After the strange title of My stuffed reindeer (Baby Reindeer (in the original version) the latest great serial phenomenon is hidden. Netflix released it almost secretly Friday the 12th a series about which nothing was known beyond a few brief plot lines: the harassment of a woman by a comedian became something sickening. It could have gone unnoticed in the jungle of weekly releases if it hadn’t become a word-of-mouth phenomenon.
A week after its launch, the amazed and enthusiastic comments from those who had approached it turned My stuffed reindeer in one of those rare cases in which a title outside the commercial circuit became an unexpected phenomenon. It has been installed in the number one spot in Spain on Netflix for several days and last Tuesday it already had 2.6 million views. your second week added another 13.3 million views, making it the most-watched series of the week, number one in 38 countries, and thus confirming the global phenomenon. And all thanks to personal recommendations. And to a story so creepy and disturbing that it is impossible not to tell others about it.
“The most chilling episode of television of the entire year,” he titles his review The Guardian“A brilliant and jarring account of bullying, victimization and emotional turmoil,” he says. Variety. “One of the most brilliant and disturbing series of 2024,” he says MashableThere is some consensus among critics that it is the series of the moment and also that it is very difficult to recommend it because it is not, by any means, for all audiences and all sensibilities.
This short-form story (its chapters last around half an hour) and only seven episodes begins as a first-person narration of the harassment suffered by a man, Donny (played by Richard Gadd, also the creator of the series), an aspiring comedian who earns his living at the bar of a bar. His kindness to a woman, Martha (played by Jessica Gunning), whom he invites to tea one day, will trigger an obsession that quickly turns into dangerous harassment. From then on, he begins to receive dozens, hundreds of emails every day and daily visits to the bar while she tells him about a life that, by all accounts, is only the fruit of her imagination.
But it doesn’t stop at a woman obsessed with a man, and here we enter the territory of the plot spoilers (you can skip to the next paragraph if you haven’t seen it yet). His attitude and what his voice-over narration hints at give clues that there is something more behind it, something that explodes in a chilling fourth episode, the longest and most intense of the series, a disturbing chapter that travels to the protagonist’s past and in which it is discovered that he was the victim of sexual abuse by a powerful scriptwriter who promised him work and flattered him while drugging him to abuse him. The trauma caused by that experience has affected him to the point of sinking his self-esteem and believing that he deserved what happened to him.
As if this story of trauma and survival were not already distressing enough in fiction, another layer turns it into My stuffed reindeer in an even more overwhelming experience: the plot is based on the real experiences of its creator and protagonist. Scottish comedian Richard Gadd (in the series he is renamed Donny) explains in an interview in The Guardian which, although it has altered some facts and the chronology of what happened, is based on two traumatic personal experiences. In real life, Gadd was harassed by a woman 20 years his senior. As told in Time, During the four years of the stalking, she followed him to his performances, waited for him outside his house and sent him 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, 106 pages of letters, 350 hours of voice messages and 41,071 emails. The messages shown in the series are real messages he received from his stalker. The harassment affected his personal relationships. In real life he also fell in love with a transsexual woman (in the fiction she is played by Nava Mau) but his stalker’s obsession also extended to her and the relationship did not come to fruition.
Another real experience is behind what is narrated in the fourth episode (again, details about the series). In the monologue Monkey See Monkey Dowhich premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016, Gadd recounted how she had been sexually assaulted by a work colleague. Her account—not improvised, as in the series, but prepared—won her the award for best comedy show. Three years later, also at the Fringe, she presented another Showtitled Baby Reindeerwhich is what the Netflix series is based on.
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