Baby Reindeer transcends its trauma drama and succeeds as art

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Have you reached the twist in the fourth episode of Baby Reindeer? Where you realize that this series about a stalker is actually a complex, empathic exploration of the after-effects of trauma? (Its popularity has increased weekly since it landed on Netflix Apr. 11, I suspect because viewers who finished it have been encouraging algebraic numbers of newbies to stick out their discomfort and get to Episode 4.) Well, I hope you’ve seen it, because here come the spoilers.

First, some context. You can’t turn on your TV these days without tripping on a trauma. This is not a new phenomenon – Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag took us there back in 2016; so did Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette (2018) and Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You (2020) – but it feels ubiquitous now.

On Sugar (AppleTV+), an aspiring actor reluctantly explains to the titular private detective (Colin Farrell) how being sexually harassed and intimidated by a bigwig producer’s vile adult son has affected her and dozens of other women. In The Veil (Disney+), we infer that Imogen (Elisabeth Moss) became an MI6 agent – her specialty is working with vulnerable women – because she was abused in the past, and that Adilah (Yumna Marwan), the suspected terrorist Imogen is escorting to France from Syria, was drawn to the Islamic State by her bitter experiences as an Arab immigrant in Paris.

On Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show (Max), the comedian confronts his parents about the pain they’ve caused him – his father’s lies and infidelities, his mother’s bruising homophobia. In the Netflix film Scoop, a BBC producer (Billie Piper) and star journalist (Gillian Anderson) try to manoeuvre a lunkheaded Prince Andrew (Rufus Sewell) into admitting that he participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s systematic sexual abuse of girls and young women.

Pretty much everyone in True Detective: Night Country (HBO) is acting out or trying to suppress some hideous trauma: the lead female cops (Jodie Foster and Kali Reis) who once killed an abuser; the rookie male cop who kills his abusive dad; the scientists who kill a would-be whistle-blower to protect their environmentally dangerous research; and the Indigenous women who, scarred by brutality both present-day and generational, kill the scientists.

But of all these series, Baby Reindeer has seized the pop-culture imagination in a way that feels unique. It’s based on a one-man play from 2019 that itself is based on a real experience. After bartender/would-be comedian Donny (Richard Gadd, the playwright and series’ creator) gives troubled Martha (Jessica Gunning) a free cup of tea, she quickly inserts herself into every inch of his life. She bombards him with e-mail, text and voice messages, hounds him on Facebook, gains entry to his home, spends entire days in a bus shelter waiting for him, harasses his parents and eventually assaults his girlfriend, Teri (Nava Mau). The texts and e-mails in the series are selections from the real 41,071 e-mails and 744 tweets Gadd received from his stalker; on stage, he played snippets from her 350 hours of voicemails.

Donny’s reaction to Martha, however, is not what we expect – he’s often inert, sometimes flattered, even encouraging. He waits months to go to the police. In Episode 4 we find out why: Donny was groomed by Darrien (Tom Goodman-Hill), a hotshot television producer who promised to boost his career, then repeatedly drugged and sexually assaulted him. In the series’ most heart-stopping line, Donny acknowledges: “Being groomed feels great, until you realize you’re being groomed.” The resulting trauma floods his life with shame and self-loathing, yet also makes him loath to condemn Martha. They recognize the brokenness in each other.

Now, a cynic might dismiss this whole trend as trauma-tunity: confess to pain or weakness, be hailed as a truth-teller, monetize, repeat. (I wish I’d coined that term, but I stole it from a friend.) Certainly some of the shows above – I’m looking at you, Sugar and The Veil – use trauma more as modish character trait than genuine investigation. But I believe our entertainments fry this many nerves only when they’re responding to something real. Judging by these series’ popularity, there are a lot of broken people out there.

There’s a lot to be broken up about. The elections of Donald Trump and other extreme rightists, the rise of neo-Nazism and conspiracy theorists, the sight of immigrant children in cages, the pandemic, two raging wars, backlashes to #MeToo and racial-justice movements, yawning economic inequality, unceasing gun violence and especially imminent climate disaster have clotted together in an overwhelming way. The social media that many turned to for comfort now seem to be turning on them, choked by identity theft, deep fakes, bots, phishing and scams. Why wouldn’t people retreat to the one thing they have control over – themselves – and focus on what ails them as an individual?

The Canadian physician Gabor Maté is a world expert in trauma. In his most recent book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, he details the widening circles of trauma that humans are experiencing now, beginning in utero and expanding outward through our lifetime to Western culture at large. His conclusion: Everyone is traumatized. When I interviewed him at an event recently, the 600 audience members agreed, nodding at his every word. He sold 400 books that night, at $50 each, sometimes two or three to the same person. He would have sold more, but the bookseller ran out.

Baby Reindeer is the most successful trauma show, I think, because it’s the most authentic to Maté's and other experts’ definition and trajectory of the experience. Donny’s reactions to Martha are slow, then chaotic, then self-sabotaging. His actions often seem inexplicable. He takes one step forward and 10 back. It’s all terribly messy.

So messy, in fact, it’s redounded on Gadd’s real life. On Apr. 16, Reece Lyons, an actor who dated Gadd while auditioning to play Teri, released a long thread on X: She says she was “hurt” when Gadd “conflated a work opportunity with a dating dynamic,” and surmises that he suffers from Cluster B personality disorders, a group of nine traits including seductive behaviour, fear of abandonment and emotional dysregulation. (Baby Reindeer’s production company, Clerkenwell Films, investigated and cleared Gadd of wrongdoing.)

At the same time, amateur sleuths have been combing the internet to uncover the real Martha and Darrien, to the point where innocent people have been accused and hounded, and the stars are begging fans to desist.

Ultimately, however, Baby Reindeer transcends its trauma drama to succeed as art, because it does what good art does: It holds up a mirror to human experience and makes us feel less alone. It plunges viewers into murk and then leads us out in surprising ways. It begins as a thriller, and then implodes into a mystery – the most primal mystery: the mystery of who any of us really are, the unsettling realization that we might not know our own selves.

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