You's Joe Goldberg and Dawson's Creek's Dawson Leery aren't all that different

Jezebel

"The first three seasons of Dawson’s Creek—written and produced, in part, by You writer and producer Greg Berlanti—were more or less a montage of the titular character having an absolute meltdown each time a woman deviated from the role in which he’d cast her," says Emily Alford. "It was a character arc meant to indicate coming-of-age in the 90s, perhaps more fittingly reframed as psychopathic in its 21st-century retelling. Like You, Dawson’s Creek opens with an idealistic romantic falling instantaneously in love with a blonde bathed in sunlight, the girl immediately rendered not a person, but a cure-all for social inadequacy and mommy issues. In You, Dawson Leery, excused so often in the early seasons of the series for being a tantrum-throwing little creep because his life has been too sheltered, is replaced by Joe, whose attachment and violence issues are explained by having been too abused. Where Joe bases his obsessions on misunderstandings of classic books, Dawson creates his willful misunderstanding of reality from sappy movies, but, spiritually, they’re the same: Two local indie softboys with artsy feelings so big they establish dominion over the lives of everyone around them. And where You is careful to reiterate, often through Badgley’s press junkets, that the audience is not supposed to want to have sex with Joe Goldberg, in 1998, he was the WB’s best approximation of the kind of guy teenage girls might hope to bone."