A star rating of 3 out of 5.
If misery loves company, trauma likes an audience. With more triggers than an El Paso gun show – strong and discriminatory language, scenes of violence and underage sexual abuse, and flashbacks to late-20th-century Scottish fashion trends – Half Man is Richard Gadd’s difficult second album – the perilous next trick after the surprising runaway success of Netflix’s Baby Reindeer.
That series established Gadd either as a daring writer prepared to show his vulnerability while mining the gloomier recesses of the human psyche for material… or as an emotional exhibitionist seriously lacking boundaries. Whichsoever, he won three Emmys and a Golden Globe, delivered a sensational, disturbing global hit for Netflix, and got labelled as a go-to guy for traumatic telly.
The bar set high then, Half Man charts the toxic, tragic relationship, over 30-odd years, between Niall and Ruben, de facto stepbrothers who become locked into co-dependency as destructive as anything dreamt up by Tennessee Williams or Emily Brontë.
Gadd’s drama could lay a persuasive claim to being about love – specifically, men’s capacity for it and their inability to express it. I cannot stress enough that this does not make it date night material. In fact, Half Man is not soothing viewing by any measure. If you’re looking for something more emollient with which to salve a bruising day, might I suggest… The Pitt?
Half Man might provide the same sort of audience experience as horror movies and TV shows – feeling anxiety and fear and the related dopamine high in a safe, controlled environment – but I am early-X-Files-Scully-sceptical. In horror, the threat is neutralised as the monster is defeated. Here, the menace embodied by dangerous, damaged and charismatic Ruben (played by Gadd himself, and in younger form by Stuart Campbell who’s surely the show’s break-out star) doesn’t retreat so much as submerge.
Like a crocodile, prehistoric and patient, it waits, biding its time until its next strike. This is never very far away in what amounts to nearly six hours of television. In episode 2, in which the mild-mannered, shame-filled Niall (Mitchell Robertson, then Jamie Bell) goes to university, Ruben goes, well, full-ragey, as they say in Scotland.
He dishes out such stomach-churning, unrelenting, intimate violence – and it’s at this juncture where many viewers may well permanently part company with Half Man.
As Ruben wreaks havoc, Bell’s Niall wearily wears his accumulating trauma like an old coat – heavy, shapeless, impossible to discard – and seems perpetually braced for a impact, conflict, a hurricane.
As a love story between two repressed men, Half Man is also a study of masculinity. Unlike the semi-autobiographical Baby Reindeer, Gadd maintains that Half Man is entirely fictional. Yet what its protagonists feel, emphatically, is not.
Sometimes, Half Man feels like an essay, encouraging a ‘reading’ as much as a viewing. Sometimes, it feels like an exorcism – messy, intense and not entirely within the control of even the person conducting it.
This tension is evident in the show’s more overtly symbolic moments. A classroom scene that ends with Stuart McQuarrie’s teacher assigning Romeo and Juliet is followed by a nocturnal encounter that echoes the play’s famous balcony scene, albeit in a far more unsettling register, with Ruben’s dad beseeching his son for contact outside Niall’s bedroom window.
Half Man is both more ambitious and less accomplished than Baby Reindeer. That the other characters – especially the women – are woefully underwritten suggests a script in need of more development. As do the plot holes and ‘I don’t buy it for a minute…’ moments. To wit, I don’t buy it for a minute that a mum – a Scottish mammy, no less – who loves her son as much as Lori loves Niall would let a psychopath move into her teenage son’s bedroom and hijack his life up to and including his wedding decades later. But the whole drama is contingent on it so we accept it when we should believe it.
And here’s the rub: Half Man is half-baked. Compared to Baby Reindeer – a piece of theatre stress-tested at the Edinburgh Festival before years of development at a top-drawer production company turned it into telly – of course it is. And Half Man is half-baked partly because Gadd is still learning his craft. Prior to Baby Reindeer, he’d only written a few episodes of other people’s shows, notably Sex Education. By contrast, when Adolescence blew up on Netflix, writer Jack Thorne had more than 20 series under his belt.
Baby Reindeer was an unexpected hit that thrust Gadd into a spotlight that, yes, illuminates him as a singular voice in television, but also throws into stark relief his inexperience, as evidenced in the scene in which Ruben appears on a motorbike at Niall’s wedding. Removing his helmet to stare down his “brother from another mother” he conjures a vibe that says less ‘psycho biker troublemaker’ and more ‘demented shampoo advert’. I’m not sure this was the intention.
All that said, there is a lot to admire about Half Man. Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot to love. That’s PTSD TV for you.
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Half Man will arrive on BBC iPlayer at 6am on Friday 24 April.
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