8 Shows Like ‘Baby Reindeer’ to Watch After Streaming the Netflix Hit

Baby Reindeer, the British series that’s become a global sensation since it began streaming on Netflix, leaves viewers gasping and reeling—and immediately seeking out their friends’ opinions. To see it is to want to talk about it!

Written by and starring Scottish actor Richard Gadd, the seven-episode show is based on the actor’s own experience dealing with an infatuated woman stalker (played by Jessica Gunning). That’s unsettling enough, but a shocking revelation pulls the show into an even darker place.

Baby Reindeer is ultimately about many troubling things—abuse, rape, obsession, victimization, false identity (we could go on)—but it’s also suspenseful. How will Gadd, who calls himself Donny here, free himself, not only from the stalker but from his demons?

Here are eight shows—scary, disturbing, strange and maybe at times challenging—worth bingeing after Baby Reindeer.

You (Netflix)

Anyone who still associates Penn Badgely with Dan Humphrey, the sensitive, writer from Gossip Girl, will have their neural paths permanently rewired with this unnerving hit series. He plays Joe Goldberg, a bookish young man who has a habit of falling head over heels in a way that anyone else would recognize as psychotic. A deadly if deluded romantic predator, he’s known to imprison the women he desires—and stalks—in a plexiglass cage in the basement. The death count keeps growing. A fifth and final season is currently in production.

Killing Eve (Netflix)

Created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag), this tale of murder and espionage, which first aired on BBC America, hinges on the dangerous melding of egos between Eve Polasti (Sandra Oh), a smart, down-at-heels intelligence agent, and a possibly demented international assassin named Villanelle (Jodie Comer). Villanelle happens to also be baby-doll cute and dizzily funny, and she occasionally dresses as if she were headed for Anna Wintour’s annual Met Gala. The women are enemies and opposites stalking each other across international lines, but their missions are always on the verge of compromise because of a mutual attraction and fascination that may be sexual. Or are they both fundamentally unstable?

Doctor Foster (Apple TV+)

This outrageously entertaining 2015 British series first aired in the States on Lifetime with the added subtitle A Woman Scorned, which is both apt and not. In outline, yes, this could be any Lifetime movie about infidelity and revenge. Dr. Gemma Foster (Gentleman Jack’s Suranne Jones) catches her husband having an affair with a soft, lovely, not terribly bright young blonde (Jodie Comer before Killing Eve fame) and sets out to destroy every scintilla of happiness he’s ever known or will know. But the show also has a particular British zest for going all-in dramatically, to the point of being cruelly, knowingly funny.  There was a second season that pushed the envelope even further, and then a 2020 spinoff, Life.

Fatal Attraction (Apple TV+)

A limited-series and reboot of the electric 1987 movie starring Glenn Close and Michael Douglas, Fatal Attraction is an intelligent, #MeToo take on this cautionary tale about family man Dan (Joshua Jackson) who comes to regret his fling with the violently possessive Alex (Lizzie Caplan). At eight episodes, of course, the show can’t possibly be the white-knuckle trip that the film was. If anything, the tone is often closer to Jackson’s critically acclaimed Showtime series, The Affair, a measured examination of the harm men and women do to each other in (and out of) their relationships. And Caplan could be considered the un-Close. Her performance has a soft, sad-eyed stealthiness as if she kept her secret thoughts wrapped in velvet

The Watcher (Netflix)

Nora and Dean Brannock (Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale) have just moved into their suburban dream home when they begin receiving creepy-cryptic-frightening letters from an anonymous writer who signs off as the Watcher.  (“You need to fill the house with young blood,” says the first note, followed by the ominous warning:  “If you were upstairs, you would never hear them scream.”) This seven-episode series nicely ratchets up the sense of dread and paranoia—what terrible stalking fate is closing in on the Brannocks?—as it introduces possible suspects from the community played by a dream cast of oddballs, including Jennifer Coolidge, Richard Kind, Margo Martindale and Mia Farrow. Watcher is based on a true story, but it’s also co-created by Ryan Murphy. So don’t be surprised if the plotting is fun but less tidy than your average suburban lawn.   

Swarm (Amazon)

Played by Dominique Fishback with a combination of furious, bloody-minded passion and stark, numb pathos, Dre is one of the most alarmingly original characters to appear on television in the past decade. Like Kathy Bates in Misery, Dre is a crazed superfan—in this case, of a Beyoncé-like star called Ni’Jah. If anyone should happen to have different musical tastes from Dre’s, or stand between Dre and her dream of seeing Ni’Jah in concert, she’ll bludgeon them to death (and raid their refrigerator). But—again, as with Bates in Misery—you worry what might happen to the unseen Ni’Jah if she were ever to fall short of Dre’s fantasies about her. This seven-episode series can be studied for its deeper themes about social media, emotional isolation and maybe even the influence of Beyoncé, but only after the fact. First, it should be binged for its jolting weirdness.

Bates Motel (Amazon)

The Good Doctor’s Freddie Highmore isn’t feeling so good here, playing young Norman Bates in a five-season series (originally on A&E) that serves as a prequel to Psycho. In the classic 1960 movie, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring a twittering, stammering Anthony Perkins, Norman is a psychotic, murderer man-child zealously guarding a secret: he’s murdered his mother and stashed her mummified corpse in the basement. Here we find the younger Norman as a deeply insecure teenager, with Mrs. Bates—played by the commanding Vera Farmiga—very much alive. Inevitably, Mommy will be among the show’s corpses. But will this Norman grow up to attack unsuspecting women in the shower? The show may not agree with Hitchcock on that point.

Enlightened (Max)

Laura Dern gives what’s possibly still her best performance—nervy, funny, bravely unsympathetic—in this profoundly uncomfortable comedy written and co-created by Mike White (The White Lotus). She plays Amy Jellicoe, a corporate up-and-comer who cracks up at work, suffering a sobbing, screaming, raging breakdown. After being packed off to rehab, she returns to the office full of self-validating slogans and ideas that are completely delusional—pitiable, really, whenever she repeats them, trying to convince her colleagues of her new zen confidence. No one buys it: she’s demoted—down many, many rungs—into data entry. At that point, Amy sets out to systematically destroy top management, never deviating from her conviction that she alone is driven to act by idealism and truth, never aware that people flee her smiling, hectoring presence. She’s what we’d currently consider a sociopath, alienated from many aspects of reality. And yet it’s possible—at the end of two seasons—to conclude that maybe she is heroic.