🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

Hello, you. It’s me, Joe Goldberg. I’m the problem, it’s me. 

After drenching the town in red (maroon?) across the 10 episodes of You Season 4, Penn Badgley’s murderous London Boy moves on to his next chapter to the sound of Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” in the season finale. The Midnights track, released four months ago, plays under a season-ending montage that checks in with everyone who survived Joe’s most recent killing spree — before unveiling the new-old life Joe has made for himself with Kate (Charlotte Ritchie) in New York City. (He’s in the penthouse of Kate’s heart… and in a literal penthouse.) But the road to Joe’s (latest) fresh start wasn’t smooth, as viewers will know all too well. Throughout the season, Joe goes full Fight Club before killing friends and kidnapping a former love interest, entering a dissociative state to protect his self-image as a good guy. 

After Joe finally embraces his darker side in Episode 10, the lyric “It’s me, hi. I’m the problem, it’s me” seems like a perverse mantra of self-acceptance. In a fortuitous twist of fate, Midnights was released just as showrunner Sera Gamble and music supervisor Season Kent were searching for “big songs” for the closing sequence. “Anti-Hero” resonated with the season’s themes — and not just for its title. 

“I watched the ‘Anti-Hero’ video for the first time and I realized we’ve been talking about [Joe] in that way [in the writers’ room],” Gamble tells Tudum. “And then I remembered seeing Penn’s [first-ever] Tik Tok also, to be weirdly sort of meta about it.” 

Of course, this isn’t the first time You has featured Swift’s music. The thriller needle-dropped Folklore’s “exile” in the Season 3 finale as Joe burned down his Madre Linda life and chased Marienne (Tati Gabrielle) to Europe. Fans reacted passionately to the music cue. (And the fandom runs deep among the staff of You as well: Even though it doesn’t appear on-screen because they just did it on set, the code to Joe’s glass cage is 1-2-1-3-8-9 — the singer’s birthday.) Gamble and Kent figured it couldn’t hurt to ask Swift about using “Anti-Hero” in Season 4 — though it felt like a “big swing” because of how new and popular the song was upon its release. So Kent started the clearance process and Gamble wrote a letter to the singer. 

“I sent a little note saying how much the fans of our show talk about ‘exile’ and how meaningful that is,” says Gamble. “I acknowledged that [‘exile’] was a really important addition to the show and that we wanted to pay homage to that [with ‘Anti-Hero’]. And look, we have people in our writers’ room who just show up to work in Taylor Swift T-shirts — true Swifties abound in the You-verse — so we just made a fan appeal, basically.” 

And the rest is history. Or, folklore.