Has the internet ruined Baby Reindeer?

If you’ve watched Netflix’s Baby Reindeer, you’ve likely felt the following emotions: fear, horror, devastation and disbelief. The King of Horror himself (Stephen King) aptly summarised the thriller drama series on Twitter last week with, “BABY REINDEER: Holy shit.” The seven-part series based on writer and lead star Richard Gadd’s experience with a female stalker and buried trauma, shot to Netflix's top show slot, where it remains now, and received rave after rave review from critics.

But the internet response has become the real Baby Reindeer story. Fans have unearthed tweets from a woman and spread her details across the internet after claiming she’s the ‘real Martha’ i.e. Gadd’s stalker in the show who bombards him with more than 40,000 emails (played brilliantly by Jessica Gunning). Sleuths have even wrongly accused one man of being Gadd’s abuser, leading to lawyers and police getting involved.

Trauma, mental health, sexual assault and stalking – key issues explored in the series in real nuance – have now been eclipsed by this online clusterfuck. Have fans gone too far, or is this an example of the new frontier of autofiction dramas on the internet?

Gadd was forced to issue a statement on Instagram Stories last week, saying, “people I love, have worked with, and admire… are unfairly getting caught up in speculation”. He added, “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real life people could be. That’s not the point of our show.”

“It’s strange,” says Tanya Horeck, Professor of Film and Feminist Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University, on the fan response. Like many of us, she was struck by the power of the show and spent days processing its events, but was never compelled to uncover the character’s real life identities.

“It's interesting because while we have become accustomed to the internet poring over true crime stories and docu-series, it feels less familiar to have such intense speculation over a dramatisation of this kind,” she says.

Baby Reindeer is “true crime adjacent”, but is ultimately a TV adaptation of an autobiographical one-man show. “I think the online obsession with uncovering the real-life identities of Martha and Darrien shows the intensity of social media sleuthing and how it crosses all genres and continues to unsettle the real-life/drama divide in deeply troubling ways.”

She points out the obvious irony here, too. A show about “the complexities of stalking has become an excuse for true crime TikTok to engage in collective online ‘stalking’ through the drive to uncover identities”.

Gadd has made clear that details of people involved have been heavily changed to protect their identities, and told GQ that the real Martha wouldn’t even recognise herself. But all this appears to have done is encourage online detectives further and, in their eyes, given them more ammunition to track down the real identities.

Could any of this have been avoided? “I think this sort of response could have been better anticipated by the network,” says Beth Johnson, Professor of Television and Media Studies at Leeds University. While Baby Reindeer is a drama, Netflix still has a duty of care towards anyone involved and affected by the show in the same way broadcasters protect reality TV stars in series like Love Island, she says.

There are very real implications from the online saga, too, such as false accusations. Fans might think they’re just adding to the show’s discourse, but they could be committing defamation and see themselves forced to pay damages to the people they’re accusing of abuse.

Instead, many have doubled down on their accusations, and are claiming to be on the right side of justice by doing so. While she's clearly mentally unwell, Martha is both violent and manipulative to Gadd in the series, so it's not entirely surprising that the internet has villainised her and the account they've linked to her. It’s clear many want to make sure that the real life ‘Darrien’ (Gadd’s abuser) is punished as he’s still out there, too.

Johnson agrees that there’s a sense of social justice behind it, but argues fans are ignoring really important elements of it, such as a recognition of care and mental health issues. Throughout the series Gadd makes it very clear that Martha is mentally unwell.

This kind of sleuthing or “intelligence gathering” that now characterises TV viewing in the social media age has “a nasty edge to it for sure,” says Horeck. We've seen a similar response before in the online reception to Netflix's true crime documentaries Making a Murderer (2015) and the more recent Tinder Swindler (2022), which saw fans involve themselves in the story, and share their analysis online. It “seems to shut down the very complexity the show is trying to open up,” Horeck adds.

It’s clear fans aren’t going to stop anytime soon, either. Is there a ‘lesson’ to be taken from all of this, then? For Johnson, it’s that the media needs to “tell a variety of stories”. “I certainly wouldn't like to see a situation in which it was like, ‘Okay, well, you know, this story's too sensitive” because of what happened here.

For Professor Horeck it’s even bigger than that. “I think we need to be having more conversations about ethics, television, and social media. What [does] ethical television mean in the streaming era? What does it mean to be an ethical audience? And to behave as ethical digital citizens?”

Perhaps Baby Reindeer could fulfil its creator’s wishes for a deep, nuanced conversation around mental health and stalking, but fans would have to log off and look inwards for that to happen.