Late to the Party (sort of): Baby Reindeer
Have you ever watched a TV show through your fingers?
For a supposed pop culture writer, I am rubbish about keeping up with TV shows. If I were to provide you with the very long list of popular, even iconic television programs I haven’t actually watched, you’d be shocked and appalled, and possibly consider trapping me in your house Annie Wilkes-style until I watched every season of Mad Men.
It comes down to one thing: quite simply, there are too many television shows. Folks, there are just too many! Too often I hear about shows premiering their third or fourth seasons, and I wasn’t even aware that they existed before that. I am truly astonished and envious of people who can juggle watching multiple shows at once, or an entire season of something in one day. I can watch maybe two episodes in a row before my brain says “Ay, that’s a spicy meatball” and I have to stop. It could be the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen and end on a “there a bomb planted at the Super Bowl” cliffhanger, and I would still say “Well, that can wait till tomorrow.”
So when I say I’m sort of late to the party for Baby Reindeer, I mean that even though it only came out two months ago, in context to the current media landscape it might as well have been last year. The Discourse has already passed, and even when it was active it mostly focused on the wrong things, like more tiresome citizen detectives tracking down the real people that inspired it to mock and harass them, even though the show’s creator, Richard Gadd, specifically asked them not to do that. So I’ve mostly just had myself to digest thoughts about the show with, and maybe that’s not so bad.
When I went into Baby Reindeer, I was expecting a dark comedy about a sad sack who finds himself the unlikely victim of a stalker. It starts out like a bit of a horror movie: when bartender/struggling prop comedian Donny Dunn (Gadd) shows some simple kindness to a random stranger named Martha (Sarah Gunning), it sets off a campaign of increasingly threatening harassment.
Like Halloween, in which Laurie Strode is terrorized just because she dropped off some keys at the old Myers house (and not because she’s actually Michael Myers’s sister), it’s the randomness that makes it frightening. Martha is just a customer at the bar who’s having a bad day, and Donny doesn’t charge her for a cup of tea. Martha looks at him with such naked gratitude that it’s both funny and pathetic at the same time. As is often the case, there is no such immediate sign that Donny’s kindness, which in most situations he’d have probably forgotten about the next day, would result in something twisted, terrifying, and ultimately very sad.
Where I did not expect Baby Reindeer to go was an empathetic and unsettling look at PTSD. Martha isn’t the only character deeply in need of psychiatric help. Donny is too, and Gadd, who based Donny on himself, doesn’t shy away from that. I’m a bit puzzled at people who complained that Donny’s often self-contradicting reactions to Martha’s harassment, such as accepting her friend request on Facebook, didn’t make sense. He explains it, several times, in that while it didn’t make sense to him then, he realized later that in a sick way he liked it, because it was during one of the lowest moments in his life, and he welcomed any attention he could get from someone.
Maybe you have to have had points in your life when your self-esteem was at rock bottom to truly get how enticing it is when someone, even someone who is clearly very bad for you (if not just a bad person in general), offers you some crumbs of attention. Donny doesn’t immediately shut down Martha’s aggressive pursuit of him because he’s afraid of her (not at first at least), or even because he’s not attracted to her, but because he enjoys it. As he struggles with his own unaddressed trauma after a sexual assault, the fact that his comedy career is failing, and confusion and shame about his attraction to trans women, Martha’s over-the-top, sexually charged flirtations are a tawdry little boost to his ego. He doesn’t even seem to mind too much when she abruptly switches gears and insults him, because there’s nothing she can say to him that he hasn’t already said to himself.
Even when things cross the line with Martha into physical assault and harassing other people in his life, Donny can’t quite bring himself to put a stop to it. After all, if she’s not there to tell him the things he wants to hear, then who will be?
Donny’s failure to put an end to Martha’s harassment ultimately ruins his blossoming relationship with Teri (Nava Mau), a trans woman who has her shit together far more than he does. He knows that, of course, which is why he doesn’t fight to win her back. He knows he doesn’t deserve Teri, because he’s a self-destructive mess. The most gripping scene of the whole series is in episode 6, when Donny breaks down in the middle of a comedy set and confesses to the audience his sexual assault, the situation with Martha, and the end of his relationship with Teri. They were doomed from the start, he explains, “Because I hated myself so much more than I loved her. And I loved her very much.”
I don’t know, man, maybe you have to have destroyed your own marriage, and upended your and someone else’s entire life mostly out of self-hatred to understand and empathize with Donny Dunn as a character.
In a way, I’m glad to have missed the discourse on Baby Reindeer, because I am incapable of taking a side in an interminable, pointless “She’s the villain,” “No, he’s the villain” debate, when the show ends on an ambiguous “they both fed into each other’s various emotional issues” note. When Donny cries at the end, it’s not for himself (well, maybe a little) but for Martha, after listening to her recount a rare time in her childhood when she felt safe, and how it inspired her to give him the nickname Baby Reindeer. Someone he had perceived as a monster was, in fact, just another broken, traumatized person like him, and his heart had broken for her. It’s been two weeks since I watched the final episode of Baby Reindeer, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
I was a little late to it too. I agree that it's impossible to keep up with all the shows. I'll start to watch one and months later realize, "Oh yeah, I never finished that." I watched this show over three days and it stayed with me for weeks later. I was blown away with how honest the Donny character was. He explained really well why he did the things he did and made his choices. I would have to guess that the people who didn't see that or felt they had to find "the villain" in it all, either had a guilty conscious or never experienced trauma or self esteem issues? Who knows? It was a tough watch, but expertly done and I'm glad it made my short list of TV shows I watched to the end. Now I need to finish "Beef."