Reindeer games are darkly brilliant
In the last few months, I've pivoted this column away from Netflix and towards some interesting lesser-known platforms where you can find great films and shows.
But, once in a while, that big red N turns up on something so good I can't ignore it. And Baby Reindeer is one of those.
In 2016, Richard Gadd was just one more not-very-good comedian at Edinburgh Festival Fringe. His routine was self-conscious, his material wasn't funny, and Gadd's foray to Scotland seemed to end with the train back to London and the resumption of his work as a barman.
And then, into Gadd's life walked a woman who we will come to know as Martha. Martha was upset and alone, and didn't have the price of a drink.
Gadd took sympathy and shouted her a cup of tea. Martha immediately perked up and began to regale Gadd with stories of the fabulous life she led as a wellconnected corporate lawyer.
It was nonsense of course. Gadd knew that – and Martha perhaps knew that he knew, but a bond of friendship was established. Unfortunately, that wasn't where it ended.
Martha became obsessed with Gadd and began to appear at the pub every day. She found out where he lived and what his social media presence was.
Over the next six months, Martha sent Gadd 40,000 messages and emails, wrote him letters, bought him unwanted gifts and waited for him to walk past every morning and night at a bus stop near his house.
She abused Gadd's ex-partner and then physically attacked a woman he had begun to date. Eventually the police were involved and the stalking and harassment was finally halted.
It had been a terrifying ordeal that scarred everybody involved. Including, in her own damaged and needy way, Martha.
In the following year Gadd took these real-life events and shaped them into a piece of theatre he unleashed on Edinburgh in 2019.
Anyone who attended hoping for stand-up comedy was in for a shock, but the people who commission programmes for Netflix thought there was something in Gadd’s hour-long show that could be expanded and adapted to screen. Baby Reindeer, told over seven mostly half-hour episodes, is the result.
Early in Baby Reindeer, we see Gadd – named "Donnie" in this telling – go to a police station and report that he is being stalked. The policeman asks him how long this has been happening and Donnie answers, six months.
‘‘Why did you take so long to report it?’’ asks the policeman.
Baby Reindeer waits until episode four to answer that question. By then we have probably gleaned enough to realise Gadd hasn’t been telling us the whole story, about why such a seemingly bright and sensitive man should have been living such a reduced and anxiety-ridden life. And so in episode four, we travel back to Edinburgh, before Martha arrived, to meet Donnie the desperate stand-up comic again.
We see Donnie bombing every night at the pub full of disinterested locals who are his audience.
We watch as he is approached by an assured older guy, who claims to be a successful writer and who wouldn’t mind paying for the drinks, laying out a few lines of speed, and perhaps taking the struggling younger man under his wing. The show is unflinching about what happened next.
Baby Reindeer is clear-eyed and hypnotically watchable story-telling.
The story may be fictionalised, but there isn't a false note across all seven episodes.
The script refuses to paint Martha as a villain or Donnie as her innocent victim. There is a queasy symbiosis about their shared dependency, and the show doesn't shy away from it.
Gadd plays Donnie himself, and is very good. But the performance that blows Baby Reindeer through the roof is Jessica Gunning as Martha.
Gunning’s Martha is wheedling and occasionally terrifying, although the performance never slips into parody or theatrics. She is a credible and human character, taking refuge within a monster.
Most ‘based on a true story’ shows I can live without, but Baby Reindeer is an exceptional piece of work.
Baby Reindeer is available now on Netflix. There is also a very good ‘Behind the scenes’ special on YouTube that is worth watching.