Writers like Richard Gadd must be free to imagine or relive whatever is most urgently interesting
September 30, 2024 5:02 pm
When Baby Reindeer arrived on Netflix, the dramatisation of its writer/star Richard Gadd’s stalking ordeal at the hands of a woman called “Martha” became an overnight sensation. Within about five seconds, the public had unearthed Fiona Harvey, allegedly “the real Martha”, and made a vulnerable person’s life a misery.
Whatever you thought of Harvey, it would seem that not enough had been done to anonymise her – an argument now supported by a US judge, who has cleared the way for her defamation suit against Netflix.
While Gadd has been clear about how Harvey’s actions impacted his life, the behaviour he accuses her of in real life falls far short of its on-screen depiction. Yet, “it appears that a reasonable viewer could understand the statements about Martha to be about [Harvey]”, wrote the judge.
It’s hard to argue that Netflix – which billed the series as a “true story” – shouldn’t have to shoulder some blame. The backlash against Harvey was both predictable and avoidable. In the era of social media, it’s practically a guarantee that viewers will track down the characters in their favourite series. Couldn’t Netflix have made Martha Irish rather than Scottish, blonde rather than brunette, or changed any number of other identifying characteristics?
It’s easy to see why they didn’t. Recent appetite for true crime, not to mention the eternal human soft spot for gossip, surely contributed to the decisions to lean into the series’ real-life aspect – but just because something’s tempting, doesn’t make it a good idea. Certainly, the human consequences are plain to see. What’s more, they risk undermining the ambiguity that made the series so valuable in the first place.
Quibbling over degrees of fictionalisation or legal technicalities drags Baby Reindeer out of the realm of art, reducing it to something altogether less nuanced. However viewers might have treated it, the series was not an episode of reality TV to be weighed in on – on the contrary, Baby Reindeer was extraordinary precisely because it exposed its audience to difficult ideas without necessarily needing to resolve them.
Martha frightens Gadd’s character, but she also feeds something in him. He wants her to stop, and he also wants her to obliterate him. That inner conflict is immeasurably more compelling than any amount of legal wrangling could ever hope to be. But thanks to Netflix’s decision to slap a “true” sticker on the show, it’s ultimately the latter we’re talking about.
No matter which way the legal proceedings go in Harvey’s case, the fact that they’re happening at all risks painting endeavours like Gadd’s as fraught, or even somehow immoral. On the contrary, they are essential, and richly instructive. At times, Baby Reindeer was hard to watch; I can only imagine what an ordeal it must have been to write. In 2024’s stark moral landscape, arenas that allow mass audiences to marinate in uncomfortable quandaries are few and far between. We must do everything we can to champion them.
Art can be separate from our immediate moral universe. Using it to decide who is good and who is bad is the least interesting thing we can ask of storytelling, and as far away as possible from the challenging creativity of which Baby Reindeer is so exemplary.
Writers like Gadd must be free to imagine or relive whatever is most urgently interesting. It is down to producers and distributors to share it with as little collateral damage as possible.
While many parts of this story are singular, Baby Reindeer is also totally unremarkable: find me a novel not, in some way, based on its author’s experience. “Truth” will always have a troubled relationship to fiction, and in Baby Reindeer, it is both paramount and irrelevant. Is the series more powerful because a version of it “really” happened? Where does one person’s right to tell their story end, and another’s right to privacy begin? There is no answering these questions, but plenty of merit in chewing them over.
Beyond its seven episodes, Baby Reindeer continues to raise pertinent questions about ownership and authorial authority, issues that will only become more relevant in a world where everyone is just a Google search away, and a public platform only requires clicking “go live”.
For now, let Baby Reindeer’s unofficial sequel be a lesson to nosy viewers and greedy producers both – but we mustn’t let it put off other Richard Gadds from making blazing, bracing work the world so desperately needs.
