Karen Minty may have survived ‘You,’ but she still got shafted

A lot of people have been talking about You. It’s hard not to. Ever since the show moved from Lifetime to Netflix and thus was made available for binge-watching, the ballsy dramedy about a homicidally obsessed bookstore manager and the unremarkable bore he follows until she loves him has sparked conversations about toxic masculinity, rom-com tropes, and how completely fucking awful every single character on the show is. 

All but one. No, not Peach Salinger. She sucks too. The only remotely likeable person on You is Karen Minty. 

Karen Minty has the unfavorable luck to be the rebound girlfriend protagonist and stalker-psychopath Joe dates after Beck, the true object of his dangerous obsession, dumps him. Karen is everything Beck isn’t, which is to say she’s an interesting, self-assured woman with a job and readily observable positive qualities. 

In the short 45 minutes that showcase Karen as a character, she is an excellent girlfriend to Joe (who, just as a reminder, is an irredeemable murderer). She organizes his books, she helps him take care of his young neighbor Paco, and she literally saves her friend Claudia’s life while Joe hops off a dock to have gross ferry bench sex with Beck.

When Beck, high off whatever infidelitous fumes fuel her misplaced superiority complex, comes for Karen at a party, she fails at putting a single dent in Karen’s self-confidence. Karen is composed. Karen is elegant. And Beck still wins the guy (horrible guy, but bear with me) with a few blonde lady tears. 

In the grand scheme of You, Karen is the luckiest character on the show. Joe dumps her, she takes it well, she gets the last word with both Joe and Beck and more importantly, she survives Joe’s murderous impulses. But it’s still hard to stomach the way her character is treated in her mini-arc. Karen’s survival is predicated less on her getting lucky and more on her being considered boring and expendable compared to the allegedly fascinating pairing of Joe and Beck.

Karen is subject to denigration from every corner of You from the moment she shows up. Joe treats her well enough as a boyfriend, but his internal monologue reveals that while he is with her, he’s looking at Beck’s social media. He refers to Beck as his drug and Karen as his “methadone,” reducing her to an object he’s using to wean himself off the thing he actually wants. By the time Beck shows up drunk at a party and calls her “Little Karen Minty,” Karen would be well within her rights to wind her arm back and slap the shit out of pretty much everyone in the room — and yet she doesn’t. 

Yes, it’s the point of the show that Joe and Beck are both destructive people on wildly different levels, but it’s still fucked up that one of the only characters of color on the show and specifically a black woman is treated like a means to an end. While Karen is clearly a better person than anyone else in Joe’s immediate social circle, she maintains the status of a consolation prize compared to the golden, shining shitbird that is Guinevere Beck. 

While Karen is clearly a better person than anyone else in Joe’s immediate social circle, she maintains the status of a consolation prize compared to the golden, shining shitbird that is Guinevere Beck. 

Even the writers don’t seem to know exactly what to do with Karen Minty. In the scene where Joe breaks up with her, she unceremoniously packs her things and silently prepares to leave his apartment. It’s honestly kind of a badass move, until at the last minute she pauses and remembers to grab her curling iron from his bathroom. 

There is no universe under the sun where a black woman with natural hair, as Karen is, would keep a curling iron in her boyfriend’s bathroom. It’s unlikely as hell that she would have one at all. That one line reeks of the possibility that whoever wrote that line was not thinking at all of the realities of a black character’s hair and just…kept the line in there after casting the beautiful and naturally coiffed Natalie Paul. 

It’s common for black women characters to be treated as inconsequential or lesser than the white protagonists or love interests on their respective shows. The Good Place started out Season 3 by introducing Simone, a smart and well-matched black love interest for lead character Chidi Anagonye and completely phased her out in favor of pairing Chidi with Eleanor, who may or may not be his “real” soulmate. More egregiously, Fox’s Sleepy Hollow teased a romance between its leads Ichabod Crane and Abbie Mills for three seasons before killing her off (and dooming the show to explore even further depths of mediocrity before its cancelation).

It’s not enough for a show like You to simply have black characters and love interests when those characters are pawns in their own narrative. It’s fucked up for writers to not consider the optics of marking their black love interests as more expendable or less worthy than their white ones, even with the context that in You, nobody should be dating Joe at all. 

Now that both of the black women on the show are out of the picture and dead, respectively, it’s up to You to course-correct in its second season with regards to how it treated Karen Minty. Karen deserved better than Joe, but she also deserved better than to be seen as second-best by a second-rate sociopath. She really was the only character on the show worth rooting for. Give Ms. Minty her props.