Based on Caroline Kepnes' best-selling novel of the same name, YOU is a 21st century love story that asks, 'What would you do for love?' When a brilliant bookstore manager crosses paths with an aspiring writer, his answer becomes clear: anything. Using the internet and social media as his tools to gather the most intimate of details and get close to her, a charming and awkward crush quickly becomes obsession as he quietly and strategically removes every obstacle - and person - in his way.
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Joe's ill-fated neighbour Natalie in season two is a TV-only invention. Because the show diverged so far from the ending of the Hidden Bodies novel, the writers needed a fresh obsession for Joe once he landed in Madre Linda, and Natalie filled that gap instead of the librarian character from the books.
Marienne isn't a straight adaptation of anyone from the third novel, You Love Me. She's loosely built from a librarian character named Mary Kay, though the show changes her daughter's age and softens how serious her relationship with Joe becomes compared to the source material.
The You Love Me novel takes Joe's story in a very different direction than season three. In the book he's just out of prison and relocates to Bainbridge Island in Washington after the Quinn family pays him off, splitting from Love entirely rather than raising baby Henry with her in the suburbs.
The season two twist where Love reveals she's murdered people too doesn't exist in Kepnes' novels. Book Love never kills anyone. When she learns about Joe's past there, she simply chooses to stay with him out of love rather than confessing a body count of her own.
In the original novel there's no ambiguity about what happens to Candace, Joe drowns her at Brighton Beach and that's that. The show's writers deliberately left it open, having her turn up alive at the very end of season one so the story could go somewhere the book readers wouldn't expect.
When Candace resurfaces in season two under the name Amy Adam, that's actually a nod to Hidden Bodies. A character called Amy Adam shows up in the book too, and it's the reason Joe heads to Los Angeles in the first place, chasing her down after she robs the bookstore.
A lot of Peach Salinger's very specific, moneyed style in season one came straight from Shay Mitchell's personal closet. She's said she loved getting to dress up after years of a stripped-back look on Pretty Little Liars, and even brought extra bags of her own clothes to set to work out Peach's look with the costume team.
The bookstore where Joe works isn't a set built from scratch, it's Logos Bookstore on Manhattan's Upper East Side, used for both the exterior and interior shots. Fans do occasionally stop by hoping for a peek at the infamous glass cage in the basement, but that part, thankfully, was never real.
Most of season three was shot on the Warner Bros backlot rather than on location, the same one used for Gilmore Girls and Pretty Little Liars. Love's bakery, A Fresh Tart, sits on the same street set as Luke's Diner, just around the corner, and the backlot is open for public tours if you want to spot it yourself.
Penn Badgley barely speaks out loud while filming most of his scenes, since Joe's constant internal narration gets recorded separately afterward. On set, his stand-in reads those inner-monologue lines off camera so Penn can react in the moment, then Penn records the actual voiceover later in a booth.
