I watched Baby Reindeer recently and found I couldn’t really understand the hype. It is a show about a young man, an aspiring comedian, who is sexually assaulted by an older man and then separately stalked by an older woman. It had some interesting things to say about how trauma might make a person vulnerable to attracting further transgressive behaviour. But I felt the messages and themes were spelled out much more than they needed to be over the course of the show, and so it quickly became repetitive. It is narrated by an internal monologue that runs over the show, which, to my mind, over explains dynamics we can observe for ourselves between the characters (or should be able to).
The writing felt pedestrian to me; full of cliches and absent any fresh or surprising turns of phrase. Usually this would not matter in TV writing except for the dialogue, but if the entire thing is narrated it becomes, not just obvious, but annoying. I found myself comparing it a lot to Fleabag, which I feel was just a much better show in every way. Fleabag had that monologue device too but it never really felt superfluous or unnecessary to me. The writing was much fresher and more innovative too.
Another thing I found difficult about Baby Reindeer is I think it is hard to watch anything where half the premise is someone doing unfunny comedy. I found scene after scene of his standup routine flopping gruelling. And the commentary on class felt shoe-horned and clumsy. There is a scene where the protagonist discovers some of his classmates from RADA are wealthy and they live in a flat paid for by their parents and he acts very surprised by this and basically says “Oh you’re rich!?!”. It made me roll my eyes. Come on, who would be surprised to discover that their classmates at **RADA** are rich! I feel like we all understand how this stuff works. I can’t read or watch anything this wide eyed without just finding it really fake and annoying.
One of the marketing points of Baby Reindeer is that the show is based on true events. We read hundreds of real emails and texts from the stalker over the course of the show. And people have already tried to guess who she is and the suspected woman has given interviews (I haven’t read any of those pieces and I won’t). It seems that it was not difficult to track this figure down because the show made her fairly easily identifiable.
I think it can be hard to be critical of work like this because we know this person has experienced some harrowing things and turned them into this show partly as a way to try to make something positive out of what they have been through. But I do think it is jarring, given the didactic approach the show takes to explaining mental health and trauma, that seemingly not much thought was given to how releasing Baby Reindeer might impact the lives of the other people it is based on.
Another argument in favour of the show is that it has provided a necessary perspective on two issues we don’t see much of on TV at the minute: sexual violence against men, and stalking. I agree with the point about sexual violence, and I think the show did an admirable job of refusing a “good victim” narrative, by showing how the protagonist did choose to put himself in a vulnerable position. I thought it did an admirable job of showing how we can see warning signs and choose to tamp them down because a certain circumstance might be, say, professionally advantageous to us. And that, still, no matter what, the person who is choosing to sexually prey on other people is the one at fault, not their victim.
I think it is always valuable to see this narrative in mainstream entertainment. Because sadly I think this is a perspective on sexual violence which we do need to have reinforced again and again.
The show was basically about people who choose to live in a fantasy world and how vulnerable and dangerous they can be. The stalker was a fantasist, clearly. But Baby Reindeer was shown to be one too, in terms of his extraordinary self belief about his potential to be a successful comedian, despite having no external validation of this.
He was delusional and entitled. Entitled people are annoying and hard to sympathise with, still they can be very vulnerable because their impression of where they should sit in the world is so out of sync with what everyone else sees, and they crave, more than anything else, having their fantasy of themselves affirmed. A predatory person will spot this quickly and know that, if you play along with their delusion and flatter that false impression, they will be so grateful that you can make them do basically whatever you want. I did think this was a complicated, interesting presentation. (If over explained.)
But I find it hard to agree that Baby Reindeer’s perspective on stalking was useful in the same way. Stalking is definitely something we don’t see much of on TV or in films, and I think it is definitely misunderstood. The complications that arise when trying to involve the police with a stalker are done well in the show. But otherwise it showed again and again that the protagonist encouraged interactions with his stalker, ultimately because he felt sorry for her, appreciated the attention she paid him during a low point in his life, and, to some extent, felt intrigued by her.
I found this exasperating to watch. Many people who are stalked do nothing to encourage or invite the experience. In fact, one of the maddening things about being stalked is that people can tend to assume the relationship is partly reciprocal, or was at some point, or that it must be based on “something”, when there are no foundations at all. Or the foundation, say, is an old romantic relationship which could never predictably have turned that way or similar.
Over and over again in Baby Reindeer we saw the protagonist ignoring warning signs about his stalker. When he looked her up and discovered she had a criminal record for stalking and attacking other people and continued to interact with her, for example. Over and over again the show explained why he was indulging attention from her; inviting her out for tea, following her home one night, hanging out with her when she came to his show. He felt low and, in a warped way, she made him feel special. I understand this can be a dynamic that makes people expose themselves to dangerous situations. But here I felt it reinforced narratives about stalking as much more of a two way relationship than it often is.
I would care less about this if stalking was well represented elsewhere, but it is not. I don’t think in general a show about stalking needs to be totally universal or relatable. But it does become an issue with something like Baby Reindeer, to my mind, because it is a show about real, easily identifiable people. The harm done to them by making the show is what leads to arguments about it being justified because it is useful and necessary. And I did find myself thinking: Is it useful for the one mainstream presentation of stalking I can think of in recent years to show a victim who discovers their stalker has a criminal record and then invites them out for tea and follows them home?
The show’s treatment of stalking felt very different to the sexual assault plotline in that way, in that it was upholding clumsy stereotypes rather than challenging them.
And! An announcement!
From next week I will make every other week pay walled. I have thought about this a lot and I think that whenever I am especially busy this substack suffers, so this will be more of an incentive to maintain its quality week to week. I thought the best way would be to make some content free and some paid.
I don’t think the writing I do here is less valuable than the writing I do elsewhere. I think the form is more experimental but, in some ways, I think that is more valuable.
Consider subscribing if you read it most weeks. I think, since the internet made creative work easy to access for free (not just writing but, say, music too) we all spend money much more readily on (often very low quality) physical items than we do on some of the things that actually bring us the most enjoyment in life. Consider that this subscription is the monthly price of a boohoo dress or a pint in London.
Till next time xxxx
You can buy my novel, Lazy City here.