YOU

The acting is stronger than ever, now that Badgley’s Joe has a worthy opponent, and you won’t be able to see the season’s big twists coming. No matter why you initially enjoyed YOU, you’re going to fall in love with this new season, and Love Quinn.

“You” remains a fascinating look at just how hard it is to outwit and outrun your own nature.

Though it can be overstuffed at times, You balances brazen humor with emotional intelligence, all while keeping the mystery intact.

Throw in more revelations about Joe’s childhood, a side storyline (that we won’t reveal here) that could have been copied from recent newspaper headlines, and this season of You quickly becomes a binge-watching treat.

Fun to watch. ... Even though it goes too far with its secret rooms and hostage situations, it makes you want others to be kept in the dark. “You” started with a bang and, thankfully, it’s still firing solid kill shots.

Its sharpest slices are reserved for its ongoing dialogue with corrosive masculinity and the demon needling Joe, which is the urge to assert control in a place where he's powerless. ... [Joe's] the wrong kind of man in a sea of them, a principled romantic whose might change, but whose loss of affection can be lethal. The genius of Love is that she's equally dangerous, making it more worthwhile.

It stays true to the expectations it has set in the previous seasons and moves at a delightfully breathless pace. There are a lot of moving parts, but they are dealt with in a clear, energetic way that never allows the plot to meander. Pedretti and Badgley have each perfected the art of embodying their mercurial characters.

You is the best it’s ever been — every bit as dark and stinging and cheerfully willing to screw with its audience, but now outfitted with a glorious foil for Joe’s monstrousness.

The new batch of episodes easily comprises the show’s best yet, its tone solidified, its pacing and plotting perfected.

It’s Pedretti’s Love who steals the show as the complex relationship between the Quinn-Goldbergs drives much of its narrative. ... Season 3 is at its weakest, though, during the flashback sequences that try to add depth and texture to Joe’s lifetime of depravity.

The third season continues to balance that delicate juggling act, with a wife, baby and life in suburbia merely adding to the chaos, and for the most part, macabre fun.

As always, it is defiantly tasteless (one thorny “dilemma” is resolved by a character’s suicide, and there is a romantic subplot involving a teenager and an older woman), but in turning up the mockery of “the obscene one per cent-er bubble” that Joe and Love now inhabit, it at least finds more space to explore its better themes.