Someone told me last week to watch Baby Reindeer. Ugh, I said, must I? Netflix, stalker, crazy woman, blah blah blah. Sounds like another one-dimensional true crime cash-in, a genre I am guilty of partaking in but never feel good about. I am always asking people for television recommendations, which historically I have ignored in favour of compulsively rewatching the American reality series The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. However, I recently quit drinking and therefore have many more hours in the day to fill than before, and am taking up almost all suggestions of any kind. I am antsy, anxious, nervy and odd right now. I have never abstained from drinking for this long in my life. I am also, in a classically newly sober fashion, insatiably hungry for emotional truths in a childish, corny way that has humbled me. In such a mood, I watched the trailer for Baby Reindeer and recognised something in the eyes of both stalker and stalkee that made me stick around. This was different – an important and shattering thing.
Baby Reindeer is a seven-part series on Netflix, starring and written by the comedian Richard Gadd, based upon his real-life experiences. It’s about a stalker – initially, primarily – and then becomes about so many other things, including Gadd’s history of being sexually abused. It is ostensibly the point of art to represent the more difficult, diffuse parts of life, those parts we aren’t able to summarise so easily, but it’s generally easier and more profitable to produce something blandly relatable instead. Not so in this work, which is deeply uncomfortable and totally truthful. Its portrayal of assault and abuse is the first I have seen that successfully captures how truly strange it is to be subject to someone else’s power; how embarrassing it is, and how alien when seen through any external perspective – including, after enough time and distance, your own.
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