ALL I WANNA DO IS SEE YOU AGAIN

Do you know when you binge watch the first season of a show and then eagerly awaits for the following season and then gets very disappointed? I just finished the 2nd season of “You” on Netflix and, boy… what a disaster.

Spoiler-free long story short: “You” follows the anti-hero Joe Goldberg, a very romantic type of guy, who is also a very careful virtual and non-virtual voyeur, stalker and eventual serial killer. A good proposal in these days of internet over exposition and #metoo campaigns. It’s a little like “American Psycho” and “Dexter”, updated to the late 2010’s. The show premiered on Lifetime in the US and didn’t make much of an impact, so much that it had been cancelled, picked up by Netflix and granted a 2nd season even before the first one had aired on Lifetime. It was indeed more successful on Netflix in late 2018, with the 2nd season arriving roughly one year later in December 2019, now as a Netflix exclusive.

But the feeling you get is like no one really was counting on the show getting a second season (despite season 1 ending on a mid-sized cliffhanger). Season 2 shows a very irrational Joe, leaving so many traces behind that it’s hard to believe it’s the same character. In real life, his constant usage of his victims phones passing himself for them would have granted him a court order for the police to locate when and where they were used, eventually adding 2+2 and he’d have been caught halfway through the season. There are other inconsistencies with the character’s rational behavior from season 1 that ruined it for me. When I finally got over with it, I was happy to see it ended in a much more light cliffhanger, tipping it could simply end there without a 3rd season. However, much to my dismay, Variety has confirmed today that it has indeed been granted another season.

It may be the case I simply abandon the show. It wouldn’t be the first time. I confess I don’t know when I gave up on “Fringe” (and that was a lot like “The X-Files” good days meet “Lost” good days – two shows that didn’t know when to stop and I did watch all seasons, only to be disappointed at the end). Or the comedy “That 70’s Show”, which I never saw all the way (and we’re taking about old days of linear television, not today’s streaming and binge watching habits). With “Heroes”, I do remember. It was sometime between seasons 3 and 4 when my patience with it was over after this sci-fi show became a parody of itself.

Which brings me to an opposite situation: when a show I like doesn’t get renewed and the final season had already been filmed and it ends full of loose ends. It happened to the Wachowskis’ “Sense 8”. I could “sense” the show would get cancelled because it looked like one absurd burden to shoot each season in multiple cities across the world with the entire cast coming along and in a completely non-linear way, since all characters could “jump” from one place to another and back during all episodes. So logistics and direction-wise, for a TV-show (ok, “Netflix” show), this must have cost a fortune, needed a beast of planning ahead and didn’t have the desired return to justify such costs. It was, however, granted a final 2-hour special episode to give it some closure. Much like “Farscape”, which was even scripted for 5 seasons, but still got killed after season 4. It took two years for the creators to secure the rights, shoot and air a one-off series finale made-for-TV movie.

The latest incident where this has happened with a show I liked was “Berlin Station”. Loosely based on real life event as the kick off for each season, it follows CIA agent Daniel Miller (the name also got my attention immediately) who’s been recently assigned to the Berlin office of the agency located inside the American embassy in Berlin. Season 1 deals with a whistleblower and was shot on location in Berlin and in Babelsberg studios here on neighboring Potsdam. Season 2 benefitted from actress Ashley Judge joining the cast, and had an extreme-right wing party running for the general elections in Germany, but a lot of the action moved to Spain and I dubbed it “Valencia Station”. Season 3, or “Tallinn Station”, had a lot of exterior “Berlin” scenes moved to Vienna and Budapest (I can tell) while dealing with the issue of Russian influence on the Baltic countries while messing with NATO dysfunctionalities. Here’s where the show got cancelled and we never got to really grasp a proper ending for the storylines.

So much like these last two examples, I don’t have a proper ending for this post, except a reminder that “Spirits in the Forest” will air on ARTE on Jan, 24th both in Germany and  France (although slightly later in France, so technically on Jan, 25th), so make sure to watch it either when it airs or later on their website where it should be available for streaming for a couple of months. See you!