What you missed about Netflix hit Baby Reindeer

Disturbing Netflix hit show Baby Reindeer is hard to watch. The fallout has been spectacular and it is about to get so much worse.

I have much in common with writer of surprise runaway Netflix hit Baby Reindeer, Richard Gadd.

For starters, we both probably think we’re funnier than we actually are.

The show, in which Gadd stars as the lead, depicts his failed comedy career and terrible jokes as the backdrop to the main story, which is even less funny: he’s being stalked by a woman he serves while working as a barman in Camden pub, The Hawley Arms.

The subplot is equally unfunny: he’s being groomed and sexually assaulted by a powerful executive in the comedy industry.

The gripping show sells itself as “a true story”. No “based on” caveats are given.

Excerpts from the 100 letters and 41,000 emails, suspiciously “sent from my iphoen” are, Netflix has claimed, verbatim quotes from his alleged female stalker.

Richard Gadd (L) as Donny in the Netflix TV series Baby Reindeer. Picture: Supplied

This “true story” started its life as an Edinburgh Fringe show. Gadd found, when he dropped the laboured jokes and simply spoke his truth, people, finally, flocked. Then Netflix offered a deal.

Like Gadd, in August last year, I wrote and starred in my own Edinburgh Fringe one-man autobiographical show, The Psychic Tests.

Like Gadd’s, it depicted real life people including my sister, my bereaved friend and several real psychics who I critique heavily for exploiting my sister’s grief.

In the show, I discuss the death of our father. I use verbatim theatre, character-driven scenes, poignant narration and my unique brand of humour to, at times, mercilessly mock the psychics and their grand claims.

Like Gadd, I mined my own trauma to create a show for the public to view and like Gadd, I took a complex subject (his: stalking and abuse; mine: grief and belief) and explored the nuance by telling a real life story.

The story of my show trod equally fragile territory: my sister got hooked on mediums after our dad’s sudden, relatively early death.

Jessica Gunning, Richard Gadd, and Nava Mau attend the photocall for Netflix's "Baby Reindeer" at DGA Theater Complex on May 07, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. Picture: Monica Schipper/Getty Images

So, I sought them out as a hardcore, dismissive sceptic to see what the fuss was about and discover how easily they could seduce and exploit even rational-minded, secular people.

Just as Gadd finds counterintuitive sympathy for his stalker, I find surprising compassion for some of the psychic enthusiasts.

It’s not at all easy to go out, day after day, competing with hundreds of other shows, and relentlessly promote and flyer your own show on Edinburgh’s famed Royal Mile.

Then, when you’re performing night after night, sometimes to just a handful of hungover people, you could only dream of your story getting out to the sheer volume of numbers Baby Reindeer is currently playing to on Netflix around the world.

I can just imagine how wooed Gadd felt when the streaming platform made him an offer to adapt his autobiographical one man show.

But things have taken a nasty, and, frankly, altogether predictable turn.

On Friday morning Australian time, a woman purporting to be the real “Martha” in the series — Fiona Harvey — gave an interview to Piers Morgan.

In the should-look-away-but-can’t highly uncomfortable interview, she says she’s “horrified” by what Gadd has done which, she claims, is to have wildly exaggerated their sparse interactions.

Richard Gadd as Donny in the Netflix TV series Baby Reindeer. Picture: Supplied

She vehemently denies stalking him and plans to sue both him and Netflix.

What’s less predictable is what’ll happen next. Gadd could be proven to have passed off generous artistic licence as a stone cold true story; making him the fantasist, not her.

His claims could be proven to hold some truth and things could turn really nasty.

The most disconcerting outcome is that Fiona Harvey could — and probably will — be invited onto reality TV shows.

I’d imagine TV producers are already preparing their invitations. How do I know this? Because they’re the same type of unscrupulous TV producers who opened this can of worms.

If my one man quasi-autobiographical show were to be similarly adapted, I’d insist on due diligence.

My sister would sign off every word, as she did with my book (which I adapted into the show) and we’d rigorously anticipate how the psychics may react.

On day one, I’d ask to meet the platform’s compliance team and ensure we met our obligations: legally and ethically, in addition to the obligations to the audience: robust storytelling principles to keep them gripped.

Here’s the thing: nobody is coming off well from this. But to blame the viewing audience is intellectually dishonest.

Gadd implored people not to sleuth and speculate. But that seems wilfully naive. It’s human nature to be curious in this way, and is in no way comparable to stalking behaviours for those saying such viewers “missed the point of the show”. They were literally led and coaxed there, reeled in by the mystery.

Netflix commissioners knew all this. It seems that they just didn’t care. They just want viewers.

Policy Chief Benjamin King told MPs that Netflix and the production company, Clerkenwell Films, had taken “every reasonable precaution in disguising the real-life identities of the people involved in that story”.

Gary Nunn and Richard Gadd have a bit in common. Picture: Supplied

If that’s the case, why has Fiona Harvey been found and named so quickly?

Reputations are being harmed. Richard Gadd should have seen this all coming a country mile off; of course Fiona Harvey wants — and deserves — a right of reply. Piers Morgan wants the views too. There have been 10.4 million at the time of writing.

The shame is the injustice this does to quasi-memoir storytellers like me and Gadd. The thoughtful, radical empathy he found for his stalker in the show is undermined by how scant diligence was done for if her real identity were to be revealed.

“Take your broken heart; make it into art,” the late Carrie Fisher advised - her autobiographical one woman show, Wishful Drinking, inspired mine.

Thanks to this f*** up, new quasi memoir writers may be warned against such instruction.

Gary Nunn is a journalist and author. He’s on X. Visit his free Substack here.