If it hasn’t happened already, someone at Apple has surely been deployed by now to check out the new Netflix limited series Baby Reindeer — a darkly comic horror story about one man’s harrowing experience with a middle-aged stalker. What that Apple employee will discover is a spectacular show that contains more mentions of the iPhone than what a tech journalist would find at Tim Cook’s annual Cupertino presentation. And while Baby Reindeer abides by the company’s rule of not allowing ‘antagonists’ to use their products in films and television, the complexity with which its characters are drawn must certainly have left Apple lawyers scratching their heads.
Based on Richard Gadd’s one-man stage play of the same name, Baby Reindeer is a seven-episode limited series that continues one of the finest runs that Netflix has had in years, a run that the streamer will surely sabotage with a new live-action anime adaptation or a half-hearted true crime series soon. Coming on the heels of masterpieces One Day and Ripley, Baby Reindeer presents an unsettling and ultimately heartbreaking account of one man’s pain, presented with a dollop of wry humour that only hindsight can afford.