room is, ‘What’s real justice? What would hurt him the most?'”
When can we expect You season 5 to be on Netflix?
Below mentioned are the release schedules of the previous four seasons of You:
- Season 1 – 26/12/2018
- Season 2 – 26/12/2019
- Season 3 – 15/10/2021
- Season 4(1) – 09/02/2023
- Season 4(2) – 09/03/2023
As you can see, there is a significant gap of 22 months between the second and the third season, but that’s largely because of the pandemic. The 16-month gap between the third and the first half of the fourth season and a month separating the first and second halves of the fourth season, point to the absence of any new season of You this year.
Based upon this data, we can expect at least 13-16 months of gap between seasons 4 and 5 of You, if, that is to say, of course, Netflix renews the show for a new season. In that case, we can expect the new season to arrive on Netflix anywhere between April 2024 and July 2024.
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