Baby Reindeer (TV-Mini Series) Review

Based on the true story of Richard Gadd’s own life and experiences with a female stalker and suffering horrendous abuse as he attempted to make it as a comedian and writer.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Number of episodes: 7

*This review may contain spoilers and sensitive topics*

Donny Dunn is working in pub but still aspires to be a comedian and writer, believing he truly has what it takes. His life is about to take a rather strange twist when one day Martha Scott comes into the pub and he shows her slight compassion by giving her a free drink. This then becomes a regular occurance and quite frankly he just feels sorry for her. What would unfold from that quite innocent gesture is that she would begin emailing him, after finding his email address on his website for his comedy.

The first three episodes plod on showing how Martha has become rather into and obsessed with Donny. With some rather bizarre moments, mainly thinking about that coffee shop scene and while this is going on he begins to date Teri. At a comedy gig, Martha is in the crowd and it actually helps his struggling act.

It’s not until episode 4 when everything takes aa very unexpected turn, triggering a memory and a traumatic experince that Donny experienced with Darrien a man he had met at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and had been told that he could make him a star. This level of trauma and abuse was certainly not the direction I was expecting the story to go in.

Seeing that abuse unfold and the fact that Donny continued to go back for more certainly highlights that it is not as straightforward as anyone may believe. Obviously this is something that only people who have been in similar situations can really relate to, especially when the power that person has over the victim.

Does this impact on his life which would then see the end of his relationship with Liz and then go on to explore his sexuality with both men and women. Then throwing the Martha situation back, did he feel sorry for her because of what had happened to him? It really was difficult to try and understand how that all came about.

The thing is when watching each episode I actually found myself feeling sorry for Martha as well, which I guess was quite a strange way to feel. As she is seriously unwell in many ways and needed help and support. Given a little bit of attention and someone doing something nice for her wasn’t what she was used to, and she went massively overboard with this. Following Donny’s story and what happened to him and up until his breakdown on stage and revealing everything was such a harrowing moment.

Let’s focus and remember though that the biggest villian in all of this was actually Darrien. Maybe the police a little bit as well, not taking the reporting of Martha seriously enough early on which could have prevented more events for them both.

Not only did Richard Gadd create this TV series based on his real life experiences but he had also performed it all on stage as a one man show at the Edinburgh Fringe festival and in London’s West End winning awards.