The actor and screenwriter Richard Gadd I experienced a very long episode of harassment by an unbalanced woman and decided to tell it in a series. That series is My stuffed reindeer and it is indefinable. And very good. His crazy comedy premise and his silly Netflix series poster could even be part of the perverse game that Gadd proposes to us. Warning: My stuffed reindeer It is neither comedy nor silly. From Netflix it is.
Because Richard Gadd, in addition to a very long episode of harassment by an unbalanced woman, also lived, with a demonic man, a terrifying relationship that immediately led to continued sexual assault. And I decided to tell it in a series. In the same series.
Almost all the humor of My stuffed reindeer fades out in its first episode. We soon see how the Martha who harasses Donny (Richard Gadd playing himself) is not a wonderfully crazy woman. Amelia or (any) Barbra Streisand character, but a really dangerous person. Martha (an amazing Jessica Gunning) is clearly disturbed, but she is also a lonely woman and, why not, perhaps unfairly marginalized. Donny thinks so. When she discovers that it is not, it is too late and the harassment escalates to unusual extremes. So much so that (I insist, I insist a lot) the comedy disappears. And Donny is funny. A sad clown. Sad, harassed and violated.
The fourth episode of My stuffed reindeer is a turning point comparable to that of Fleabag, a series with which it is being compared a lot. But with Fleabag you laugh With My stuffed reindeer you just try. Until you give up.
Richard Gadd tambin she surrendered to the power of seduction of a man she admired. That sinister relationship led Gadd to hit rock bottom. Did she do it consciously, informedly and adultly? Yes and no. As he already did I could destroy you with the trauma of a rape, My stuffed reindeer manages to explain very well the twisted and ambiguous functioning of admiration-submission relationships. To do so risks becoming repetitive, since the reward and punishment mechanisms (simultaneous and indistinguishable, sometimes) of abuse involve a lot of repetition, ceremony and routine. Martha’s harassment of Donny also has a lot of constant noise and the series shows it. Thus he faces the legitimate criticism of having script and direction errors, but in exchange manages to take the viewer into an unhealthy trance in which the body and mind are carried away by the current directed by another. Donny was carried away by the currents of the two demons of him and us that Richard Gadd marks in the series that tells it. Structured in short chapters, My stuffed reindeer It could well have been formatted as a very long movie. We would have seen it just as well. That is to say: just as bad.
My stuffed reindeer, released on Netflix without much promotion, could become one of the television phenomena of the year. It is a series-experience, a series-ritual, a surprisingly simple oddity that, however, takes the viewer to places they have rarely been. Cheap, anticlimactic, uncomfortable and not at all attractive (you have seen few uglier series in your life), Richard Gadd’s work, which adapts his own theatrical monologue (as Fleabag!), seems like one thing and is many others. It seems like a silly comedy but it is an abysmal tragedy. Looks Misery with laughter but it is Requiem for a dream no handsome actors. It looks the same but it is different. It seems not but it is.