You probably fall into three categories when it comes to “Baby Reindeer,” the new, almost indescribable series on Netflix.
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Never heard of it and never seen it.
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Everybody is either telling you to watch it or not watch it, which has become like a ceaseless drumming and says more about them, depending on what they are telling you to do, than about the show.
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You already watched it.
(If No. 3 is true, I would hedge a guess that you either burned right through it immediately or stopped cold pretty early on.)
For transparency sake I will tell you what most of you already know — that I read almost nothing about a show before I see it on purpose and there’s less than a handful of critics I even bother with when the time comes to read a review and usually that time is after I’ve already watched.
In the case of “Baby Reindeer” not that long ago, a friend told me about it via text.
I’d never heard of it.
Someone had told him about it. But also: “It’s all over the Netflix site.” Me: “Everybody has a different algorithm and I’ve never even seen the name, but I’ll check it out sometime.”
Response: “No, I really think it’s everywhere on Netflix?”
And: “You gotta see this.”
I went and looked at my Netflix landing page, a mash-up of choices that reminded me of the American Music Club song “Johnny Mathis’ Feet,” where singer-songwriter Mark Eitzel asks Johnny Mathis how to live.
It’s one of my favorite AMC songs ever, filled with magisterial bleakness and astonishingly great writing, where in one stanza Eitzel says:
So, yeah, that’s my Netflix landing page.
But, huh, there it was — “Baby Reindeer.”
Even with that brilliant title I guess it just washed across my eyes like some cosmic speck in the infinite stardust of social media click-bait, dopamine hits and egregiously TMI trailers on every streaming platform I subscribe to…and I just missed it?
In the song, the fictional Johnny Mathis does give Eitzel tons of life advice, and I will share this line before diving into the shortest Two Episode Test I can recall:
