It is exceptionally tricky to write a review about a show that deals with things like sexual and emotional abuse, because we live in a very touchy world. But I’m going to try anyway.
Mainly because baby reindeer makes an impression. Love it or hate it (or like me, be somewhere in the middle), but it does make an impression. Every decade has its definitive stalker movie. The 80s had Fatal Attraction, the 90s had Single White Female, and so on. The 2020s will have baby reindeer. The emotional rawness of it alone will guarantee that. Modern day and age thrives on emotional rawness, gorges on it. They want to see people turn themselves inside out and eat up the innards offered. It’s rather disgusting but there it is. And Richard Gadd, the multi-talented writer, director, and star of baby reindeer seems to tap right into that unsavory thirst by offering up this seven-episode creative adaptation of his real-life experience. In the show, Gadd plays Donny Dunn, a twenty-seven-year-old loser who works in a pub, lives at his ex’s mom’s place, and pursues a dream of being a standup comedian. The dream has long gone stale, mainly since Donny isn’t all that funny or good at performing onstage . Donny is lovely and sad, and then he meets Martha. Martha is an obviously severely unhinged woman, yet he is so desperate for attention that he continues to encourage her. Martha is in her early forties, morbidly obese, and obviously a liar. None of that seems to give him much of a pause. When Martha’s attention finally turns psychotic, with countless horrendously spelled emails a day, Donny still do much about it. Only when Martha violently attacks Donny’s love interest, does he go to the police, but the way he does it almost guarantees they will not take action. Eventually, Martha moves on to disturbing his parents, which prompts another half-assed attempt of his to stop her. And you know why he endures all of it? As it turns, it’s because he’s dealing with a lot of shame from being groomed and raped five years ago by a male TV producer and his subsequent struggles with his sexuality, which include being uncomfortable with his unbelievably awesome trans girlfriend wonderfully played by Nava Mau. Donny never quite processes his feelings or confronts his abuser. The best he can manage is eventually having a full (and videoed) breakdown onstage which is actually a viable alternative to his crappy comedy. In the end, despite the enormous amount of support, love, and acceptance in his life from his parents, girlfriend, and even his ex and her mom, he still ends up running everything from his relationship to his mental state to his finances. He’s just that weak of a person, which is tragic but also blatantly obvious, completely content (and even actively encouraging) the awful experiences in his life to overwhelm the rest. Which is to say … not a particularly sympathetic character. Is he meant to be? I’m not sure. It’s unusual to have that compelling of a show full of that many terrible people. Donny’s girlfriend is awesome. His parents are pretty great. But most of the show is devoted to him and Martha and their peculiar but definitely mutual obsession. They are these two wretched abused messes that perpetuate the cycle of their abuse on each other. It stands to mention that while it is hinted that Martha was perhaps abused by her parents, Donny was in fact a twenty-two-year-old adult when he got groomed and raped. It was a protracted process, and he went along with it the entire time, coming back for more and more because he was so desperate for fame he thought the man might offer him. Far be it from me to blame the victim, but Donny certainly makes it difficult to sympathize with him. Only in the very end does he finally go to confront his abuser … and ends up having a lovely cuppa instead, leaving with a promise of a potential job. Nor does he ever name the man who has ruined him so in public. So not a confrontation at all. No closure. Nothing. He does manage to put Martha behind bars. Something Gadd did not do in real life because he thought it was wrong to lock up a mentally disturbed person. But is it any sort of a triumph for him? Absolutely not. He is a complete mess, alone, unemployed. Pathetic really, if you cared enough about him. A lot of people in the show do, mostly women, seemingly unconditionally. This is difficult to explain because he does basically look like a baby reindeer. And also weirdly old for his age and definitely old for his character. Throw in factors like broke, sexually, confused, severely in need of a good haircut, all=around failure, etc. and he doesn’t make for much outside of maybe a pet project. Which in a way makes it all the more interesting how watchable the show with a protagonist like that is. I give all the credit to Gadd here, unlike his character, he is genuinely talented. The writing especially is terrific. Worth checking out, this show is certainly one of the smarter, more original things on Netflix. Though they do set the bar low.
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