This Saturday, May 18th, I’m doing a Berlin book launch for my novel ‘Midlands’. Tickets are free here and you can buy a book at the event.
The hit Netflix series ‘Baby Reindeer’ – and what a hit, with 56.5 million views in its first 26 days of release – is an exemplary example of a genre I call ‘Netflix good’, well-made, story focused, and moving along at a brisk pace while never letting a particular moment linger into the structurally unusual. The episodes are the right length, the cliffhangers come in the right places, and the needle drops are the songs you’d actually want if you had an adequate musical budget to pay for their hire. If you start watching this show, you generally finish it.
Once you’re done you can also go online and participate in the discourse, or you can skip straight to the discourse if you're short on time.
At least discussion of this series is founded in pretty tangible ethical issues for a change. They revolve around using the disturbing and recent personal story of its creator, Richard Gadd, as the basis of entertainment and the implications of that for the real people involved. Clearly, it’s Gadd’s has the right to present the story of his sexual abuse and stalking as he sees fit. Nonetheless there’s a fairly clear ethical objection here, well articulated by
of this parish on her own newsletter, that suggests the show would probably have been better not to have been made at all: Namely that, given the shows ‘Martha’ character founded her stalking of Gadd on the delusional belief that he was attracted to her, a seven-episode dramatization of the affair runs the risk of encouraging her in that belief.So it has proved. That he real-life Martha was being interviewed on Piers Morgan about the case is the kind of thing which would be happening in a stalker’s fantasies of thwarted love. To this extent, ‘Baby Reindeer’ has the potential to promote the behaviour it thematizes.
Overall, tho, I do not know Gadd’s actual experiences, nor am I telling him how to present them, or the real-life people they depict how to react. I do tho know and know intimately another of the worlds the show depicts, namely that of the lower echelons of UK stand-up comedy, that world of sparsely attended open mics, grim comedy competitions, and Edinburgh festival runs at unsuitable venues. And I can say that many of the decisions made about depicting that world, and how it folds into the show’s wider narrative, are either subtly or largely inaccurate – and that, in their own quiet way, feeds into some of the ethical questions as to exactly how much the show departs from reality.
As ‘Baby Reindeer’ begins, Donny (Gadd’s alter ego – you wonder why the name was changed at all) has moved to London to try and make it as a comedian, and at the beginning we see him struggling at a series of open mic gigs. At these Gadd is seen as completely bombing, playing to utter silence and bemused looks, an exaggeratedly baffled response.
The thing is, there are also significant audiences at the gigs we see. In reality, at those kinds of gigs, you get one or the other; tiny rooms and a baffled response, or an actual audience. In the latter case people have usually to some degree elected to be there and are as such less hostile. The kind of response Gadd is getting come occurs at gigs where people are only accidentally there for comedy, and perhaps just wanted a drink in peace; as a former London open micer, looking at those scenes I could only envy that Gadd was getting a whole fifteen people in.
In short, Gadd has exaggerated audience hostility to his – for my money actually quite funny – routines in order to increase the TV audience's sympathy for him. As creative manipulation goes, it’s pretty minor; in comedy reality, he’d be baffling some people and getting laughs from others. It’s not a big distortion – all it evidences is that the writer-director of the series wants to be liked. This may not be unusual from a comic.
The depiction of the comedy competition Gadd is progressing through across the series departs from accuracy much more notably. In this comp, Gadd again plays to silence but helps himself through via some banter with Martha. Maybe this happened; it’s a bit convenient, but as ever, it keeps the story moving.
What certainly didn’t happen was, as is shown in the show, Gadd having his own dressing room in the (quarter and then semi-final) of a comedy competition. Where are the other acts? In a real heat, Gadd would be crammed backstage with countless other comedians, communicating in a weird mixture of tension, nervousness and camaraderie. It seems odd that Gadd is cutting out other comedians like this – I’m sure it’s meant to communicate that his struggle is all alone, but it also runs the risk of coming off as solipsistic. The little moments of interest in his comedy the show portrays – his colleagues mocking his comedy set in a work office, a stranger in a pub laughing at his clips – also buttress a sense of Gadd’s excessive self-involvement. In real life, other people just don't care about your comedy all that much, let alone enough to mock it in public.
The depiction of Gadd/Donny’s performance at the Edinburgh Festival is somewhat truer to life; the pub with the mic shoved in the cupboard, and big screens showing sport throughout the performances, reminds me of my own run at a southside Edinburgh pub in 2016. Again, the disinterest and hostility of the Scottish pub audience is exaggerated, but there are certainly many days at the festival for unknown acts which sees them play to microcrowds. It’s very awkward when you have one person in your crowd and there’s a walkout.
What is definitely inaccurate is the way Gadd shows up at his venue and then immediately launches into his show; in reality, you’d scope your room out in advance, then come back a few days later and perform. You’d meet the other people who are also doing the same venue; again, other comics are cut out. The people who run your venue would probably be nice. Again, the edges of the process are smoothed out in order to attenuate the ‘hero’s journey’ aspect of the narrative, which I’m not sure sits easily with exactly how this particular hero ends up attaining their success.
It’s in the finale tho that the distortions in Gadd’s depiction of comedy becomes, at least for me, a major issue. In the final of the competition, Gadd starts his set well, getting laughs, but at a certain point breaks down into an emotional monologue about the abuse he has suffered from Martha, his rapist and himself. Ignoring requests to leave the stage, he runs to an end, then eventually walks out through the stunned crowd.
