Half Man TV Review: Richard Gadd and Jamie Bell share an unusual brotherhood in the new series from the creator of Baby Reindeer
Plot: Capturing 30 years in the lives of these broken men, an exploration of brotherhood, violence, and the intense fragility of male relationships. After all, when things fall apart… it is sometimes the closest relationships that break the hardest.
Review: Richard Gadd’s acclaimed limited series Baby Reindeer came out of nowhere in 2024. The darkly comedic drama, inspired by his own true experience with a stalker, turned the Scottish comedian from a regional success into a global sensation. Gadd’s follow-up to his breakout Netflix project is another limited series, this time for HBO. Half Man, which deals with a much different subject but one equally dark in tone, finds Gadd sharing the lead with Jamie Bell. The pair portrays two brothers whose contentious relationship evolves over 30 years of success, failure, fights, and even deaths.Half Man boasts solid performances from Gadd and Bell, set across the past and the present, with shocking twists and turns. This is not necessarily an easy series to watch, but it is one full of the same tension and drama that made Baby Reindeer an instant hit.
Set over six hour-long episodes, Half Man opens with the wedding day of Niall Kennedy (Jamie Bell). While the celebration takes place outside, Niall is confronted by Ruben Pallister (Richard Gadd) and the two come to blows. The rest of the series shifts back from this pivotal moment in the present to their youths. Niall (played in flashback by Mitchell Robertson) is a nerdy, unpopular fifteen-year-old living with his mother, Lori (Neve McIntosh), and her lesbian lover Maura. Niall learns that Maura’s son, Ruben (Stuart Campbell), has been released from a juvenile facility and will be moving in with them. While Niall is smart and reserved, Ruben is brash, violent, angry, and troubled. The two share a connection despite not being related by blood, and Niall begins to feel safe around his surrogate sibling. As they get older, Ruben has more run-ins with the law, while Niall tries to make it as a writer, and their frequent clashes often create waves in each other’s lives.
It would have been easy to make Ruben the villain of Half Man, but Richard Gadd informs his performance with so many layers of trauma that you often feel sorry for him even when he commits horrendous acts. Niall, also, is a deeply troubled character who struggles with understanding his own sexuality and represses it for fear of Ruben’s reaction. Jamie Bell makes it hard to fully trust Niall and all of the poor decisions he makes, but also makes it impossible not to feel for him. Both men are intrinsically connected to one another and fill in the gaps each needs to be happy. When they are together, they bring out the best and worst in one another, but when they are apart, neither feels whole. The toxic core of their relationship is a central element to the flow of Half Man, which builds with each chapter towards their physical clash shown at the start of the first episode. The series could have been told in a linear narrative, but given how fraught their brotherhood is, Half Man opens with a sense of foreboding and impending doom, filling every episode with a tension that leaves audiences devastated by the end.
Half Man is a series whose title can be analyzed in many ways, only to be explained at the end of the sixth episode. This is a story about sibling rivalry, masculinity, and the fragile perception of sexuality amongst them, and the impact of trauma on even the most seemingly well-adjusted person. Some of what Niall and Ruben experience over the three decades chronicled in Half Man will seem like typical childhood memories many of us have, with some of the more disturbing elements still familiar to far more than they should be. By showing not only the trauma but the fallout of that on these men, we witness something not often showcased in mainstream entertainment, but something that needs to be talked about by more people. This is not a series about being gay, straight, or bisexual, but more about being okay with who you are and not being okay about the things that have hurt you in your life. That comes through in this series, both in the horrific and the hilarious, sometimes within moments of one another.
Richard Gadd wrote all six episodes of Half Man, which was directed by Alexandra Brodski and Eshref Reybrouck. Full of memorable tracks from the eighties and nineties, the series is far more nuanced than Baby Reindeer but uses the same tactics from thrillers and mysteries to build the psychological framework of the relationship between Niall and Ruben. Shifting from one being successful while the other struggles and back again, there is a Jekyll-and-Hyde interplay between the two men that gives Jamie Bell a showcase performance that ranks amongst his best, while Gadd also shines in a supporting role that is firmly in the spotlight of the series. I watched all six episodes in one sitting, but know that tuning in week after week to see how the story goes makes for a very different experience and one that is going to generate a lot of conversation online as viewers theorize and anticipate what will happen next. Odds are that once you watch the first episode, you will have a good idea of where things will finish up, but you are in for a surprise as to how they get there.
Half Man is as funny as it is traumatic, and as dramatic as it is poignant, with each of the six episodes serving as an individual achievement in storytelling. I felt like I had experienced far more than six hours of television in this intricate and brilliant series. The marquee series that HBO has become known for has added yet another exceptional achievement in Half Man. Richard Gadd proved with Baby Reindeer that not every story has been told before, and he has done so again with a series that has no comparison. This will be a hard story for some to watch, but it is a rewarding experience through the intense drama. There are very few series that can be this funny and emotionally resonant at the same time. Watching Half Man is going to leave you with the desire to think about your own psychological well-being and question whether everything you have experienced in your life is all right.
Half Man premieres on April 23rd on HBO.
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