Richard Gadd’s new show Half Man is hard to watch. But does it have anything to say?

When Baby Reindeer swept across the globe like bird flu in 2024, Richard Gadd’s work was described as “not an easy watch”, “gruelling” and “important”, and seemed to emanate from personal trauma and pain. The daring seven-part drama about a lonely barman being stalked by an older woman shot to the top of the Netflix charts in multiple countries and won a haul of awards, including Golden Globes, Emmys and Baftas. 

Now his new show, Half Man, has arrived on BBC iPlayer, garlanded with yet more praise, and, having watched it, I still don’t understand what Gadd is trying to say. The new six-part drama centres on stepbrothers Ruben (Gadd) and Niall (Jamie Bell), locked in an unhealthy yet homoerotic relationship over three decades. We’re told the show “examines the dysfunctional and volatile relationship between two men growing up in Glasgow in the 1980s”. 

The reviews broadly agree it’s about toxic masculinity. “To a rare degree, it asks the question of when and how men … must take responsibility for their actions,” says the Guardian’s five-star review. What am I missing? No one in Half Man takes responsibility for anything.

Gadd’s TV output looks initially impressive but is, on closer inspection, emotionally hollow. For a creative who so viscerally seems to “lay himself bare”, his message is surprisingly opaque. Do TV executives (and some critics) see all of that extremity – drug rape, child abuse, self-punishment – and think new ground is being broken? To me the extremity isn’t tethered to anything.

After Baby Reindeer, I initially concluded that Gadd was an energetic storyteller who had admirable compassion for the real-life stalker who inspired him to write the show. That notion evaporated when it was revealed he’d inadvertently unmasked the woman in question by directly quoting her social media posts. Internet detectives found her in minutes and her lawsuit against Netflix is ongoing. How could he be both compassionate and careless?

Throughout the six humourless episodes of Half Man, Gadd struts, shirtless, through scenes, hurting and/or sexually humiliating people. He seems to be confronting us with shocking images and ideas, but where is his commentary on those things? Is he trying to “do an Adolescence” and get us all thinking about the source of male anger today? Watching his shows, I feel like I’m doing all the work.

I’ve long been interested in the legacy of trauma and stories about abuses of power. Last year I published Don’t Make Me Laugh, a darkly comic novel about male toxicity and abuse in the world of comedy, after investigating the subject as a journalist. So why does Gadd’s presentation of the topic seem to promise so much and offer so little in the way of insight? 

“You know … a lot of TV shows make it too clear what the meaning is,” Gadd said in a recent BBC Writers interview to promote the new series. But to me, Half Man is a nihilistic portrayal of violence and darkness that manages to project a total absence of insight. There’s burying your meaning and then there’s apparently not having one at all.

His supporting characters (and this is also true of Baby Reindeer) don’t want anything except to service the plot. There’s a lot of one-dimensional cruelty that doesn’t come from anywhere except for the main character’s need to experience suffering. No one else is real in a Gadd universe. Instead of a story told from multiple perspectives, it feels more like a puppet show with Gadd doing all the voices. Isn’t he curious about other people? On this evidence, I’m not sure he is. 

If I were a TV commissioner, at this vital moment for the discussion around masculinity in crisis, I’d want to give my massive budget to a programme-maker who is actually going to say something, because Gadd’s shows certainly aren’t made for simple entertainment. With the impact of Adolescence or the delicate nuance of last year’s Unforgivable by Jimmy McGovern on BBC Two, there are better examples which really add to the conversation.

The closest Half Man gets is in its final episode, where one character has a breakthrough and tearfully announces the reason for his aggression. This self-knowledge lasts seconds and is gone just as quickly, so that the character can return to his path of lawless destruction. People usually learn things in a drama, but Gadd’s characters are so intransigent it’s like they’re in a sitcom.

The emotional truth is always lost for me under Gadd’s huge performances, trademarked by an intense physicality, his ever-present nipples, and snot streaming from his Bafta-winning nostrils. 

If you use your precious chance to communicate important things through the most popular medium and refuse to share with the class, what’s the point? 

Am I swinging from a lamp-post, crowing about naked emperors? Possibly. But the core of the contradiction I can’t get past is an artist who seems to lay his guts on the table while giving nothing away at all.

Half Man is on BBC iPlayer in the UK and on HBO Max in the US.

Julia Raeside is a journalist, author and broadcaster. Her debut novel, Don’t Make Me Laugh (Bedford Square) was shortlisted for the Comedy Women in Print prize and the Chortle awards. She hosts the TV nostalgia podcast Box of Delights