“You,” one of television’s more addictive treats, returns for a second season on Thursday. It has moved to a different shelf of the candy store — it’s now a Netflix series, after premiering on Lifetime — but it’s as tasty, and as bad for you, as ever.

The first season won a rabid following, and a lot of critical attention, for its clever fusion of the conventions of the romantic comedy with the conventions of the bluebeard serial-killer tale. As Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) — cute, courteous, literary and deranged — pursued his quest to be the perfect New York boyfriend, the bodies piled up, and the rom-com was shown to have been a horror story all along. The distance between the genres vanished.

It was a good trick, part of a long tradition, from Hammer Films to “Scream” to Jordan Peele, of using dark comedy to make audiences feel less guilty about enjoying homicidal suspense and bloodshed. And it was well timed as a cautionary #MeToo allegory: Joe’s ability to make psychopathic narcissism look like romantic sensitivity — and the eagerness of his victims to believe in it — was a perfect representation of the big-city dating hellscape.

But for all the attention devoted to the show’s extreme critique of the controlling mansplainer, and its biting depiction of millennial vacuousness, the real dramatic engine of “You” is simpler (and perhaps even more subversive). What’s really entertaining about it is the screwball comedy of watching poor Joe trying to keep all of his plates spinning — to stay one step ahead as his lies get harder to keep track of and his regretful but necessary killings become harder to cover up. The action is a Rube Goldberg-like maze, and Joe is the rat whose escape we can’t help rooting for.