Baby Reindeer wasn’t an easy watch, but Richard Gadd’s new show is punishing

Half Man ★★½

Richard Gadd, whose 2024 Netflix series Baby Reindeer was a wrenching, unforgettable debut, pushes his grasp of trauma, violence, and self-deceit beyond its limit in this punishing follow-up. Freed from autobiographical parameters, Gadd has written a show that straddles the line between unrelenting and repetitive.

This new six-part series covers the corrosive brotherly bond between the closeted Niall Kennedy (Jamie Bell) and the swaggering Ruben Pallister (Gadd, layered in muscle). Told over 30 years, the story captures their painful back and forth, but both men deprive the viewer of self-illumination.

Savagery is the punctuation here. A stand-off in private between the two at a middle-aged Niall’s wedding, which Ruben crashes, ends with a punch serving as the cut to a classroom blow in late 1980s Glasgow, where a teenage Niall (Mitchell Robertson) is being bullied. When he gets home, the nervy boy discovers a domineering new roommate just released from juvenile detention, Ruben (Stuart Campbell). Niall is both fearful and entranced. Ruben has a volcanic temper, but he’s also a crutch for Niall.

“Toxic masculinity” is a phrase Half Man will attract, but Gadd wants to peer beneath any labels. While the historical detail is cursory, the show serves as a period piece in depicting how Niall’s nascent sexuality is a secret he’s desperate to keep.

With an echo of Douglas Stuart’s acclaimed novels, Niall struggles with the repercussions of his actions, living in terror of Ruben finding out. Homophobia is normalised in 20th-century Glasgow, and a telling point that Gadd makes is that even when it isn’t, Niall – a struggling author – still acts like it is.

Gadd gives a charismatic, chaos-laden performance. His Ruben doesn’t breathe, he simmers. But it’s locked in to Gadd’s physicality, and deprived of insight until the ritualistic close. It’s Niall who is the barometer, and Bell captures not only his self-evasion and panic, but slowly spins the perspective so that Niall nettles Ruben, and even secretly damages him. Both actors deliver what their roles require, but the narrative of Niall’s dynamic with Ruben repeatedly reaching a horrifying breaking point becomes a kind of unavoidable ritual.

Gadd can end an episode with a terrific twist, and he has an unnerving way with long, intimate set-pieces, starting in that shared teenage bedroom. But there’s barely a shred of Baby Reindeer’s blackly consolatory comedy here, and the narrative takes too long to find an outside voice that can navigate both Niall and Ruben. Its focus on the pair is exhaustively tight – Niall’s interior life as a writer is rarely felt.

Half Man seeks understanding through extremes, but that can also leave you desensitised to this demanding show.

Half Man premieres April 24 on Stan*

*Stan is owned by Nine, which also owns this masthead.

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