Why row over Baby Reindeer sleuths will change real-life drama for ever

Netflix’s No 1 hit show sparks legal and moral debate over identities in true-crime stories

Baby Reindeer was meant to be a close-up, complex – even funny – look at mental health problems and the way sufferers can feed on each other’s different illnesses. According to its millions of fans worldwide, the Netflix drama achieved these tricky goals. But the show, which shot to the streamer’s No 1 slot, is also now likely to change how fictionalised crime is seen.

The fictionalised series tells an intimately personal story already explored by the show’s writer, Scottish comedian Richard Gadd, in a couple of acclaimed one-man fringe theatre shows. It follows a depressed Scottish barman called Donny, played by Gadd, as he becomes enmeshed in the life of a female customer, “Martha Scott”, who is stalking him, sending him more than 41,000 emails, 350 hours of voicemail, 744 tweets, 46 Facebook messages, 106 pages of letters and torpedoing his other relationships.