Why Baby Reindeer Is the Best Thing Streaming Right Now

Netflix Baby Reindeer, created by and starring Richard Gadd, is based on the comedian real experience of being stalked and its connection to his own trauma as a sexual assault survivor. The seven-episode limited series is one of the most uncomfortably honest pieces of television ever made.

Before it was television it was a one-man show. Gadd performed Baby Reindeer at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019 and then transferred it to the Bush Theatre in London, staged on a near-bare set against a wall of recorded voicemails. He had already worked the same seam in Monkey See Monkey Do, which he performed while running on a treadmill for the entire hour and which won the main Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2016. The Netflix series is the third pass at this material. That is why it lands with such control.

Gadd plays Donny Dunn, a struggling comedian who gives a free cup of tea to Martha, played by Jessica Gunning, a woman who then becomes obsessively fixated on him. The show depicts how Donny inability to set boundaries stems from deeper psychological wounds.

Gunning performance as Martha is extraordinary precisely because it generates empathy for a character who is genuinely dangerous. You understand Martha loneliness and delusion even as her behavior escalates.

The sexual assault narrative is handled with devastating specificity. Gadd does not depict trauma as a single dramatic event but as an ongoing process of confusion, self-blame, and delayed recognition.

Episode four is where the series stops being about Martha. It runs a little over half an hour and deals almost entirely with Darrien, the television writer played by Tom Goodman-Hill, who grooms and drugs Donny across months. It is the hardest thirty minutes of the seven and it arrives with very little warning. Watch it when you have somewhere to put the rest of your evening, not at midnight before work.

What makes Baby Reindeer revolutionary is its rejection of traditional victim narratives. Donny is not blameless. He makes terrible decisions, hurts people he cares about, and sometimes seeks out the very dynamics that damage him.

The series opens with a card reading This is a true story, and that choice has been expensive. A Scottish woman named Fiona Harvey identified herself publicly as the basis for Martha and sued Netflix in a US court in 2024. Netflix told a UK parliamentary committee that it had taken care to disguise real identities. However the case resolves, it is a live argument about how far a writer can go with a real person while still calling the result true.

The seven episodes total about three and a half hours, so this is two evenings rather than a commitment. It took Outstanding Limited Series at the 2024 Emmys, along with lead actor and writing for Gadd and supporting actress for Gunning. If you want the nearest comparison in tone, watch I May Destroy You, which does something similar with a real assault and a narrator you cannot fully trust.

Stream on Netflix at https://www.netflix.com/title/81219923.

Baby Reindeer is essential because it does something television almost never does: it tells an uncomfortable truth without flinching. If you have the emotional bandwidth, it is one of the most important series of the decade.