Warning: this article contains spoilers for seasons one and two of You.

There are a great many infuriating things about You, not least the immense difficulty of simply trying to talk about it. In order to make it clear that you are talking about You the show, rather than you the other person in the room, you (not You) need to go through several steps of clarification. “I can’t wait to see You.” “I’m standing right here.” “I wonder what will happen with You?” “I’m fine, what’s wrong with you?” “Well, it is fun, but I do have a problem with the notion of a sexy sociopath,” etc.

The hugely popular Netflix thriller released its second season the day after Christmas. In the first, Penn Badgley was Joe Goldberg, a puppyish New York bookshop manager with romcom good looks, who also stalked, wooed and eventually murdered Guinevere Beck, a lost-soul writer and poet who had the misfortune to visit his store. It was tense, twisty and audacious, with about as little regard for propriety as it had for common sense. Never has a show incited viewers to shout “buy some curtains” at the screen with more urgency. Don’t get me started on the lack of password protection on any devices crucial to the plot.

What was fun about it, though, apart from the creeping dread that came whenever Joe miraculously disguised himself with nothing but a baseball cap, was its satirical edge. To get away with a protagonist who stalks and kills women, and who views his motivations for doing so as fundamentally decent, was always going to be a push, but season one chose its targets with skill. The careful curation of an image via social media was taken to its horrific extremes; those who suffered most were rich snobs with airy literary pretensions. The first season ended with not one, but two big twists. (You is rarely understated.) Joe ended up killing Beck, whom he’d imprisoned in his glass cage in the basement, and Candace, the first girlfriend Joe thought he had murdered, turned out to be alive and looking for revenge.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nauseating lurches from humour to horror ... it’s all part of the You experience. Photograph: Beth Dubber/Netflix

Season two shifts Joe and the action to the west coast, though on the surface much is the same, even the tension-heavy set pieces, whether that’s a jogger being chased and bludgeoned (or almost), or a suspicious police officer who sees through Joe’s well-honed charms, or that glass cage, lovingly reconstructed in a storage unit. While snooty New York bookish types were amusing to poke fun at, the Los Angeles macrobiotic-vegan-guru-movie-type feels overused, and a little less clever, though this does allow the writers to ramp up the silliness of the humour. In order to hide from Candace, Joe assumes a new identity. But old habits die hard, or at least harder than his ex-girlfriends, and he soon has a new object of his affections, Love. (What is it with this show’s semantic tangles? Joe loves love, and Love, and boy do they love labouring the point.) Love, played by The Haunting of Hill House’s Victoria Pedretti, is a recent widow and compulsive baker all too eager to let herself love again via Joe/Will, the self-styled Perfect Boyfriend, even if he is lying about his identity, and how he knows so much about her, and that telescope pointed directly at her house.

Once again, nothing makes a lot of sense. This time, I found myself borderline apoplectic at the idea that police would ignore Candace’s reports that her sociopathic ex-boyfriend attempted to murder her, and buried her while she was still alive, due to a lack of physical evidence, advising her instead to pretend to be dead. Joe can’t text from Delilah’s phone because it’s covered in blood and smashed? Put the sim in another phone! But these moments of frustration are curated and deliberate; it’s the reason the young people in horror movies, trapped in a house stalked by a serial killer, run upstairs rather than out of the front door.

While season two is certainly funnier than season one, its amusements eventually wear thin, particularly when it comes to the fate of poor, doomed Delilah, a decent human being caught up in the nasty Joe and Love sideshow. In attempting to redeem his past actions, we see the queasy spectacle of Joe the Saviour – “I don’t hurt women” – rewiring his misdeeds into a Dexter-shaped narrative. There’s even a mention of Dexter, the serial killer with a heart, to force the point home, and flashbacks of Joe’s difficult childhood, so we know it was his mother that made him the way he is. It was enough to make me want to throw the towel in, having sufficiently gorged myself on its shlocky charms. But of course, there was a twist, the twist to end all twists, and Joe had met his match.

When going through my notes, I found one that read, “I hate this show”, scribbled at around the halfway point. Yet I watched it until the end, from start to finish, in two days straight. I now realise that being frustrated by every single implausible twist, by its nauseating lurches from dark humour to horror, is part of the You experience, like cheering on your favourite team even when you know they’re doomed to lose. At the risk of sounding like a Joe Goldberg voiceover, to hate You is to love it, Love.