Since its premier just a little under a month ago, it’s been hard to avoid the buzz surrounding Netflix’s new black comedy limited series ‘Baby Reindeer’. The show soared to the number one spot on Netflix’s Top 10 Watch List and received an impressive 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, with over 22 million people having watched it already. Many factors could potentially play into its soaring popularity. For example, it has a unique, fast paced filming style that makes the series incredibly bingeable. Could it also be due to its gripping, dramatic storyline? Or perhaps it’s because most people feel connected to the fact that the characters and the story depicted are all very much true.  

Comedian and writer Richard Gadd plays the protagonist “Donny”, a young Scot who works as a bartender in a Camden pub, all while trying to make it big on the London comedy scene. Not only does Gadd play the charismatic lead but it turns out ‘Baby Reindeer’ is all based on his own life; he basically plays himself. This detail is impressive on its own, yet if you watched the show and you know how disturbing and heartbreaking things get for ‘Donny’, knowing that Gadd is reliving this trauma is almost unbelievable. 

Gadd is supported by actress Jessica Gunning who plays ‘Martha’, a 40-year-old woman who claims to be a top lawyer, working for some the country’s high-profile politicians. She encounters Donny after entering the pub he works at with a somber look on her face. Taking pity on Martha, Donny offers her a cup of tea on the house. This simple, now infamous, act of kindness is the trigger point for the rest of the story that unfolds. Martha quickly becomes infatuated with Donny and proceeds to obsess and stalk him over a five-year period. 

Each episode, which averages at 35 minutes, gets darker as Martha’s stalking becomes more intense. She goes from having a harmless banter-centered relationship with Donny as a ‘regular’ in the pub, to abusing his girlfriend for being the ‘other-woman’ in the fictious sexual relationship that she has created between herself and Donny. 

Baby Reindeer may be a depiction of a true-story stalking case, but it is not a villain and victim story. Before it was adapted into a Netflix phenomenon, the story was told as a one man show. Back in 2019, Gadd said: “It would be unfair to say she was an awful person and I was a victim. That didn’t feel true.” 

Backtracking to why I think Baby Reindeer has gained such immense popularity in such a short time period, I believe it’s because an audience loves to feel connected to what they watch on screen. It’s what makes a show so watchable. However, in this case, not only can fans watch and feel immersed in the drama as if they are the ones being stalked, but they also have power to find out more about the people that the characters are so closely based on.  

Tension continues to unfold online as internet sleuths have slowly managed to uncover the identity of Martha, or so the woman that they believe the character to be based on. From X (formerly Twitter) to Facebook, people have been ruthlessly and ironically “stalking” a number of women that they believe to have links to Gadd. The irony of the viewers turning to stalking and investigating themselves is almost laughable but is something that Gadd has had to address himself. Gadd took to Instagram to shut down the chances of the characters’ real identities being revealed. He stated:  “Please don’t speculate on who the real-life people could be. That’s not the point of our show.”  

Others online are jumping at Gadd, suggesting he should’ve put more effort into making the identity of the perpetrators even more anonymous than he already did. But at what point does that blur the lines between telling his story or telling a fictional one? It’s hard to control the lengths that audiences go to, to connect further with the media, after having watched content. So, as much as Gadd could have tried to hide the identities of those involved, there will always be people who do deeper digging.  

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