Shortly after returning from visiting my daughter in Madrid in April, I logged onto Netflix to see what I’d missed while abroad. Now, it’s not entirely unusual for a glance at the platform’s “Top 10 TV Shows in America Right Now” queue to yield some unfamiliar results. “Too Hot to Handle,” which is on the list as I write this, is already in its sixth season and, as far as I can tell, is a reality show about testing kitchen gadgets.
Seeing a series titled “Baby Reindeer” at #1 piqued my interest. An odd title. Maybe a reality show following a caribou herder in Alaska? It could be a cute nature show. Who doesn’t want to watch a bunch of adorable reindeer calves learning to walk?
The next day, a publicist called.
Have you seen Baby Reindeer? No, but I see it's the number one show on Netflix. I'll have to check it out.
The next day, the same publicist called again.
“Did you see 'Baby Reindeer'?” Dude. It's been a night.
The next day, I watched “Baby Reindeer,” and the day after that, I finished watching “Baby Reindeer.” Seven episodes, most of them half an hour long. At first, it seems like a horror story about a stalker who pursues Donny, a sad-sack waiter who dreams of becoming a comedian. But it quickly becomes deeper and more complex, as Donny’s own behavior becomes erratic, fueled by self-loathing and neediness rooted in shame.
And then you get to the fourth episode and find out why it took Donny so long to report the stalker. Watching it was the closest I've ever come to pausing or completely stopping a TV show because what I was watching was so horrifying and painful to witness. It makes the Christmas Eve dinner flashback episode of “The Bear” look like a Hallmark Christmas movie.
And yet, almost everyone I know has seen “Baby Reindeer.” I have neighbors who have watched it twice. And they weren’t the only ones. “Baby Reindeer” made it into Netflix’s top 10 most-watched TV lists in 92 countries. Three months after its release, it had racked up 88.4 million views.
Have you Have you seen “Baby Reindeer”? Do I even need to ask? No doubt, if you’re one of the 24,000 members of the Television Academy who vote for the Emmys, it’s a rhetorical question. Even with headlines surrounding the self-proclaimed real-life stalker suing Netflix for defamation, the show is poised to win big at the Emmys this year. For a niche series that wasn’t on anyone’s radar four months ago, that’s a remarkable story.
