Please Don’t Judge Me as a Person 

I discovered the show at two in the morning on a Tuesday, which is the exact hour I usually reserve for reviewing every conversational error I have made since the fourth grade. I was supposed to be answering an email from a teacher that began with the words "Just checking in," a phrase that always makes me feel like a patient who has wandered out of a facility in a hospital gown. To avoid this interaction, I opened Netflix and found something called Baby Reindeer. Given the title, I naturally assumed it was a festive holiday cartoon about a young caribou who overcomes a mild physical deformity through the power of friendship and teamwork.

Instead, it psychologically rearranged my internal organs.

By Thursday afternoon, I had become the most dangerous type of person to encounter in a public space. I was the person who traps you against the soda machine at lunch and says, "No, listen to me, you need to watch it tonight, just ignore the name and ignore the first twenty minutes and also please don't judge me as a person." I spoke with the trembling, wide-eyed intensity of a historical reenactor explaining a cholera outbreak.

The problem is that my friends have completely stopped trusting my endorsements. Only a month ago, I cornered several people in the hallway to insist that a ninety-minute documentary about the history of the modern stapler was actually a profound meditation on human industrial loneliness. When I tell people a piece of media will change their lives, they expect to be bored by an old man in a turtleneck talking about metal fatigue. They do not expect what Baby Reindeer actually offers, which is seven episodes of a man making the absolute worst decision available to him at any given second.

Trying to explain the plot of the show to someone who is currently trying to enjoy a basket of mozzarella sticks is an exercise in social ruin. You find yourself saying things like, "Well, he is a comedian, but he is very bad at it, and then this woman comes into his pub and he gives her a free cup of tea because he feels sorry for her, and then she emails him forty thousand times." Your friend will look at their cheese, then look at you, and ask why anyone would watch a television program that sounds like a training video for human resources.

But the stalking is actually the least uncomfortable part of the entire experience. The real horror of the show is its commitment to absolute, humiliating honesty. Most television shows about troubled people allow the protagonist to be beautifully damaged. They suffer in grand, cinematic ways that make you wish you also had a substance abuse problem and a leather jacket.

This show does not do that. The main character, Donny, is miserable in the way real people are miserable, which is to say he is clumsy, desperate, and deeply embarrassed by his own existence. He wants to be noticed so badly that he accepts the attention of a person who is clearly destroying his life, simply because any audience is better than no audience at all.

There were several moments where I had to pause the screen and just stare at the wall for five minutes, feeling like a person who has accidentally opened an official envelope containing an enormous, unexpected tax bill. At one point during episode four, my mother walked into the living room carrying a bag of groceries and asked if I wanted any bananas. On the screen behind her, a man was having a full emotional collapse in a brightly lit television studio. I had to look her in the eye and say, "Yes, a banana sounds lovely," while the audio track emitted the sound of a human being sobbing into a microphone.

It felt like a crime had been committed, and I was the one who had driven the getaway car.

My peers are often accused of being obsessed with oversharing, which I think is a misunderstanding of what we are actually doing. We do not overshare because we are proud of our flaws. We do not post our breakdowns on the internet because we think they look good. We do it because we are terribly lonely, and we have figured out that if you tell a tragic story with enough jokes in it, people will look at you. Sincerity has become a very dangerous social currency. If you tell someone you are sad, they look away because they do not know what to do with your gravity. But if you tell them you are sad while doing a small dance or using a funny filter, they will click a little heart button. We have turned our bruises into a performance because we are terrified that if we stop talking, the room will go completely silent.

What stayed with me after the final credits rolled was not the strangeness of the characters or the extreme nature of the plot. It was the horrible, familiar realization that the desire to be witnessed can make a person do almost anything. We are all walking around looking for someone to look at us and tell us we are real, even if that person happens to be emailing us from an account called “baby reindeer.”

I did eventually reply to the teacher who was checking in on me. I told her I was doing splendidly and that my academic progress was entirely on track. It was a complete lie, but it felt much safer than the alternative, which would have been sending her a link to a British miniseries and a message that said, “This is what the inside of my head looks like when the Wi-Fi goes down.”