You Season 5: Everything We Know About the Final Season

You—the Netflix hit series starring Penn Badgley as a charismatic but inscrutable serial killer—was just renewed for a fifth season and final season following a bombshell fourth-season finale. The news is bittersweet for fans of the show, which is based on the best-selling book series by Caroline Kepnes. 

Thankfully, we won't have to say “Goodbye, you” to Joe Goldberg until next year. So, for now, let's try to focus on the present. Here’s what we know about You season five: 

It’s all coming to an end in 2024. Netflix announced the show's renewal for a fifth and final season on March 24, 2023. They also dropped a teaser, although it doesn't reveal much. Per the streaming platform, You executive producers Greg Berlanti and Sarah Schechter “always conceived” the series “as a five-season journey.”

Joe won’t be returning to London. The end of season three saw Joe in Paris, and season four takes place entirely in London. That is, until the very end. In the fourth season's shocking finale, Joe and his new paramour—Kate, played by Charlotte Ritchie—move to New York so that Kate can take over her father's business there. 

As cocreator and showrunner Sera Gamble recently explained to The Cut, “We always knew we wanted him to go back to New York, have a homecoming, have his real name, shave his beard, and look like Joe Classic, but that he would be much more in the category of people he used to watch from afar. Now he has near unlimited resources. He has the support of powerful people and he has a lot less ambivalence about what he does in private. So that’s the setup.”

Joe may finally see justice. While season four was still airing, series cocreator Sera Gamble told The Hollywood Reporter that brainstorming for season five had already begun. 

“We have an idea for season five that we’re excited about,” Gamble said. “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.”

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By Emily Tannenbaum

Regarding the question of whether Joe might die at the end of the series, Gamble added: “That question is a spoiler. 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?”