“Baby reindeer” is perhaps this year’s most unexpected crowd favorite
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TV CHRONICLE While some TV series are given hits, there are others whose huge impact is much more difficult to predict.
“Baby reindeer” is just such a series.
The term “sleeper hit” is a label for films, TV series, songs, video games and the like, which look moderately promising before their premiere, but then sail up and become successes even though no one really expected it.
The term indicates that the process takes some time, but is now also used when the journey from hidden ice to snack ice is quite fast.
The point is that it’s something unexpected, that hasn’t been marketed with trumpets and trumpets, often lacks poster names and other stardom, and doesn’t have such high expectations, but still grows big.
Sometimes it’s media attention that arouses the audience’s interest.
Sometimes, on the contrary, it is the growing fan base that arouses the media’s interest.
And in the latter case above all, it is Netflix that, with several hundred million subscribers worldwide and a constant influx of high and low, is the king of creating stealth hits that spread like wildfire and get people talking.
Phenomena that they probably don’t even always see coming.
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The best example is “Squid game”which came out of nowhere in 2021 and became a wrestling hit that absolutely no one could miss.
But there are many other series that launched modestly, then quickly took off and basically marketed themselves via the digital jungle drum.
Like “The queen’s gambit”, “Tiger king”, “Making a murderer”, “Heartstopper” and “13 reasons why”. And “La casa de papel”, which went from Spanish fringe phenomenon to global steamroller when Netflix took over the rights.
And now we have a new bang, named “Baby reindeer”.
The Scottish Comedian Richard Gadd has created and plays a version of himself in the series, which is about his own traumatic experiences as a youngster. When he was first groomed, sexually abused and raped by a man he thought would help him with his career, then stalked by a woman who stalked him both physically and digitally – with over 40,000 emails and hundreds of hours of voicemails.
That the dark and psychologically complex series (which is partly directed by Josephine Bornebusch) deserves the impact it has had, there is no doubt. It is something of a rarity.
However, I had tipped it as a critic favorite rather than a mainstream hit, and presumably Gadd himself didn’t anticipate this kind of attention for his story either.
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“Baby reindeer” has TV bombs like these often does, has taken on a life of its own, and now the internet’s amateur detectives are trying to figure out the identities of the perpetrators. Which has Gadd concerned – because pointing out so who did it not was the point of the series.
A precarious side effect of course. But when a series is devoured in an instant by millions of people, you can expect that the score will fly over the heads of some.
Gadd’s trauma is now content, over which he no longer has control.
And Netflix can at least laugh all the way to the bank.
Again.
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