"YOU"........LATE NITE STALK-SHOW APPEARANCES.........

You (Mini-Series- 2018)    Oh the tongue-in-cheek irony......

              Where else would the series version of Caroline Kepnes's darkly sardonic thriller land but on on the Lifetime Channel.........home to countless cheesy stalker-suspensers.........

               The channel's schedule is already heavily loaded with with its very own stalk-a-thons...with titles  along the lines of "I'm Watching You"....."She's being watched"......"Watching Her"....etc, etc, etc.......'round the clock stalking whenever you need an endangered heroine fix........

               But here's the rub........Lifetime's stalk-a-ramas, in their own way, aren't far removed from the Hallmark Channel's year 'round seasonal, chaste romances.........slow paced to the point of stillness and mass produced like sausage.

               "You" may indeed share the basic plot structure of a Lifetime movie.......(creepy guy slowly insinuates himself into the life of his prey)......but "You" arrives with a far higher pedigree than boilerplate Lifetime product.........based on a best selling novel, it's witty, well written,well acted,   snappily paced and most clearly a quality effort.

                 So the whole stalking thing seems to serve as the only reason it landed in the sea of cheese that comprises the Lifetime schedule..........(imagine "The Way We Were" suddenly popping up right in the middle of one of  Hallmark's 'Love At the Cookie Contest" movies.....)

                 Not that we're complaining.......having birthed itself on a basic cable channel, it means we don't have to pay HBO, Showtime, Amazon or Hulu to check it out.  Very cool.

                  In her book, the first of two, author Kepnes cleverly created her own variation of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley........he's Joe Goldberg, a seemingly harmless Ripley-esque dweeb who fixates on Beck, a beautiful creative writing graduate student who walks to into the bookstore where Joe works.

                   Ah, true psychotic love. It's stalk at first sight.

                 Joe's anything but harmless and he wastes no time launching into all manner of insidious machinations to make Beck his one and only,including swiping her cellphone.   The perverse fun in the pilot episode, as it was in the novel, is in the layer-by-layer peeling off  of Joe's mask of normality.....(his thuggish next door neighbor, however, sees right through him as no doubt others will.....)

                   A role like Joe provides a challenging tightrope walk for an actor, (how much empathy....how much psychosis), but so far Penn Badgley (of 'Gossip Girl') deftly navigates his way through the rocky shoals involved in bringing such a multi-faced character to life.

                   This show's off and running out of the starting gate and we can't wait to grin 'n grimace through all the future twists and turns......you can bet we'll post on it again as we look in on Joe Goldberg's further creepy adventures........for now, BQ stalks the opening of "You" with 4 stars (****)......premium thrills without buying a Premium channel.....what more could you want?