The Baby Reindeer aftermath shows we’ve lost the plot on armchair sleuthing

It’s a fair prediction, even at this early stage, that Baby Reindeer will be the most talked about show of 2024. Or, at the very least, let’s go with “Have you seen Baby Reindeer?” as the most persistent watercooler question of the year.

Writer-actor Richard Gadd’s Netflix smash is a black comedy, of sorts, about a googly-eyed, failing comedian, which then shapeshifts into a bracing, complex nosedive into trauma and surviving abuse. It’s also based on a “true story”, that is, Gadd’s own story. It’s a powerfully executed piece of work, but also exposes some truth about us as an audience and our loosening grip on the boundaries of entertainment, storytelling and fact over fiction.

We’ve been armchair detectives for some time now. If you look at one of the early phenomena of modern true crime, Making a Murderer, which came out in 2015, the first season was a forensic 10-hour encyclopaedic dive into a murder case in Wisconsin that represented 10 years of work by the filmmakers. It was not only about the individuals involved, but the flaws with the wider criminal justice system and was a truly ground-breaking piece of journalism. And it brought us along for the detective work.

Now, the enormous volume of true crime these days has somewhat diluted the impact of stories. The sheer number of shows and their proliferation in prime-time entertainment is reducing their power and desensitising viewers. Are people fully registering the difference between actual real, dead women and plots in police procedurals, for example? Telling victims’ real stories is absolutely vital, but are we doing it in the right way? And are we watching them in the right way?

It seems that now we are much more interested in the jigsaw pieces than the people at the heart of the puzzle. Baby Reindeer is initially about Gadd’s real-life experiences at the hands of “Martha” and sets out its stall as a tale about stalking, but then does a shocking about-turn and becomes about the impact of another predator with a much more catastrophic effect. It’s deeply affecting, particularly for its unflinching spotlight on the emotional carnage triggered by assault – a hugely important insight that we can and should all learn from. And we should have left it at that. But no, we didn’t.

In picking over Baby Reindeer’s carcass, the internet has hunted down the real-life Martha, who, now in a case of life imitating art, is claiming she herself is being stalked and threatening legal action against Netflix. Elsewhere, rumours continue to circulate about the predatory producer featured in the story. Both instances have caused Gadd to step in and call off the dogs. “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real life people could be,” he wrote on Instagram a couple of weeks back. “That’s not the point of our show.”

Is it naive to think that internet sleuths wouldn’t have attempted to hunt out the real identities of those involved? There are prompts aplenty in the show: Gadd, as Donny, for example, uncovers multiple newspaper reports about previous stalking offences by Martha and that, together with details about her being a lawyer, offers a few bones for curious minds watching at home to work with. Was there more of a duty of care to protect identities, rather than just relying on the internet to be decent enough not to hunt down a woman with clear mental health issues for TikTok posts? Maybe so.

Audiences have a vital place in putting a spotlight on stories that need to be told. One of the most recent, interesting examples of the monumental social impact TV can have is another British drama based on true events, Mr Bates vs The Post Office. It’s the unbelievable story of an IT accounting malfunction that saw 900 subpostmasters – from tiny British suburbs and villages across the country – facing criminal convictions for false shortfalls in their accounts.