Half Man Review: Richard Gadd's Baby Reindeer Follow-Up Is a Startling Portrait of Masculinity

The most obvious thing to say about Half Man, Baby Reindeer creator Richard Gadd's new limited series, is that it's not going to be for everyone. The same, of course, could be said about the semi-autobiographical Baby Reindeer, which follows a comedian whose experience with being stalked forces him to recall long-repressed traumas, and which nonetheless proved to be a massive, award-winning hit. Half Man is a work of fiction but is interested in similar themes, like sexuality, addiction, mental illness, sexual abuse, and masculinity. Gadd has a talent for facing those ideas with matter-of-fact honesty and steers clear of moralizing about any of his characters. Its intensity will make some viewers uncomfortable, but we live in a time when fans hold fictional characters to the same standards as real people, which makes Half Man often feel like brave television.

The six-episode limited series is made up mostly of flashbacks, set in Scotland and following a pair of not-quite-brothers through the decades. Niall (played as a teenager by Mitchell Robertson and by Jamie Bell as an adult) and Ruben (played by Stuart Campbell, and later Gadd) become bound together in their youth when their mothers begin a relationship and combine the two families, forcing the boys to share a room after Ruben gets out of juvie. Ruben is charming and confident but has a terrifyingly violent temper that can be triggered by just about anything. Niall is his polar opposite, a timid and bookish kid who spends his days getting tormented at school for his and his mother's perceived sexualities.

Ruben enters Niall's life with all the grace of a tornado, ripping his Doctor Who posters off the walls and replacing them with photos of shirtless boxers, pummeling Niall's bullies, and sneaking his girlfriend in through the window — the last of which leads to an agonizingly messy early scene that sets the tone for the rest of the series. Niall is as frightened of Ruben as he is compelled by his ability to make anyone and everyone defer to him, while Ruben eats up the attention. This is where Gadd gets particularly frank about one of the series' many taboo subjects, putting the current of sexual attraction between the two on frequent, stark display. The series makes the graceful decision to never explicitly put it into words, but both boys know it's there in a Royal Tenenbaums sort of way, even as Niall spends the majority of his life working overtime to repress his queerness. (The fact that his mom is a lesbian is regularly pointed out to him — but, he reasons, it's "different for women.") Gadd has spoken about not feeling seen by sunnier, more hopeful queer stories amid his own identity struggle, and as a story about a man who falls through the cracks, Half Man is fascinating.

8.2

Half Man

at HBO

Like

• All four leads are on fire
• The characters are dynamic
• The writing is complicated and layered

Dislike

• The adult portion of the show is less compelling than the adolescent portion

As the show barrels through the years they spend fading in and out of each other's lives, watching Half Man's central duo repeatedly make the same mistakes can be as maddening as it is gripping. When Niall heads off to university, apparently intent on making a fresh start, one single encounter with a boy he's instantly attracted to has him calling Ruben in the middle of the night to insist that he needs him. When he grows up into a struggling writer nursing sex and drug addictions, he can't stand to see Ruben doing better than he is and wedges himself back into Ruben's life. For his part, Ruben waits in the wings, perpetually circling Niall with animalistic focus. (And the very burly Gadd does indeed look the part of a growling, snarling animal, which works well in contrast to Bell's shorter, slighter frame.) Wherever Niall goes, there Ruben is. As one character observes, "It's like one needs a head and the other needs a body."

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While Gadd and Bell are outstanding both separately and together, the adolescent half of the show is more subtle than the adult portion, which has much soapier tendencies and deploys a number of somewhat overwrought monologues. The show begins when a vengeful Ruben crashes Niall's wedding, which is riveting as a framing device but becomes a little too over the top once the series really starts digging into the event itself. The adult Ruben's everlasting, hair-trigger rage is exhausting after too long, as is the way people continue to fearfully fall in line for him throughout his life. But in his youth, Campbell pads that fierce temper with boyish charisma that makes it easy to hope that Ruben might still be capable of change. And Bell is given room to explore the tragicomedy of a man so pathetically, inextricably linked to another man that he has no idea who he is outside of that relationship, but it's Robertson's wide-eyed innocence that truly informs the character's identity.

Half Man can be emotionally obliterating, and some of the particularly brutal sequences may permanently burn themselves into the viewer's brain. But the series is artful in its approach, avoiding using violence simply for the sake of shock value. Every vicious image is essential to the journeys of Niall and Ruben, and as a portrait of the myth and performance of masculinity, Half Man can also be very rewarding. Gadd continues to use his art to remind us that people are complicated — TV could use more creators like that.

Premieres: Thursday, April 23 at 9/8c on HBO
Who's in it: Richard Gadd, Jamie Bell, Stuart Campbell, Mitchell Robertson, Neve McIntosh, Bilal Hasna
Who's behind it: Richard Gadd (creator)
For fans of: Baby Reindeer, complicated men
How many episodes we watched: 6 of 6