Two of the best performing articles I’ve ever written for The Postrider are my reviews of seasons one and two of The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, Investigation Discovery’s shoddy, shameful documentary series about an Indiana couple who may or may not have abused their disabled adopted daughter. A running theme throughout both pieces is that the makers of the series clearly don’t have the best interest of their subjects in mind – instead, they’re trying to create a buzzy and controversial reality show, where larger than life figures storm out of interviews and accuse each other of lying at every turn. While not every piece of true crime media is quite as crass as Natalia Grace, even those lauded for their reporting – such as The Jinx or Making a Murderer – have been dogged by accusations of strategic omissions and selective editing in ordering to either further an agenda or create splashy, ready-for-TV moments. It’s a tension that seems inescapable – how do you craft a narrative that’s not only entertaining, but fair to all of the real-life figures involved, while also ensuring that the details are factually and emotionally accurate?

Richard Gadd’s answer to this vexing question? Just let the victims write and star in it. Granted, it wouldn’t be completely accurate to describe Baby Reindeer – the pitch-black Netflix miniseries Gadd adapted from his own one-man show – as a true crime story. It’s also a lot of the things that prestige streaming shows strove to be in the 2010s – a meditation on Gadd’s sexual identity, a story about dealing with trauma, and, if you squint, a very, very dark comedy. But if it’s revolutionary in any way, it’s in how it eschews the exploitative, sensationalistic approach that an outside observer might apply to Gadd’s story and replaces it with an ultimately empathetic and sensitive core that’s more interested in why people are driven to do such irrational, ultimately dangerous things – a tone that it achieves thanks to the series’ brutal, unflinching look at the realities of obsession and abuse.   

The first interaction between Donny Dunn (the fictionalized version of Gadd, played by the man himself) and Martha Scott (Jessica Gunning) starts out innocently enough – Martha, distraught and disheveled, walks into the pub where Donny works when he’s not trying to kickstart his comedy career. Taking pity on this seemingly lonely woman who says she can’t even afford a drink, Donny buys her a cup of tea on the house, a small gesture of kindness that prompts Martha to come back to the pub every day to flirt with Donny (“baby reindeer” is the pet name she gives him), who’s happy enough to play along for the ego boost. But Martha begins to mistake their playful repartee for a full-fledged relationship and starts sending Donny dozens of emails a day that grow increasingly sexual and wrathful when he doesn’t reciprocate, leaving Donny a paranoid mess who literally looks over his shoulder at every turn.

It’s a premise that, in the hands of more detached filmmakers, could be easy fodder for a thriller, but there’s nothing thrilling about Baby Reindeer. Instead, Martha’s nonstop harassment of Donny is portrayed for what it is – a life-shattering nuisance that causes him to lose sleep, disrupts both his day job and his nascent standup career, and throws a wrench into nearly all of his personal relationships. But Gadd is just as interested in the cascade of bad decisions Donny (and, one can assume, the real-life Gadd) makes that only exacerbates the situation. Amused by Martha’s attention at first, he indulges her flirtations until he begins to realize that she’s taking them seriously, at which point he tries to delicately balance letting her down gently with trying to find out more about her, which she then interprets as genuine interest. The chaos only compounds when he adopts a false identity (“Tony”) to sign up for a trans dating site and strikes up a relationship with Teri (Nava Mau), an American therapist who he courts while trying to simultaneously shield her from both Martha and his misogynistic coworkers.

The irony of this whirlwind of social interaction is that, through it all, Donny still remains profoundly lonely. His hang-ups about his sexuality make him unable to be completely honest both with and about Teri, and the continued stalking of Martha makes it impossible for him to get too close to someone, lest Martha get jealous and begin targeting them as well. But it’s that sense of loneliness that makes it so difficult for Gadd/Donny to be as harsh as he needs to be with her – not only because he likes to feel wanted, but because, on some level, he empathizes with her longing as well. In a way, this empathy is almost as much of a burden to Donny as Martha’s very real stalking. He knows he should hate her and do everything in his power to get her out of his life, but, as his opening monologue points out, pity was the first emotion he felt for her. Maybe he’s naïve to think that he can simultaneously end his suffering without adding to her’s, but anyone who’s ever found themselves unable to be completely mad at another person who’s done them wrong will surely see themselves in Donny’s well-intentioned but ultimately fumbling attempts to let Martha down easy.

Donny’s reticence to cut Martha off completely is informed by the darkest revelation in the show, which is that, years prior, he had been groomed by Darrien O’Connor (Tom Goodman-Hill), a male comedy writer who promised to take him under his wing, only to repeatedly sexually assault him during their drug-fueled writing sessions. While the assaults made Donny feel ashamed and confused regarding his sexual identity, Martha’s obsessive attraction to him made him feel desired and secure in his masculinity, clear feelings that eluded him after his own trauma. According to Donny, this is a pattern – the reason why he struggled to cut things off with Darrien was because the prospect of comedy fame was constantly dangled in front of him. In other words, Donny allowed these two people to take so much from him because, in his own warped way, he thought that he’d get something out of it too.

If Gadd weren’t narrating the show himself, these conclusions, which verge on victim-blaming, would be almost impossible to swallow and feel more tasteless than revelatory. But because they come from the victim himself, it forces the viewer to wrestle with the fact that such events elicit more complicated feelings than hate and revenge, and that closure doesn’t necessarily come when the perpetrator is locked away. Gadd is in no way absolving his abusers, but unlike most true crime stories, he’s less interested in the whodunit of it all (since we very clearly know who did it) and the satisfaction of justice being served than how one should cope with such life-shattering events and how they can only beget more suffering.

Unfortunately, fans of Baby Reindeer do not necessarily share Gadd’s perspective. Since the show’s release, self-appointed detectives have tried to uncover the real identity of the Darrien character, culminating in, ironically enough, an online harassment campaign against British theater director Sean Foley, who bears a physical resemblance to Goodman-Hill, despite Gadd’s requests that viewers not speculate on the identities of the abusers (the alleged inspiration for Martha gave an anonymous interview to the Daily Mail claiming that she also received death threats from viewers. A week later, the reporter who interviewed the real-life Martha claimed that she began stalking him.). It’s an episode that highlights both the perils and the importance of Gadd’s project, and why true crime so often fails to do anything but stoke the flames of online rage and titillation. Typically, the genre either explicitly or implicitly asks viewers to take a side, to try and determine who they think did it, who they think might be lying, or what the authorities investigating the crimes did or didn’t do right. In the case of Baby Reindeer, Gadd seems to imply that it’s only possible to arrive at such easy conclusions when one is not directly involved with the tragedy or trauma at hand.

In an interview with The Standard, Gadd criticized UK law enforcement protocol regarding stalking, saying that “they look for black and white, good and evil, and that’s not how it works.” The same could be said, in many ways, about consumers of true crime media – the thirst for easy answers and tidy conclusions flattens the complexities of the cases portrayed and can even exacerbate the trauma of the subjects themselves. Gadd’s attempt to avoid that style of storytelling may not be consistently replicable – after all, true crime victims are often deceased – but it does, at the very least provide something of a template for a new approach to such stories. In most true crime series, the credits roll after the case is or is not solved. In real life, the people affected by these crimes must find a way to move forward. It’s that search for meaning, that reconciliation between what happened and what now can be, that Gadd seems to find most valuable in his story. We’d all probably be better off if the rest of the true crime industry felt the same way.