Baby Reindeer's Exploration of Sexuality Is Unlike Any on TV

In Baby Reindeer, Donny never asks Martha to stop calling him by the titular name. It’s a cute moniker, but its charm is hollow: Martha is Donny’s older stalker, making the pet name more infantilizing than sweet.

But Donny sees it differently. Kind of.

The new Netflix limited series explores the nuanced complexities of Donny and Martha’s relationship, which, for Donny, reveals his equally nuanced sexuality. The portrait of their dynamic, and the attractions that drive it, is unlike any on television, transcending May-December, adult-baby, and dirty-talk kinks to unearth something fresher: a sexuality not defined by appearances or gender but an artist’s deeply buried trauma and unquenchable thirst for affirmation. 

Donny (Richard Gadd, also the series’s creator) is a 30something bartender in London, serving pints at a cheap pub as he tries to hack it as a comedian. Trouble is, his jokes are horrendous, leading to depressive states and zero gigs. If the laughs don’t rise in the comedy club, something else won’t in the bedroom. Enter Martha (Jessica Gunning): fat, seemingly vulnerable, and with a laugh so giddy Donny can’t resist tickling it. 

Relationships between bartenders and customers can already be muddy (does this person actually want to hear about my crummy day, or are they just being nice so I order more beer?), and Martha’s daily visits to the pub keep pushing the boundaries of professional comfort. She only sits in Donny’s section, suggests he join her for her birthday picnic, and finds his email on his website. “You shouldn’t have it on there,” she chirps. “Any so-and-so could get it.”

Soon, Martha’s firing off expletive and horny emails at all hours of the night — that those missives are horribly misspelled and conclude with a fake and tacked-on “sent from my iPhone” gives Baby Reindeer a darkly comic flair. This white-hot spotlight scares Donny, and titillates him. The deluge of emails may freak him out, but he never changes his address.

For anyone who’s been a struggling artist, Donny’s deviant curiosity may feel familiar. Martha provides Donny with two tantalizing gifts: enthusiastic messages in an inbox otherwise full of rejection letters, and fodder for his future comedy sets. In cities like London where skyrocketing costs make being an artist increasingly difficult, Donny’s hunger for Martha’s validation illuminates a contemporary sexuality.

Martha and Donny’s relationship is parasitic and codependent. Recent TV series have captured similarly thorny relationships — Ripley follows, to murderous ends, the perils of falling for someone you also wish you could be, and Succession caught laughs with Roman’s oedipal complex for Gerri — but, in Baby Reindeer, Martha's obsession with Donny, and how it affirms his ego and revs his id, is distinct.  

This makes Donny’s sexuality more psychological than physical. The stalked becomes the stalker as Donny tries to better understand Martha; he shadows her, watches her make a microwaved meal in a dingy flat (despite her alleged job as a high-powered lawyer), and is nearly discovered while snooping. “Maybe some part of me wanted to get caught,” his voiceover confides.

In a paltry effort to shake off his need for Martha, Donny goes on a bender of first dates. He meets promising YoPros: kind, astute, and, to Donny, utterly boring. To cap off each round of romantic roulette, he excuses himself to go to the loo but then scampers out of the restaurant. Such “ordinary” relationships do not intrigue Donny. But one gets close.

As Martha pursues him, Donny builds a healthier connection with a trans woman, Teri (Nava Mau), but their relationship starts bumpily: Donny takes on an assumed name because of his perceived stigma for dating a trans person. Here, there are echoes of Josh’s flirtation with Shea on Transparent; both series feature scruffy, charming, and floundering men unsure of how to enact their desires for gorgeous trans women whose sense of self is much sturdier.

But Teri, used to navigating transphobia and her own attractions to men with baggage, loses and regains patience with Donny, who cannot, initially, bring himself to have sex with her. Over time, she succeeds in opening him up: She asks why he struggles in the bedroom, noting he still craves Martha, and asks him to consider his sexuality, and whether he is bi. Donny thinks he is, “because I feel like a fraud no matter who I sleep with,” he says. It’s a touching and succinct analysis of bi-erasure. But before these reflections, Donny and Teri break up, and the absence of a stable relationship makes Donny want its opposite. Now, midway through the seven-episode series, Baby Reindeer slyly unravels Donny’s past trauma and how it has shaped him.

A few years back, in Edinburgh, Scotland, Donny failed to attract audiences to his comedy sets during the city’s fringe festival. He gets more walk-outs than walk-ins, but one person takes note: Darrien (Tom Goodman-Hill), a high-powered TV writer who coaches Donny on how to sharpen his sets.

Darrien’s notes work; Donny amasses a following and his confidence soars. All the while, the two spend more time together, and late-night hangs slip from artistic discussions to drug-filled binges. Darrien dangles creative opportunities that never materialize; Donny follows Darrien’s lead into another coke-laced night.

Horrific acts follow. Darrien invites Donny to his lavish home, feeds Donny drugs, and rapes him, weekend after weekend. As with Teri, Donny’s relationship with his acting classmate, Keeley (Shalom Brune-Franklin) deteriorates. Donny is always sure, on the other side of a weekend he can’t yet see is traumatic, an exciting job might magically appear, like an email in an inbox.

Back in London, whenever Donny is free-falling, Martha is always there to catch him, even as her actions cross boundaries. She sits outside his home day and night, follows him to far-flung comedy shows, and threatens his parents. A police report puts her at bay but inflames Donny’s longing — he can’t resist her gravitational pull, and, to successfully have sex with Teri, he imagines sleeping with Martha.

Baby Reindeer, wisely, does not moralize, even as we recognize the black hole Martha sets before Donny’s feet. Watching the textured gray area between them unfold is, in fact, a spiky gift: art can be moving, art can be entertaining, and art can be practical. The series understands that relationships are seldom static; they ebb and flow and, in extremes, poke at our darkness and coo with welcome. Donny, like so many, is unequipped; he cannot articulate his trauma or need for Martha, but Gadd’s series, based on his lived experience, does. Through its seven episodes, we may see our own unhealthy relationships, and loneliness, reflected back to us.

When he first moved to London, Donny says he felt like a “background artist in a cast of millions.” Celebrity’s gaze might not have found Donny, but Martha’s did. “You shine,” she tells him, eyes warm and aglow like Big Ben at night. Who, in some deep melancholy, hasn’t needed to hear that?

Baby Reindeer is streaming on Netflix. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Billy McEntee is a freelance arts journalist with bylines in The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Vanity Fair, and others. Follow him @wjmcentee.