I’m sure you’ve heard of star-crossed lovers – two people who are bound together by the same perverse fate that will ultimately keep them apart – but what about star-crossed brothers? “My brother from another lover” is the refrain in Richard Gadd’s new six-part BBC series, Half Man, where sex and violence, love and hate, good and evil have all been etched, irrevocably, in the cosmos.
“What can I say about Niall Kennedy?” a voice booms out at a wedding. It belongs to Ruben (Richard Gadd), a bearded biker who has burst into the ceremony, his leathers creaking like a stretched belt. Niall (Jamie Bell) is his makeshift stepbrother, the son of his mother’s former partner. They grew up together – Niall a nervous boy struggling with his sexuality, Ruben a force of pure delinquent charisma – before an act of violence wrenched them asunder.
As they become adults, they drift apart, are pulled back together, and then combust all over again. “You’re very different,” flatmate Celeste (Philippine Velge) observes when the brothers arrive at university. “It’s like one needs a head and the other needs a body.” But rather than combining to make one fully functioning person, they instead reach new levels of dysfunctionality.
As a writer, director and actor, Gadd has been in high demand ever since his breakout Netflix drama, Baby Reindeer, fictionalised his own struggles with a stalker. That show was based on his personal experiences, which he stress-tested in an acclaimed Edinburgh stage show and then successfully translated to the screen (though a messy fall-out followed).
It’s not easy to follow such an intensely personal project. Do you try to repeat the formula, drawing again from your personal life, and run the risk of confining your pony to a single trick? Or do you push back against your breakthrough and do something completely different? With Half Man – produced for the BBC in collaboration with HBO, the world’s most prestigious broadcaster – Gadd appears caught in two minds. It feels like a show in search of meaning, a plot looking for a story – and frankly, it’s a huge misfire.
Part of the issue is the sheer unlikeability of the central characters. Both Ruben and Niall – portrayed as teenagers by Stuart Campbell and Mitchell Robertson – are presented as deeply flawed men, the architects of their own misery. Ruben “has blackness in him”, a tendency that draws him to violence and abuse, while Niall is a slippery coward, skulking behind the dark glamour of his stepbrother.
But the show fails to extract much sympathy for the pair – particularly Ruben, whose whirlwind of malevolence involves him repeatedly exacting brutal, near fatal, violence on innocent parties. Even the supporting cast are hard to root for: Ruben’s wife Mona (Amy Manson) is selfish, while Niall’s mum Lori (Neve McIntosh) strains credibility as his straight-shooting protector. “One of the most lethal acts of self-harm you can commit,” she tells her aspiring author son, “is convincing yourself you’re worthy of a higher purpose.” Top parenting.
There’s a world in which this nastiness might serve a point. After all, Gadd’s self-portrait in Baby Reindeer was unflinching. His performance highlighted his own mendacity and the cyclical nature of abuse (a theme that is revisited here). But there was genuine pathos, too, eliciting sympathy for both victim and perpetrator.
The purpose of Half Man is less clear. Cartoonishly exaggerated characters knock chunks out of each other, speaking in overwritten soundbites (“You may be the painter, Niall, but I’m the rolling hills!”) in service of a plot that rambles over the course of multiple decades. It has the feeling of a dark, misanthropic novel – the sort of thing Martin Amis would’ve written, to great acclaim, in the Eighties – but struggles as a six-hour entertainment piece.
Bell acts his socks off – while Gadd appears to have written himself a character with limitless sexual charisma, who is largely shirtless – but the show just feels pointless. And maybe there is a streak of nihilism in Half Man. Neither Niall nor Ruben can escape their childhood, the things they’ve expressed or the things they’ve hidden. Nothing, it seems, can happen to change their doom-laden trajectory. It was, after all, written in the stars.
But even if that charitable interpretation exists, it’s hard to escape the nagging suspicion that Gadd’s sophomore programme is a calculated attempt to make something brave and startling and important, and all the other adjectives that were applied, more authentically, to Baby Reindeer.
