If you’re a fellow Penn Badgley fan, we’ve got bad news for both you and You – the Netflix hit’s latest season has gotten some pretty rough reviews. 

The Guardian called season five’s ending “insultingly rubbish,” The Standard blasted its “truly terrible dialogue,” and IGN dubbed it “taxing television.”

So why can’t some of us stop watching it?

A family member of mine unflinchingly followed the news that she’d binge-watched the latest series in two nights with the verdict “it was crap,” as if the two admissions were unrelated. Friends have expressed similar views. 

Still, You is in good (or kind of bad, or good-bad, or so bad it’s good) company.

Twilight, lambasted for how both its books and movies were written, nonetheless had teen girls and adult women alike hooked; more recently, Colleen Hoover’s much-mocked prose has made publishers millions. 

So, I reached out to experts to find out why we can’t put bad writing down.

“It’s a McDonald’s of the mind”

Carl Schoenfield, award-winning film producer, BAFTA voting member, teacher at the University of Oxford, and founder of the Online Screenwriting Academy, tells HuffPost UK that “Great writing is only one of the attractions of a film or show. 

“In many cases, we can be drawn to a world that we want to spend time in and want to know more about (A Minecraft Movie), spend more time dazzling characters (Transformers) or a style (Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, Prometheus).” 

Most directors can make good work from a great script, he adds, but to truly show their mettle, “they need to make a good movie from a bad script.”

Dr Wes Brown, a lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, adds that ‘bad’ writing frees us from the “realism” often lauded in Western art.

“Its stylised dialogue, implausible scenarios and general glorying in well-worn tropes and stock characters help transport us to a different realm of mental escapism, beyond the rep-tape of the more piously realistic stories and the arduous realism of our own lives,” he suggests. 

“It allows us free license to play in an imaginarium of the unserious,” and allows us to “revel in the ridiculous as another meta layer of enjoyment.”

Meanwhile, Julia Bell, a writer and reader in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, says it’s all down to our instincts. 

“I think it’s worth thinking about the ways in which suspense works on a neurobiological level – it creates a kind of tingle of anxiety.

“And as long as we want to know what happens next, the rest of the art – good characterisation, a sense of place, an interesting proposition or question – gets lost in the propulsive race to ensure character survival,” she tells us.

“It’s a cheap but effective trick. But it’s a bit of a McDonald’s of the mind – easy to consume but ultimately not very satisfying.” 

Expect more bad writing 

Dr Jules O’Dwyer, a Teaching Associate in Film Studies and French at the University of Cambridge, tells us that while “certain communities (particularly queer and subcultural audiences) would revel in the perverse pleasures of hammy acting, and conspicuous failures of artistry and expression,” that “camp” writing isn’t what most of us mean when we call a show or book “bad”.

He adds: “What we are encountering on screen is, of course, shaped by labour and material conditions.

“We are in a moment in which the labour force of Britain’s TV industry is contracting. In these moments, we tend to see a more conservative approach toward commissioning, one in which writers are less likely to take creative risks, and there is a privileging of quantity over quality. At these moments, writing tends to suffer.” 

In other words, it’s probably good if you enjoy bad writing – we might be set to see a lot more of it.