Baby Reindeer was, if anything, an even bigger punt. Gadd’s black comedy about an aspiring comedian stalked by a woman he befriends at the bar where he worked was loosely based on his own experiences (hence the lawsuit). Capturing the randomness of real life – Gadd’s Danny initially struggles to accept he’s being stalked – the show crept up the Netflix English language charts, fuelled by viewers recommending it to one another.
But if the Emmys was daring in its selection of winners, the ceremony itself was the same old same old. Looking out of place and ill-at-ease throughout the night, the Levy father-and-son duo struggled to conjure any excitement.
They landed a rare sucker punch with a gag about The Bear and its classification as a comedy (“in the true spirit of The Bear, we will not be making any jokes”). Otherwise, the three-hour broadcast managed just one memorable moment – a 25th-anniversary reunion by the cast of The West Wing, headed by President Bartlett himself, Martin Sheen. West Wing-aside, the Emmys chugged by on auto-pilot. How it could have done with some of the innovative thinking that made Shogun and Baby Reindeer such sensations.