Reindeer games
Donal O’donoghue on the legacy of the most compelling TV shows of the year so far,
OBaby Reindeer
ne of my favourite Ireland’s Own columns from way back was ‘Stranger than Fiction’. Even the querulous title intrigued. What was stranger than ction? Could it simply be fact or was there another realm, a limbo space between fact and ction, where strangeness ruled? And what were the rules of this otherworld? Of course, such thoughts were all at the nether end of my consciousness as I devoured stories which invariably featured ying saucers or haunted houses or haunted ying saucers. And all true. Allegedly.
By now it is very likely that you will have watched or read about (or perhaps done both) Baby Reindeer. In case you’ve been under a rock or abducted by aliens, the seven-part mini-series, based on the true-life events of stand-up comedian, Richard Gadd, involve a serial stalker, a rapist and a comic called Donny Dunn who is a ctional variation of the man who plays him (that’s Gadd in case you’ve lost the thread). Within a week of its April 11 debut, it was the biggest show on Net ix globally. Within two weeks, people were playing amateur detective to unearth who the stalker and rapist might be. Pandora’s box was opened.
Baby R is unsettlingly addictive. e fourth episode comes with a warning: 30 or so minutes where you’re thinking that things can’t get any worse before they do. And the whole season is stamped with that legend which has now almost become devalued, ‘Based on true life events’ (or a variation thereof). e cleverest reworking of the genre, long before it lost its lustre, was the Fargo anthology series, true tales of dark deeds, or so we were warned, set, per the 1996 Oscar-winning lm that inspired it, in the badlands of North Dakota and Minnesota. It wasn’t until a ying saucer made a cameo appearance that I questioned its truthiness. As we said, truth can be stranger than the other thing.
e debates that have swirled in the wake of Baby Reindeer have highlighted a new road for true crime. It has been such that Richard Gadd was compelled to post on Instagram, writing: “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real-life people could be. at’s not the point of our show,”, adding that some of his friends and colleagues were “unfairly getting caught up in speculation.” And yet with such an incendiary story, superbly told and played (apart from Gadd, Jessica Gunning as the stalker, Martha, knocks it out of the park), it was inevitable in the Age of Social that the keyboard detectives would be on the beat. In a way, this taps into its theme where the stalker is stalked, and the show goes on (although one wonders why Gadd wasn’t less speci c with the real-life details). Baby Reindeer has broken the mould but where does it go from here and can we expect a whole ra of baby Baby Reindeers coming in its wake? Is that a good thing?