Baby Reindeer, the true story of the comedian and stalker from the Netflix series

Six years of stalking, 41,071 emails, 744 tweets and 350 hours of voicemails. It is by drawing on his true story that Richard Gadd created Baby Reindeer, the new Netflix series, which is leading the chart of the week around the world on the platform, with a further increase of 66% after the record of +406% achieved last week.

What it later became Baby Reindeer (which takes its name from one of the nicknames that his stalker gave him), at the beginning it was a theater show that Gadd, a Scottish writer, actor and comedian, born in 1989, brought on stage in Edinburgh. And which plays on the suffering and unhealthy relationship between the actor – who becomes “Donny” – and Martha, played by Jessica Gunning, who inserts herself inextricably into the fabric of her life and begins to disintegrate it. His already lackluster career as a comedian is put in jeopardy by the woman, who sneaks into her shows, her job at the pub is put at risk, and his budding relationship with Teri, a trans woman he met online, is significantly hindered.

Neither Donny nor Martha, however, are portrayed as entirely victims or entirely perpetrators. “Stalking is a mental dysfunction, it's an illness,” Gadd explained to GQ. «I felt I was dealing with a vulnerable, mentally ill person, who couldn't stop because he believed in what he had in mind.” The narration is «extremely truthful on an emotional level. Of course, this is a medium where structure is important: you need to change things to protect people, but I like to think, artistically, that it has never strayed too far from the truth.” In reality, Martha «was a rather eccentric person. We did everything to disguise it. What has been borrowed is an emotional truth, not the profile of a person”.

Episode four

In episode four, the rawest and darkest, Baby Reindeer describes in detail his experience as victim of sexual assault by Darrien, the writer of one of his favorite shows, who pretends to take him under his wing, promising him a successful career as a comedian, but in reality uses drugs as a means of manipulation to make him vulnerable both physically and emotionally. There is a profound dichotomy between the conscious intentionality of the aggressor, Darrien, and the involuntary compulsiveness of Martha, whose behavior arose from deep vulnerability.

This episode answers the question the viewer has been asking throughout the first three: why is Donny humoring Martha? Why this strange indulgence? Here we also understand why Donny can't bear the fact that he falls in love with Teri: if Darrien hadn't attacked him, maybe he wouldn't be so confused about everything to lie even to himself. And we understand why he has needing a person like Martha, who sees him as he wants to be seen, who supports his heteronormativity.

«I think that was the most truthful part of the whole show. Abuse creates psychological damage as well as physical damage. Leave a footprint. There's a pattern to why many people who have been abused feel that they need their abusers. The episode shows something that has never been seen before on television, which is, unfortunately, the deeply rooted, negative psychological effects of the attachment you can sometimes have with someone who abuses you.”