‘You’ creator on Season 4 and having fewer sex scenes: ‘There’s no morality panic’

Sera Gamble understands your Joe Goldberg conundrum. As the hopeless romantic and serial killer at the center of Netflix’s popular series “You,” Joe, played by Penn Badgley, is a thorny protagonist to follow: You love him! You’re weirded out by him! He’s toxic! Wait, you’re rooting for him to change?

“It feels like that in the [writers’] room, too,” says Gamble, the showrunner of the psychological thriller. “On any given morning, someone will be like, ‘We need to shove him off a building instead of some innocent victim this time.’ And then somebody else would be like, ‘Oh, I feel like he’s been really sweet to [love interest] Kate [Charlotte Ritchie] this season.’”

Joe has been wrestling with himself too.

After escaping death at the hands of his equally murderous wife, Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti), Joe headed overseas. Season 4 — split into two installments, with Part 1 released last month — started off as a whodunit satirizing the British class system, with Joe posing as Jonathan Moore, an American literature professor in London drawn into the mystery of the Eat-theRich Killer. As we learn in Part 2, now streaming, all is not as it appears: Joe himself, in the midst of a psychological break, is the culprit, and has his former obsession Marienne (Tati Gabrielle), thought safe from harm in Paris, locked in a glass cage.

Joe’s unraveling felt inevitable, Gamble says. “It’s wearing on him.

“Writers in the room all day, every day, talking about Joe — they have some pretty harsh judgments of him. And regularly, they’re like, ‘When are we going to punish this guy?’ Penn too. Penn is like: ‘How self-aware can you make him?’”

After going virtual during the critical stages of the pandemic, the writers room returned to working in person this season. “It was really hard to break most of a season on Zoom,” Gamble says. “You’re efficient because you have to be because the fatigue is quicker. But there really is so much about the chemistry of people in a room.”

She also acknowledges, with a tone of relief, that the pandemic forced her to change her relationship to work. After getting her professional start on ABC’s short-lived procedural “Eyes” in 2005, she joined the team at the CW’s “Supernatural,” leaving after its seventh season in 2012. In 2015, she created and executive produced SyFy’s “The Magicians,” which ran for five seasons, and in 2018 she developed “You,” based on Caroline Kepnes’ novels, with Greg Berlanti. She’s also currently an executive producer on Apple TV+’s “Physical,” starring Rose Byrne.

“I have worked pretty much nonstop for my adult life,” she says. “But the pandemic stepped up the level of working all the time with no breaks. The last couple of years has been a period of real introspection for me about how to just live my life in a more sustainable way and have a relationship to my work that is a little bit gentler and that can last for a really long time.”

In a recent video call from her home in Los Angeles, Gamble talked about the season’s shocking twists, “You’s” homage to Taylor Swift, and accommodating Badgley’s request for fewer sex scenes. The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

As Joe adjusts to his new life in London , there’s one person in his posh new circle of friends that he’s drawn to: Rhys Montrose (Ed Speleers). Rhys rose to prominence by writing a memoir about his troubled upbringing, which Joe found relatable.

In the Part 1 finale, Rhys is revealed to be the Eat-the-Rich Killer and the man who’s been stalking Joe and trying to frame him for murder. Except he isn’t really : He’s a symptom of Joe’s disassociation from reality.

We started from a place of, “What kind of man would Joe admire?” The key that unlocked the story for us was when we realized that Rhys was definitely a real person. We went back and forth as we were starting, to say, “How are we going to tell the story of the killer inside Joe has split off entirely?” We realized that we could have this be a public figure and then we started talking about how there are these horrible examples of people who have stalked and harmed public figures.