Netflix’s Current No. 1 Hit Doesn’t Take the Easy Way Out

This post contains spoilers for Baby Reindeer.

What if one small moment of kindness ruined your life? This is the premise of Baby Reindeer, a sleeper hit of a drama-thriller that, seemingly out of nowhere, has skyrocketed to the top of the Netflix charts in the past week and a half. The limited series’ success is something of a surprise for a show created by and starring Richard Gadd, a comedian unknown in the U.S. and only marginally better known in his native U.K. But having watched all seven episodes, I can tell you that Baby Reindeer deserves its word-of-mouth success—it’s very good and very horrible, and a lot less of a comedy than its comic lead might suggest.

Gadd plays Donny, a failing comedian working in a pub. He takes pity on a crying customer at the bar one day and offers her a cup of tea on the house. From here, the customer—a middle-aged woman called Martha, who claims to be a lawyer—goes on to develop an obsession with Donny, whom she calls her “baby reindeer.” Donny initially humors her fixation, grateful for some attention. But eventually, Martha starts to hound him and his loved ones by telephone, over email, and in person, turning up at his gigs to scream abuse at him and sitting for hours at a time at the bus stop outside his house.

I sort of hate the impulse in me that immediately wondered if these events really happened, but I’ve not been the only one. And much of the story really did. The series is based on Gadd’s stage show of the same name and an early one-man show he did called Monkey See, Monkey Do, both of which were drawn directly from his life. Gadd did have a stalker—someone apparently quite different from the series’ Martha—who invaded his life and bombarded him with vast numbers of emails and voicemails. Gadd was also abused by an older man in the comedy industry; both events, in the screen adaptation, unravel and nearly destroy Donny.

The series is a difficult watch, whether or not you’re aware that this all really happened to Gadd. The scenes in which Donny’s abuser drugs and takes advantage of him are painful to sit through. The effect that this abuse has on Donny, coupled with the relentless stalking by Martha, leads to the breakdown of his relationship, and this is painful viewing too. Donny is not always likable, and his self-destructive decisions test the limits of audience sympathy, even though the character is the victim of horrendous circumstances.

But what has stayed with me after the credits rolled is how Baby Reindeer treats Martha herself. She is played by the staggeringly good English actress Jessica Gunning. She’s perfect for the role, with such a lovable baby face that you can understand how Donny could fail to find her threatening enough to immediately distance himself—even when she says things like, for instance, that she wants to unzip people and wear them as coats.

But it would be easy and boring for a show about a stalker to paint the stalker merely as a freakish villain. That’s not what Baby Reindeer does. Martha’s behavior is often frightening and sometimes truly abhorrent: attacking Donny’s girlfriend and ripping out a chunk of her hair, assuming she’s foreign and yelling racist things at her. But Donny, and the series itself, becomes interested in why she might be the way she is. When Donny finally involves the police, partly to protect his parents, whom Martha has also begun to harass, he is told that he needs to first listen to the thousands of deranged voicemails Martha is leaving him. He needs to find evidence of something explicitly threatening before the authorities can take action against her. Donny uncovers this evidence relatively quickly—Martha threatening to physically harm him and his family—and takes this to the police to press charges. But he doesn’t stop listening to the voicemails. He wants to get to the bottom of her.

The culmination of the series sees Donny at his worst ebb. Having agreed to collaborate on a show with his former abuser, he’s on the verge of a panic attack and sitting in a pub, listening to Martha’s voicemails. He opens one he has not previously listened to and presses play. In this voicemail, he finally gets the answer to a question he hadn’t thought to ask: Why has she called him “baby reindeer” all these years? She tells him that a toy baby reindeer, to whom Donny apparently bears an uncanny resemblance, was the only good thing about her childhood. It was the sole positive memory from an otherwise unbearable time. In this moment, Donny realizes that Martha was someone he never understood, and who had suffered enormously—a person who is now in prison because of her (horrific, to be fair) behavior toward him.

Donny begins to cry, and the bartender takes pity on him, offering him his Diet Coke for free, just as Donny had offered Martha the cup of tea. He looks up at the bartender, a strange expression on his face. Is this a moment of Donny recalling that initial cup of tea and the havoc it wreaked on his life? Or does that one look up, the final shot of the series, imply that Donny, like Martha, is also someone who has suffered enormously, and has experienced an act of kindness from a stranger at a vulnerable time? In another life, maybe even this one, could he too become the kind of person who develops an unhealthy attachment to a stranger? This final suggestion—that the protagonist of the series, the person with whom you’ve been asked to empathize over the course of several hours of television, is not so different from the ostensible villain—struck me as a brave and unusual place for the show to go. There but for the grace of God go all of us, and the line that divides the sane from the “insane” is thinner than we would like to think.