Just about all of human frailty is here in the seven episodes of Baby Reindeer. Most are just half an hour long but so densely packed with emotional drama, so unrelentingly focused on awful truths about the ways we act and the ways we fail ourselves and each other, that if it were any longer you could hardly bear it.
Written, created by and starring Richard Gadd, the Netflix drama is based on the acclaimed one-man play he wrote about being stalked online and in real life by a woman called Martha. On screen, he plays unsuccessful comedian Donny Dunn and the part of Martha is taken by Jessica Gunning. Both performances are astonishing (and won Emmys) in an increasingly complex story that begins with Donny, in his day job as a bartender, taking pity on Martha when she comes into the pub upset and without money one fateful afternoon, giving her a free drink and letting her spin him not entirely convincing tales about being a high flying lawyer. Soon, she is in the pub every day and deluging him with emails when they are apart – some fantastical, some lustful, some simply complimentary about him. But he, at some level, likes (wants, needs? Baby Reindeer rarely allows you to settle definitely on a verb) the attention, even from someone as obviously unstable as Martha, whom Gunning makes vicious, vulgar and vulnerable by turns, though each only puts us more in touch with her damage and her humanity.
The drama deepens into a harrowingly detailed interrogation of the multitudinous weird and unwonderful ways we can mistreat each other and why we do so. It is an intense, dark, raw creation whose success you can only hope has paid Gadd back for what it must have cost him to write and perform. Every episode strips away another layer of characters’ facades, leading us towards ever messier truths. The pivotal, and particularly harrowing, fourth episode confronts the power of unresolved traumas to shape us and our responses not just immediately but for years and years after.
It is so much else as well – there are moments when you feel almost overwhelmed by the number of issues it is juggling (without ever dropping the ball on any of them), and grateful that we live in an age where immediate repeat viewings are possible. It’s a rare study of male sexual assault and its effects on a victim’s perceived masculinity, an examination of the corrosive nature of loneliness, of ambition, of how damaged people can find solace in each other and whether it must always lead to greater damage in the end, the tentacular creep of co-dependency. And of course it is an acute rendering of the suffering – the paranoia, suffocating oppression, marrow-deep fear – caused by the attentions of a relentless stalker. Even as we are asked to query how much Donny is culpable in his own misery, for enjoying the attention at first, for not reporting her earlier, for turning back obsessively to the material she has left him after the legal system eventually cuts off his supply, the underlying horror is always there.
Baby Reindeer is such a sensitive and courageous piece of work, in both form (refusing to give us a happy ending – a distant note of cautious hope is all we get) and content. And although of course it is Gadd’s story, Donny is never the hero and Martha never the villain. Both are examined with a pitiless eye.
Its achievements have been in danger of being overshadowed by the real-life drama that followed its release. Netflix – apparently against Gadd’s wishes – opened the first episode with the bald statement: “This is a true story”. Viewers quickly took to the internet and identified Scottish lawyer Fiona Harvey as Gadd’s supposed stalker, which produced exactly the effects you might expect. Harvey filed a defamation suit against Netflix which a judge ruled could go forward, essentially on the ground that the words “This is a true story” might well have led viewers to think everything in the story was true, when in fact certain key events – like Martha being sentenced to five years in prison for stalking – manifestly were not.
But let’s keep the real-life fallout separate from the art. Baby Reindeer is a punishing, troubling, beautifully nuanced and constructed thing, thought-provoking and valuable in a way few offerings are in any medium. It remains a fine testament to what can be achieved on the small screen, if only you have the courage to try it and the talent to pull it off.