Is this sequence supposed to be a fantasy? For there is absolutely no way it would be allowed to happen in real life. Gadd ignores the light signalling his time is up and refuses to leave the stage; a huge no-no in a competition final where other acts would be expecting to perform. With his confessional monologue, he would have ruined the night for any other of number of comedians. Rather than this moment making his career, it would have been a moment when he required a reputation in the industry as not to be worked with. Again, in the world we see, Gadd is the only comedian who exists; for all the media attention his monologue might have gained him, he would have become a pariah amongst his fellow acts. In reality, it was writing two by-all-accounts brilliant Edinburgh shows that got him attention, not breaking down in a comedy competition. We are firmly into ‘print the legend’ here.
It does strike me that a big laugh was missed in this sequence by not, after Gadd had walked off, having the next act come out and say ‘Anyone fancy some juggling?’
Why does this matter? Comedian makes their story a bit more attention-grabbing to win audience affection shocker. This is Netflix Good, after all, where smoothness of narrative is the cardinal virtue.
I’d argue that stuff like this becomes much more significant when you present yourself as having created a work of art which is apparently extremely candid about your own shortcomings. Gadd doesn’t have to tell us, for example, that he masturbated over Martha, or bought her a coffee, or went to her house – this clearly suggests to the audience he is going over and beyond in terms of self-disclosure.
Yet if you’re going to invite the audience to praise you for your honesty, you need to extend it to all aspects of your work. The question inevitably arises that is Gadd is falsifying the less controversial parts of his story – Gadd never broke down in a comedy competition, tho he did win one – are you being 100% truthful about the other stuff?
The answer is no. It was while working on this essay that I learnt that the denoument of the show when – spoiler alert – Martha is sentenced to nine months in prison, was entirely fabricated. To invent this ending seems to me flatly unethical, much more serious than conjuring up a cathartic viral speech out of nowhere. Again, the motivation seems to be the same, of offering the audience narrative closure in terms which more palatable to them. Ensuring that dramatic closure comes before fidelity to real-life traumatic events.
Yet surely one of the lessons of trauma is that life rarely provides this kind of closure, at least not in any convenient sense, and even then only over much longer timeframes than the show depicts. As so often with contemporary trauma narratives, I am left thinking ‘Perhaps this all needed longer to be worked through.’
Gadd is asking for this level of scrutiny by presenting the work as ‘This is a true story’. Not ‘inspired by true events’; ‘This is a true story’. You, the viewer, can trust that events played out pretty much as depicted here; sure, there might be minor inaccuracies, but not colossal ones like making up that someone went to jail. And while Gadd has apparently been clear in interviews that in real-life the events played out differently, the vast majority of people streaming the show will not be aware of said interviews. I certainly wasn’t.
Gadd also created the tools to have his cake and eat it here. The presence of voiceover through the series, too, offered Gadd the opportunity to thematize the play between reality and fantasy: Imagine Martha being sent to prison while Gadd’s voiceover says ‘This never happened. Real-life isn’t so neat.’ Instead, his presentation of the events as literally true invited the army of amateur sleuths and provoked the TV appearance of the real Martha we have seen.
The overall sense is of a man who has taken quite a few shortcuts in the desire to let nothing come between him and his big break. Gadd seems to have followed the view of the poet John Berryman that ‘The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.’ This is not to dispute that awful things have happened to Richard Gadd. No one is expecting him to be a perfect victim; he can tho be a wholly conscientious artist.
Sometimes in ‘Baby Reindeer’ Gadd seems to be licking his lips a little too obviously at the quality of material his life is delivering to him, and the way he adds climaxes of comedy virality or justice being served heightens that sense of exploitation. The simple fact that he’s spent so many years working through this material in the years immediately after it happened strikes me as odd too – I’d want to live away from it first and let time do its transforming work. Gadd has spent nearly a decade combining his traumas into the most accessible form possible and apparently seasoning them with falsifications large and small to ensure they slide down a mass audience’s throat.
I think for true stories Netflix Good has to take a second seat to messy reality. If you are going to draw so directly from real life, I think you have to obey not just emotional truth but the actual historical record; longeurs, pauses and ungainly timescales are not just details but in some way essential to the way things happened; you have to respect the rhythms of reality. You have to run the risk of having things being a little bumpier for your audience to show greater fidelity to those involved and yourself – and I think you have to show a little more of your workings, and your own engagement with such ethical questions too. One reason we make characters and stories up is to free ourselves from the full weight of such concerns; when we draw from life, they need I’d suggest to be considered more directly.
There’s a strange aspect of so much confessional writing these days, in that it conceals in its heart a desperate desire to be liked. The whole point of true confession is you have to leave people the right to detest you if they wish; the mere fact of being honest is not in itself exculpatory. You need to be honest even when it jeopardizes the potential success of your story; to be blunt, if ‘Baby Reindeer’ had hewn more closely to life, I doubt it would have been such a massive hit.
Still, at least the show doesn’t show a comedian making up material on the spot and getting huge laughs for it. That’s something at least. Stand-up comedians practice bits again and again, removing anything extraneous that gets in the way of the joke landing. The stakes are just higher when you apply that logic to things which actually happened. You might remove something the audience needs to know.