41,000 emails and 350 hours of voicemails: this is why viewers are captivated by Netflix series Baby Reindeer | Show

Anyone who has a subscription to Netflix cannot ignore it in recent days: the streaming service is making a big splash right now Baby Reindeer goes through the roof. Not only is it currently at the top of the top ten series in the Netherlands, it is also on film and television review site Rotten Tomatoes the series scores highly. That’s not all: viewers of Baby Reindeer are so absorbed by the story that they have scoured the web. Looking for answers yourself.

To understand how the hype started, we have to go back to the beginning. It was 2019 when Scottish comedian Richard Gadd performed a show about his intense stalking past at the famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Netflix saw potential in it and made an offer, which led to the series Baby Reindeer, which arrived on the streaming service in April. What Netflix most likely didn’t see coming: the enormous flood of responses.

That has everything to do with the protagonist and the oppressive episodes. Because where one normally looks for an actor to re-enact the true story, Gadd decided to take on the leading role himself. And for that he had to relive traumatic memories.

Baby Reindeer tells the story of Gadd (in the series Donny Dunn), who is forced to work in the catering industry because he cannot find work as a comedian. One day a lady walks into the café and starts talking about her work as a lawyer. She has several business properties and works for famous people. Martha is her name, she tells Gadd. A bad feeling soon comes over him: if she is such a successful lawyer, why can’t she pay for her order?

Martha keeps coming back. Day in, day out she climbs onto a stool at the bar. But it doesn’t stop there. She stalks him, shows up at his shows, threatens his parents and attacks his dates. It is clear: Martha is obsessed and stalks Gadd. In the meantime, he bends over backwards to stop the stalking, but as a result he makes the wrong choices again and again.

Viewers are gradually drawn more and more into the story. That’s also because a lot of the evidence from the real case can be seen in the series. Chilling detail: Martha sent no fewer than 41,071 emails, 350 hours of voicemails, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages and 106 pages of letters to Gadd. She calls him affectionately in those messages baby reindeer.

Gadd deliberately chose to add fictional elements to the series so that the real name of his stalker would not become known. He even states that she would not recognize herself because of all the adjustments. According to Gadd, stalking is a mental illness. “We were very aware that some of the characters in the series are vulnerable people, so you don’t want to make their lives more difficult. So you have to change things to protect yourself and other people,” he previously told Variety.

But despite Gadd’s attempt to keep her real name a secret, viewers are so captivated by the series that they investigate for themselves. Meanwhile, some ‘detectives’ even think they have found Martha’s Twitter account. There you will find all kinds of messages from 2014 that correspond to the texts shown in the series. There are numerous videos with theories circulating on TikTok and X (formerly Twitter).

In any case, Gadd’s life has been quiet for a long time: the real Martha was given a restraining order and it has been quiet ever since.

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