Intense, dark and raw, this harrowing tale of stalking and sexual assault was a sensitive and truly courageous piece of work – featuring not one but two astonishing performances

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Just about all of human frailty is here in the seven episodes of Baby Reindeer. Most are just half an hour long but so densely packed with emotional drama, so unrelentingly focused on awful truths about the ways we act and the ways we fail ourselves and each other, that if it were any longer you could hardly bear it.

Written, created by and starring Richard Gadd, the Netflix drama is based on the acclaimed one-man play he wrote about being stalked online and in real life by a woman called Martha. On screen, he plays unsuccessful comedian Donny Dunn and the part of Martha is taken by Jessica Gunning. Both performances are astonishing (and won Emmys) in an increasingly complex story that begins with Donny, in his day job as a bartender, taking pity on Martha when she comes into the pub upset and without money one fateful afternoon, giving her a free drink and letting her spin him not entirely convincing tales about being a high flying lawyer. Soon, she is in the pub every day and deluging him with emails when they are apart – some fantastical, some lustful, some simply complimentary about him. But he, at some level, likes (wants, needs? Baby Reindeer rarely allows you to settle definitely on a verb) the attention, even from someone as obviously unstable as Martha, whom Gunning makes vicious, vulgar and vulnerable by turns, though each only puts us more in touch with her damage and her humanity.