AT THE VERY outset of Baby Reindeer, a title card flatly tells the audience that the seven-part series “is a true story”. Since its debut three weeks ago, it’s also become a success the likes of which Netflix hasn’t seen for a while.
Created and starred in by Edinburgh Fringe Festival favourite Richard Gadd, the show is a psychological thriller that tells the story of Gadd’s own experience of being stalked by a female friend and fan, sexually abused by a prominent male writer, and his attempts to navigate these hardships while pursuing his fledgling comedy career.
While Netflix remains notoriously reluctant to publish any actual viewing figures, the explosion of secondary media (social media posts, news reports, threat of legal action) around the show is enough to confirm its magnitude. At the very least, it will join the likes of Making a Murderer and Tiger King as a certifiable cultural “moment,” with many of us surely to someday reflect on the month we spent talking about Baby Reindeer.
For fans of the genre, Baby Reindeer is a high-quality offering – a critical triumph, which have been rather thin on the ground for Netflix lately, and a mainstream success. Jessica Gunning’s performance as Gadd’s stalker Martha rivals that of Kathy Bates in Misery, surely the blueprint for any character that careens so ferociously between adoration and menace.
The only problem is that Martha is not a character. Right? This is a true story, after all. But if Netflix believe that they took sufficient pains to conceal Martha’s true identity, well, they were wrong, to put it mildly. Indeed, the show even details the process by which the fictionalised version of Gadd – who is played by Gadd, in this true story about Gadd – found out about Martha’s own background. The show itself is an acknowledgement of the internet sleuth behaviour that has caused the show’s impact to spiral out of Gadd’s control.
A woman (who denies stalking Gadd and is threatening legal action against Netflix) gave an interview to The Sun this weekend – a Scottish woman whose age and looks both line up with Martha’s, as do her erratic claims about being a lawyer. While the woman admits to having known Gadd, she denies the behaviour shown in Baby Reindeer, which includes claims of 41,000 emails, 350 hours of voicemails and 106 pages of letters sent to Gadd by Martha.
Gadd himself has since sought to stem the tide of viewers seeking to name and shame the villains of the piece (villains to whom the work itself actually shows an incredible amount of empathy).
“Please don’t speculate on who any of the real life people could be. That’s not the point of our show,” said Gadd in a statement issued two weeks after the show was first uploaded to the streaming giant on 11 April. Gadd’s intervention came after another character in the show, a successful writer who sexually abuses Gadd, was misidentified as former BBC producer Sean Foley. Gadd has specified that the character is not based on Foley, and Foley himself has said that all defamatory statements made against him will be reported to the police.
This was an entirely predictable set of circumstances. Netflix’s own 2019 documentary series Don’t F*** With Cats is literally, specifically about how fervent internet sleuths have become in the modern age. There can really be no appeal to ignorance that a story as impactful as Baby Reindeer, billed from the beginning as a series of events faithfully adapted from reality, would ever result in anything besides a hunt for the people behind the characters involved.
Interviews that Gadd gave as Baby Reindeer’s popularity began to spread suggested that the writer saw “breaking the silence” around male victimhood as key to the show’s purpose. Speaking to the Guardian, the 33-year-old said “It’s very emotionally true, obviously: I was severely stalked and severely abused,” but he also noted that he wanted this retelling to “exist in the sphere of art”.
It seems clear then that through Baby Reindeer, Gadd is interested far less in recrimination than he is in giving an honest, tense, nuanced, and blackly funny account of what it’s like when awful things happen.
Unfortunately for Gadd, Netflix as a platform affords a visibility that goes well beyond either the intention or control of whichever poor creative has simply come up with, created, and starred in the thing.
Netflix’s American projects often push the bounds of what some might naively think of as “decency”. American Murder: The Family Next Door, for example, shows video footage taken of Chris Watts in the hours after he murdered his wife and two daughters, including footage of him speculating as to their whereabouts and feigning panic. Even more recently, the platform has been criticised for appearing to use AI to manipulate images in its true crime documentary series What Jennifer Did.
Sensibilities tend to be somewhat more restrained in Ireland and the United Kingdom, though perhaps this is changing as we become increasingly saturated in crime, true crime, and “true crime” content – content that Netflix continues to rely upon in an increasingly challenging market.
Richard Gadd, an experienced comic who has been performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for over 10 years, likely knows that Netflix is part of the problem. It’s also the largest streaming service in the world – the platform that should be perfect for an artist who wants to “break the silence” around the shame of male victimhood.
Netflix is not likely to become a more responsible outlet, meaning that the onus is on us to become more responsible viewers. Learning, somehow, to consume meaningful stories without seeking to insert ourselves, furthering a cycle of recklessness and recrimination that doesn’t serve anyone’s interest. Except maybe the executives at Netflix.
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