Donny Dunn is a struggling comedian working the bar at a London pub. One night, a woman walks in and orders a Diet Coke. She smiles too wide, laughs too loud, and tells him she’s a lawyer. Her name is Martha. She says she’s fine.
That first drink turns into a torrent of emails, voicemails, and a fixation that swallows Donny’s life whole. Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer turns that true story into seven episodes of television that are uncomfortable, funny, and almost impossible to shake. It is not an easy watch. It is a necessary one.
Based on Gadd’s one-man show of the same name, the series tracks Donny’s relationship with his stalker, Martha, played with terrifying precision by Jessica Gunning. But Baby Reindeer never lets the audience rest on a simple victim-and-predator frame. It digs into Donny’s own past, his failures, and the choices that kept him tethered to Martha long after he should have walked away. The result is a show that is less about a stalker than about the wounds that make a person stay.
Trailer, via Netflix.
Martha Walks In
Martha arrives in the bar with a rush of words. She tells Donny she’s a barrister, that she’s been in the paper, that she has high-powered clients. She orders a Diet Coke. She compliments his eyes. She says she’s not usually like this.
Gunning’s performance is the engine of the series. Martha is by turns giddy, wounded, vicious, and desperately lonely. She delivers threats and endearments in the same breath. One moment she is leaving Donny a voicemail that sounds like a love letter; the next she is spitting venom about his mother. Gunning never lets Martha become a cartoon. She is a person, and that is what makes her frightening.
The show does not flinch from the volume of the harassment. Martha sends Donny thousands of emails and leaves him hundreds of voicemails. The series dramatizes these with a mix of black comedy and dread. Donny reads them aloud sometimes, trying to make sense of the pattern. There is no pattern. There is only Martha.
Donny’s Own Mess
Donny is not a passive victim. He is broke, sleeping on a friend’s couch, and nursing a comedy career that is going nowhere. He is also lying to himself about his past. The series reveals early that Donny was assaulted by a man named Darrien, a successful TV writer who groomed him years earlier. That trauma sits under everything Donny does.
The show cuts between the present-day stalking and Donny’s memories of Darrien, played by Tom Goodman-Hill. These scenes are brutal. They are also patient. The series does not rush to make a clean point about trauma. It shows Donny circling the memory, trying to laugh it off, trying to rewrite it, trying to forget it. He cannot.
Gadd plays Donny with a kind of hollowed-out charm. He is funny, sometimes very funny, but the humor always curdles. When Donny tries to explain his situation to the police, to his friends, to his own mother, he sounds unreasonable. A man being stalked by a woman is funny, isn’t it? The show forces that question into the open and then refuses to answer it easily.
A Dead End at the Station
Donny goes to the police. He brings the evidence: the emails, the voicemails, the notes. The officer on duty listens, nods, and tells him that Martha has not committed a crime yet. She has not threatened him, not in a way that counts. The officer suggests Donny change his number.
This is one of the show’s most frustrating and most honest threads. Baby Reindeer does not pretend that the system works. Donny is told to wait until something worse happens. When it does, the police response is still underwhelming. The series does not turn this into a lecture. It just shows the dead end.
Donny’s own behavior complicates his case. He sleeps with Martha once, early on, out of pity or loneliness or both. That single act becomes the thing he cannot escape. Martha uses it. Donny uses it against himself. The show never lets him off the hook for that choice, and it never lets the audience pretend it does not matter.
Darrien’s Shadow
The scenes with Darrien are the show’s heaviest burden. Donny meets him at a comedy festival, flattered by the older man’s attention. Darrien offers him a place to stay, talks about writing, and then drugs him. The assault is shown in fragments, not as a single graphic scene but as a series of blurred mornings and missing hours.
The series does not use the assault as a twist. It is the root of everything. Donny’s compulsive need for approval, his willingness to tolerate Martha, his inability to say no—all of it traces back to Darrien. When Donny finally confronts the memory, the show gives him a scene of quiet, awful clarity. He does not scream. He just says it out loud.
Gadd wrote the series from his own experience, and that authenticity gives the show its weight. He has spoken publicly about drawing on real events, and the show itself opens with a note that it is based on a true story. Within the drama, Martha pleads guilty to stalking. The series does not extend that verdict to the real person behind the character.
“I’m not a stalker.”
That line, delivered by Martha at her most tender, cuts to the show’s core. Baby Reindeer understands that stalking is not always a stranger in a dark alley. Sometimes it is a person who believes they love you. Sometimes it is a person you feel sorry for. Sometimes it is a person you let in.
Restraint on Screen
The series is not flashy. It is shot in flat, natural light, mostly in pubs, flats, and police stations. The camera holds on faces longer than is comfortable. There are no montages, no musical stingers. The score, when it appears, is sparse and uneasy.
This restraint is the right choice. A show about obsession does not need to be visually obsessive. The horror comes from the writing and the performances, not from jump scares. The show trusts the audience to sit with the discomfort. That trust is rewarded.
The pacing is deliberate. Some episodes feel almost like a hangout show, with Donny and Martha bantering in the pub. Others are tightly wound, cutting between voicemails and memories. The seven-episode length is correct. A longer season would have diluted the pressure. A shorter one would have felt rushed.
What It Costs to Watch
Baby Reindeer is not a show to binge in a single sitting. It asks too much. The middle episodes, especially, are dense with shame and self-sabotage. Donny makes decisions that are hard to watch, and the show does not soften them. He does not always do the right thing. He does not always do the brave thing.
That is the point. The show is not a redemption story. Donny does not get a clean arc. He gets a little bit of peace, maybe, and a sense that he has finally told the truth. That is all. The show is honest about the fact that surviving abuse does not make you wise or heroic. It just makes you tired.
The final episode is quieter than the rest. Donny performs a stand-up set about Martha, and the story spreads. The audience laughs in the wrong places, but the set gains attention beyond the room. He does not get revenge. He walks home, and the credits roll.
The Bottom Line
Baby Reindeer is a hard show to recommend, because it is a hard show to watch. It is also one of the most compelling series of 2024. Gadd has turned his own worst years into a work of art that is precise, painful, and frequently very funny. Gunning’s Martha will stay with you long after the screen goes dark.
The show is not perfect. Some of the side characters are thinly drawn, and the middle episodes can feel repetitive. But the core of the series—the relationship between Donny and Martha, and the shadow of Darrien—is handled with a care that is rare in true-crime storytelling. It is not exploitative. It is not tidy. It is true.
If you can sit with the discomfort, Baby Reindeer will reward you. It asks hard questions about complicity, shame, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. It does not answer them neatly. That is exactly why it works.
