After You built an audience in the warm womb of Lifetime, Netflix picked it up, and by January the show was indeed a global cultural phenomenon, but even now Badgley is suspicious of the show’s momentum. “It all comes and goes,” he says of the masses of viewers who have binge-watched You on Netflix. “Inherent in bingeing is purging. The second part, nobody talks about.” (Netflix is producing You’s second season, which Badgley is shooting now.)

You is very much in the pandering, “so tacky it’s profound” tradition of Gossip Girl, but it has captured the zeitgeist in a way that Gossip Girl didn’t. It’s not a “good” show, per se, but it’s definitely a blast. Badgley plays Joe, a bookstore employee and psychotic stalker. In the pilot he has a meet-cute with Beck (Elizabeth Lail), a writer, yoga instructor, and composite Williamsburg babe. Joe’s stalking starts on social media, but before long he’s hiding in Beck’s shower and taking drastic action towards anyone who tries to stand in the way of their love. There’s a murder basement with a plexiglass torture chamber, a wealthy and obsessive friend named Peach Salinger (Shay Mitchell), and John Stamos plays a sexy stoner therapist. You is pure Lifetime, leaning into the sex and murder and trusting the audience to draw weightier conclusions.

Initially Badgley worried that if the show wasn’t done just right, he’d be the most problematic part of a really problematic show. “On one hand,” he recalls, “no one in any position of authority could ever try to act as though we don’t know that sex and murder sells, but how can it work in a different way we’ve not seen? That’s where I think this show does something that none of us could have said for certain that we would nail. It could have been really irresponsible. It could have fallen flat and been like, whoa.”

Badgley had also been frustrated by how he was perceived after Gossip Girl. “Up until this role, everybody thought I was such a nice guy. And it’s great to be a nice guy, but the kind of nice guy that makes ‘nice guy’ an insult—that's actually not a nice guy. I think that's what frustrated me. Lo and behold, I play somebody who's not a nice guy, and that everybody loves. We don't like Dan Humphrey. We like Chuck Bass. We like Joe Goldberg. So in a sense, what do you expect?”

He’s quick to clarify that he isn’t apologizing for men. He’s just newly awed by the transcendent powers of an engaged audience: To make his features into something sinister, to make a show that was (probably) only meant to entertain into the locus of social discourse, and certainly to define onscreen ideals. Bad man supply is meeting bad man demand.

“But we should always appreciate the audience's intelligence. This is what I probably didn't do well in Gossip Girl. In Gossip Girl, I was far too judgmental of everything that was happening, because I was young,” says Badgley, shrugging. “If anything, this show's saving grace is that we're not even trying to act like we're not doing this. We're doing this. We're going to take you with us, and we're going to kill her at the end. No lying to ourselves here. I think, somehow, that's what works about it.”

You does have some fraught moments. Badgley says the scenes where Joe masturbates felt particularly risky to him: One scene in particular comes to mind, in which Joe pleasures himself in the bushes across the street from Beck’s apartment, where she herself is masturbating, unaware she’s being watched. But the discourse that surrounded the show required an even more delicate hand. Many viewers seized on You as a show about white male privilege and toxic masculinity, because of the way Joe (white, male) is able to repeatedly charm people into looking past his increasingly obvious crimes. Another contingent saw the show as a commentary on the dangers social media. Others seemed to miss the heavy-handed morals of the story entirely, tweeting about how sexy Joe is (“kidnap me pls”). That last group of viewers, thirsty for a murderer, was the one Badgley felt compelled to engage with.