Richard Gadd is fast establishing himself as the master of uncomfortable viewing. If “Baby Reindeer,” the super-viral 2024 Netflix series he wrote and starred in, raised difficult questions about masculinity, power and sexuality, his follow-up, “Half Man,” does the same — on steroids.
The HBO/BBC co-prod, which ends its six-episode run on May 28, follows the lives of two boys in Scotland in the 1980s, who are thrown together as teenagers when their mothers develop a relationship. Nerdy Niall (played by Mitchell Robertson as a teenager and Jamie Bell as an adult) and volatile Ruben (played by Stuart Campbell and Gadd) are polar opposites. But with the passage of time, their relationship mutates from enmity and abuse to friendship and brotherhood. There is even, perhaps, a hint of incestuous desire. HBO boss Casey Bloys wasn’t kidding when he described it as “intense.”
Like “Baby Reindeer,” the protagonists of “Half Man” are both deeply dislikeable yet strangely sympathetic. In the hands of Campbell and Gadd, Ruben, the personification of toxic masculinity, is endowed with a pathos that becomes compelling, even captivating. (Some viewers may well end up rooting for him over Bell’s increasingly self-pitying Niall). But he’s also, as the show reminds us repeatedly, abjectly dangerous.
