The television series You begins with your typical “meet cute”. A girl named Beck walks into Manhattan bookstore, and bonds with the handsome, intellectual clerk over shared literary tastes. The scene is set for happily ever after.

Except You isn’t a romantic show, or not in the traditional sense. As we learn, the clerk, Joe Goldberg (Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley) is a delusional, potentially violent misogynist who stalks Beck while trying to win her heart.

If it sounds dark and twisted, it is, but the writer behind it, Sera Gamble, stresses it’s not only that. “It’s just a sweet little love story… only kidding. It’s really not,” she jokes. She says You, which debuted in America in the autumn to rave reviews and airs on Netflix from December 26, is “Dexter meets 500 Days of Summer” an examination of “the true story underneath the love story”.

Based on Caroline Kepnes’ bestselling novel, You has been in development for several years. Gamble was working on post-production when the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke — there’s a blink and you’ll miss it reference in an early episode — and although the themes of male privilege and predatory behaviour would resonate at any time, #metoo certainly makes You timely.

“We realised we could take advantage, that it would be something people understood, but this is a conversation that has been going long before any of us were born,” says Gamble, 35. “There’s nothing new about toxic masculinity, or about the weird, dangerous stuff between men and women.”

Having written and produced shows including vampire drama Supernatural and detective series Aquarius, Gamble was keen to tackle such a meaty subject. You, she suggests, works because it gets under the skin of things that are nearly universally frightening to women, “as simple as that you are not safe in your home or walking down the street, that a guy can seem nice but might be less than trustworthy.”

While “a lot of flagrantly stupid stuff happens” in the show, which is as much satire as it is drama, as a modern woman, Beck (Elizabeth Lail) has no choice but to put herself out there in life and on social media, leaving herself vulnerable. “It’s always pretty much impossible for women to be perfectly safe. This is just a new way to talk about that.”

Growing up, Gamble was told “equality had been achieved, feminism had done its job, and that if an individual women needed to complain or point out something disturbing she might be perceived as particularly sensitive or unusual.” In the last few years, propelled by the presidential election and #metoo, she thinks that has shifted and there is now “a basic set of facts that we are agreeing upon” about relationships.

The daughter of parents who fled Soviet Poland after the antisemitic purges of the late 60s and early 70s, Gamble grew up in Cincinnati and then California, attending Jewish day school. She was a bookish child — “that girl in the class who wrote a little more than she had to” — and her family’s experiences weighed heavily.

“They are the generation that came exactly on the heels of the Holocaust, both of their families survived by fleeing Poland and then returned,” she says. “The deep contemplation of my family has always been that the Holocaust really happened to us, we lost a huge amount of the family tree on both sides.”

Today, living in Los Angeles, she describes herself as culturally Jewish “in a way I couldn’t get rid of if I wanted to, It’s a major part of what makes me me. It influences a lot about the way I see the world.”

Her cultural Judaism came to the fore when she co-ran a blog called Very Hot Jews, born over a bunch of cocktails with a friend. “We were a little tipsy and joking about who best to raise your Jewish child than two drunk Jews with no children. From there we just started writing funny personal things.”

In her early 20s she dabbled with acting, then started writing material for herself. It’s been a fairly gilded path ever since. You came about after producing supremo Greg Berlanti (whose credits include Dawson’s Creek and Supergirl) read the book and sent her a copy. Gamble knew the material would work instantly.

“I was just a few pages in when I was like ‘I get it’ because you are deep inside the uncensored thoughts of this guy Joe, and there’s something so intriguing about that,” she enthuses. “But at the same time you become aware he’s not a very reliable narrator and he has a very skewed world view, and you’ve been along for not exactly the ride you thought you were. I like that element of surprise.”

Joe’s inner monologue is in turn funny and creepy; he sighs at Beck’s casual attitude to privacy while seeking to exploit it. “There’s something universally compelling about wanting to get underneath a person’s exterior,” she says, “I might be paranoid but I walk through the world sort of side eying people who really seem to have things together, I always wonder what they’re really thinking. I’m not surprised people make TV shows about that.”

The show satirises the social media era in particular; Joe stalks Beck, not by following her home (although he does that too) but by tracking her movements online, including her perfectly curated Instagram. Having spent a few years immersed in influencer culture for research, Gamble’s view is that “social media is just the lamest thing humans have got their hands on”. That said, she sees it as part of human nature. “The first caveman who told an exaggerated story about the hunt is doing the same thing we do now when we post flattering photos of ourselves on Instagram,” she jokes.

Joe Goldberg is so named because it’s a generic name. “In the book he’s half Jewish on his father’s side,” says Gamble. “Caroline said first in her mind was to give him a name that was really hard to Google. Because it’s so common, it feeds into the ways that he hides in plain sight and can move through the world online and in real life with ease.” As somebody who is Jewish “and notices this stuff” it stuck out. “I don’t usually read or see a character like this who is behaving this way who just happens to be identified with a Jewish name.”

Filming is about to begin on series two, and Gamble is hopeful You will survive beyond that. “We hope we get to keep telling the story, we have lots of ideas for the third season,” she says. She is also executive producer for sci fi series The Magicians, which is going into series five.

Meanwhile, she is developing many TV projects and is set to marry her long term partner. “We thought we were too artistic to do something as mundane as get married but it turns out we’re not, so in addition to doing two TV shows I’m planning a small wedding” she laughs. Writing about bad romance, it seems, hasn’t put her off her own Hollywood ending.