Baby Reindeer - Netflix

I saw the play at the Fringe a few years ago. I remember it veins one if the most visceral, upsetting things I'd ever seen. Because it was only an hour, it got very intense very quickly, thousands of voicemails swirling through the air, relentlessly raising the stress level.

The TV show the most astonishing drama I've seen in a long time. What I really liked is that it would have been so easy for Gadd to write himself as a blameless victim, but he makes such monumentally awful decisions. Equally, a lot of the stuff he tries to say to Martha comes from a place of empathy.

I've just started watching this on the advice of forum members.
I am 2 episodes in and am enjoying it. However I find, for a true story, it's rather implausible.
She says she is a lawyer who owns lots of property (which i realise she doesnt) and yet she says she can't afford a drink and he has seen where and how she lives, so why does he not challenge her?
I guess the reason is that the series would only last one episode.
Anyway it's still entertaining even if its all a bit far fetched.

Uncomfortable with a global TV drama based around a real woman with severe mental health issues who is presumably still out there somewhere hopefully trying to recover and rehabilitate.

And, inevitably, both names in the frame are now getting threats. The allegedly real people also look very like the actors cast to play them. This does feel irresponsible.

I think Richard Gadd has been very brave to relive his trauma to make the show, but the discourse from amateur sleuths on Twitter has been vile. Sharing videos and profiles, accusations. As if the irony of doing that after watching a drama about stalking wasn't enough, it's so dangerous and I think it's really irresponsible of Gadd to make her so easily identifiable.

Bit late isn't it? I honestly thought lawyers would go through the scripts with a fine tooth comb before it got anywhere near production, a statement after millions of people have watched it won't do a thing. Would Baby Reindeer be classified as doxxing, using verbatim quotes that have obviously been very easily traced?

I wonder given the success of the TV adaptation if we might finally see the original version go to the West End since it was postponed due to the pandemic.

There's certainly dishonesty when he claims he made her unrecognisable: quite the contrary, he and the production seem to have gone to great pains to cast an actress who looks, dresses, has the CV, has the speech patterns, actual cut and paste dialogue, and presumably accent of the alleged 'real Martha'. Every single aspect of that could have been altered to distance her, but weren't. In the series, he then goes on to portray Martha physically assaulting people with racial abuse, and going to prison for stalking him. We know the latter isn't true, so is the former? An unreliable narrator is a familiar trope in fiction but it's very dodgy when you are claiming it's fact. And she's getting online death threats for her behaviour as portrayed in the series. It's 'emotionally true', says Gadd, weaselly. Even more icky is that he includes a scene - and it's ambiguous whether it's fantasy or reality, of his character, played by himself, having sex with an actress who looks like a real person. That's like an analogue version of personally tailored 'deepfake porn'. Netflix have a ratings hit, and controversy is all grist to that mill, but there's a reason why shows like this are rare - it's because they're reckless. 

I've seen some people wondering if it's a Black Mirror thing but I think it's more like a lack of care by the programme makers and platform in pursuit of the sort of story that can be, and is, this year's Tiger King style ratings hit. As he portrays himself in the series, he's a man who makes very bad decisions and is desperate to make it in showbusiness, even going back to a predatory man who, as portrayed in the series, sexually assaulted him, to get a career boost. 

I need to preface this with DO NOT WATCH PIERS MORGAN'S SHOW.

The real Martha will be interviewed tomorrow. I think it's absolutely vile to use an ill woman for views.

She's both. In a society with better mental health care this situation could be prevented. Instead a situation with two people with serious 'issues' playing into each others obsession has been made into a TV entertainment with little thought to safeguarding (of both of them). It feels a bit like The Lady in the Van - turning a strange life experience and a real woman with serious mental health problems into drama, but at least Alan Bennett waited until she was dead.