Half Man: Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer follow-up is unrelentingly dark and depressing

The thing about 2024 sensation Baby Reindeer is that even at its most stressful, it still balanced the darkness with levity.

Partly because the true-kind-of-true story was so heightened and absurd, opportunities for levity and awkward humour was baked into its tone. So, it might have been anxiety-inducing, but it adhered to principles of catch-and-release.

Not so Richard Gadd’s follow-up drama, Half Man.

Gadd, the Scottish creator, writer and star of Baby Reindeer who drew from his own experiences, returns with a six-episode series that explores the toxic relationship between two step-brothers whose lives are entwined for decades from childhood.

The two characters are Niall Kennedy (Jamie Bell) and Ruben Pallister (Gadd, significantly beefed up), who grew up sharing a room after their mothers, Lori (Neve McIntosh) and Maura (Marianne McIvor), enter into a lesbian relationship.

The series opens in their adulthood on the day of Niall’s wedding when Ruben unexpectedly pulls up on his motorcycle, decked out in all leather. There’s an immediate air of threat with his presence, and not just because his presentation is so distinct from the suburban respectability of the wedding party.

It’s the alarm all over Niall’s face. Ruben is most definitely not an invited guest. The quick opening sequence closes with Ruben decking Niall with a single vicious punch to the face, and the show flashes back to their teenage years in the 1980s.

At this point Niall (Mitchell Robertson as the younger version) is 15 years old and Ruben (Stuart Campbell) is 17 years old. Ruben has just been released from juvenile detention and, moving into their shared room, imposes himself on Niall’s life without a beat.

Down comes the Doctor Who posters and up goes an image of three buff men who are supposed to represent, to Ruben, the apotheosis of masculinity.

Despite their vast differences in personality – the volatile and violent Ruben and the meek and self-loathing Niall – the two quickly become inseparable. But the power dynamic in their relationship is off from the beginning.

Ruben is quick to threaten and coerce, always only a second away from exploding, and Niall is forever on eggshells around him. But he can’t, to borrow a line from another story, quit him. Niall is magnetised to Ruben’s “strength”, equally admiring and repulsed by something he himself does not possess.

An incident during the bookish Niall’s first year at university, an absolutely brutal display of terrifying violence, forever changes their lives.

At the same time, Niall is battling with his sexuality, and it’s that secret and his fear of discovery, especially by Ruben, that sets him down the path of self-destruction.

Contextually, a lot of this is set in 1980s Glasgow and not very far in the background is the AIDs scare of that era. But Niall’s inability to accept that part of himself, even as the world around him shifts over the next two decades, hangs over his entire being.

The performances from both Robertson and Bell as the younger and older Niall are so in tune. They’re both so held in physically, always humming with this intense anxiety, a never-ending expectation that something bad is about to happen.

Then there’s Ruben, a person with unresolved past traumas who has no impulse control, ruled by toxic masculinity in which every perceived slight is the greatest betrayal, and who, at one point, declares that his wife’s body is his and his alone, and she has no agency to do anything with it.

It’s a difficult character to be with, even though he can be, in his younger form, charismatic, and when he’s older, sensitive.

Gadd said in an interview about this project that in the up-and-down conflict between Niall and Ruben, it can be hard to tell who is the good one and who is the bad.

All respect to Gadd, but while Ruben may have good in him, a history that explains some of his behaviour and a social context that equates masculinity and providing with control, Ruben is bad.

He’s a psychopath who shouldn’t be allowed near other people. As much as the series tries to, at times, empathise with him, and both characters are driven by deep-seated fears, Half Man’s portrayals of Ruben’s violence means the show can’t really walk him back.

Half Man is, by most measures, great television in that it is superbly performed, emotionally honest and with thematic gravitas.

But it is also so, so, so heavy. The experience of watching it feels like you’re being punished for some long-forgotten trespass and the universe is hell-bent on settling the score by making you suffer as a viewer.

There’s a strange conflict in that – the recognition of the show’s achievement as a piece of art that fully realises these characters and the world they, we, inhabit, but one which is so unabashedly grim and off-putting.

It’s a prime example of something you admire versus something you like.

Art doesn’t have to always be warm and fuzzy, it shouldn’t need to coddle or uplift you. Not everything has to be Project Hail Mary, but as we have seen from the success of that film, there is so much value in capturing joy and optimism.

Half Man is clearly designed to be confronting, and it’s interested in how monstrous men like Ruben are formed and the destructive effects they have on all the people around him.

But did it have to be so unrelentingly dark?

It’s really difficult to spend six hours in either the frame of Niall’s ceaseless anxiety or Ruben’s rage. There is no reprieve and no pay off - definitely don’t binge this show unless you’re a masochist.

Baby Reindeer was structured so that it could be darkly funny as well as dark, and through that, the viewer is much better equipped to absorb all of its dramatic turns and what Gadd was really trying to explore.

Half Man has taken to heart Thomas Hobbes’ indictment that “life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. That’s really hard company to keep.

Half Man is streaming on Stan from April 25