Two years ago, Richard Gadd came out of nowhere and created a massive hit for Netflix with Baby Reindeer. In his follow-up to that project, he’s created and written Half Man for HBO and the BBC, exploring a very complex friendship between two men that spans over 30 years.
HALF MAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A wedding in Scotland, with people dancing and happy. Meanwhile in a dark barn, the groom confronts a shirtless man with tattoos.
The Gist: Niall Kennedy (Jamie Bell) is the groom, and the shirtless man is his longtime friend Ruben Pallister (Richard Gadd). Niall hasn’t seen Ruben in years, and is surprised to see him at his wedding. “We might not flow through each other’s veins, but we flow through each other’s brains,” Ruben tells him, repeating the phrase they used to say about themselves when they were teens, that they’re “brothers from another lover.” Then he rears back and slugs Niall, knocking him nearly unsconscious.
That punch reminds Niall of when he was a teenager (Mitchell Robertson), when Gus (Piers Ewart), his high school tormentor, would punch him over having Indiana Jones cards. When his teacher Mr. Jenkins (Stuart McQuarrie) announces that Ruben (Stuart Campbell) is joining the class, Niall is immediately concerned.
Ruben’s mom, Maura (Marianne McIvor), moved in with Niall and his mom Lori (Neve McIntosh) for what was supposed to be six months, but it doesn’t seem like she’s moving out; in fact, it seems like their relationship is one of the biggest bullying points for Gus and his cronies. Ruben is just getting out of juvenile detention for biting a man’s nose off. Niall calls Ruben a psycho, and the first day they’re sharing a room doesn’t dissuade him from that notion.
One thing that Ruben latches onto immediately is Niall’s burgeoning sexual desires, and when Ruben’s drunken dad comes to the house in the middle of the night and screams at him to come out, Ruben puts Niall in a headlock to keep him from telling his mom. But that headlock turns into something more interesting.
After Ruben, seeing Gus and his buddies bully Niall, beats the ever living crap out him, Niall starts to see Ruben differently. He even cheats on a test in order to keep Ruben from getting kicked out of school. Ruben thanks him for it in a way that gives Niall an experience he might have had to wait years to have, but the way it brings them closer will definitely lead to confusion later.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created and written by Richard Gadd, Half Man certainly has the intensity of his previous series, Baby Reindeer, even if the subject matter is different.
Our Take: “Intense” is the best word to describe the first episode of Half Man. From those first minutes, where an adult Niall and Ruben are facing each other at Niall’s wedding, you can tell that the two of them have a long history.
You can also tell that Ruben is not well, given the fact that he’s standing there shirtless with his hands wrapped like he’s about to slip them into boxing gloves. That confrontation shows in very few lines of dialogue that the two of them have had a roller-coaster of a friendship, and some of that had to do with physical attraction as much as brotherhood.
But when we go back to their high school days — and we’ll get to the timeline in a second — the intensity ratchets up. In a lot of ways, the friendship between Niall and Ruben is a classic mismatch of someone who’s more passive and gets bullied with a more aggressive person who serves as a protector as well as a confidant. However, Campbell effectively makes young Ruben a teen who’s teetering on the edge of being a murderous sociopath. That edginess informs their entire relationship, which is probably why Niall had to separate himself from Ruben at some point.
What the first episode does so effectively is put viewers on that journey with Niall and Ruben. It shows how complex this friendship is going to be, how charged it will be and how toxic it will probably get. At times, the layers of danger that Ruben brings into Niall’s life was almost too much for us to take. But it sure made us interested in seeing how it plays out, first when they’re teenagers and then when they’re adults.
One thing that confused us, though, was the timeline. There is no graphic pinpointing when the two of them were in high school. But there are oblique references that tell us it’s the eighties, like when Niall asks if he’s going to get “the virus” after his first sexual experience, referring to AIDS. But that also means that the wedding scene isn’t in the present day. Will that also mean we’ll get to see Niall and Ruben after the wedding, as they approach their fifties? Or is the wedding — which we peg to be in the late ’00s — the most recent part of the story?
Performance Worth Watching: We were definitely impressed with Stuart Campbell as the younger version of Ruben. It’s really hard to play Ruben’s kind of sociopathic edginess well, and he adds a lot of nuance to the emotions behind how Ruben acts.
Sex And Skin: Definitely, especially in the scene where Ruben thanks Niall for helping him pass the test at school.
Parting Shot: At the wedding, Ruben helps Niall calm his breathing down, then says, “Don’t worry, it’ll be over soon…”
Sleeper Star: Marianne McIvor has a couple of scenes as Maura that are heartbreaking and Scottish-stoic at the same time.
Most Pilot-y Line: In one scene, Maura tries to tickle a response out of Niall, and we’re not sure in what world she’d think that was at all an appropriate way to act with him.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While there are times when Half Man is too intense for its own good, and its timeline is a bit muddled, the show is a mostly-riveting take on brotherhood, even when the brothers aren’t blood-related.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
