Revealed: The missing episode of Baby Reindeer, and why it was cut
Speaking at the Future Vision television summit, presented by Australians in Film and Screen Australia at ACMI in Melbourne, the triple-Emmy-winning Scot told interviewer and fellow showrunner Tony Ayres (Clickbait, The Survivors, Stateless) that an entire episode set in Scotland was scrapped – at his insistence.
'I really fought to cut an episode of Baby Reindeer,' Gadd told a stunned audience. 'I really wanted to cut it.'
The episode had been written as a pressure release of sorts, as Gadd's hapless standup comedian Donny Dunn is reeling from the relentless attention of former lawyer-turned stalker Martha Scott (Jessica Gunning), a woman he met while working in a London bar.
'I remember when we were developing it, there was the note [from Netflix] that kept coming in – and probably rightfully so – that the show was just too dark, you need to give the audience a respite from it all,' Gadd said.
'And so there was an episode where I escape London to get away from Martha and everything, and I go and visit my parents [in Scotland]. There's a whole episode where I go to the football with my dad, I spend a day with my dad, and stuff kind of happens.'
Martha was 'sort of relentless', he said, and the advice that the audience needed a break from her seemed reasonable. But Gadd said: 'When we got to the edit, I felt you miss her every time she's not on screen, and I felt in a lot of ways, the sooner you get back to her, the better. And so episode three is an amalgamation of a few episodes.
'The episode that's missing ended with her in my kitchen, which is actually how we started [the final version of] episode three. So the edit was almost a complete rewrite of what was in the script.'
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