Review: Richard Gadd’s ‘Half Man’ Finale

Lately, though hardly for the first time in history, masculinity has become associated with “crisis.” Between gambling and gooning, alienation and AI, resentment and depression, loneliness and economic anxiety, an emergency distress signal is, according to writers and posters, blaring from men and media about them. “We stand splattered in discourse, ears ringing from the unceasing alarm over men and their prospects,” Parul Sehgal wrote in the New York Times last December.

Several television shows have attempted to wring comedy and pathos from this situation as it’s experienced by some subset of the population. In an essay for The Wall Street Journal last month, Michael Ian Black identified three recent comedies — Your Friends and Neighbors, DTF St. Louis, and Rooster — about “self-doubting, affluent white male characters dealing with a world that no longer gives priority to their needs.” Half Man, Richard Gadd’s visually and spiritually bleak new miniseries on HBO and BBC, is likewise worried about the state of men but otherwise bears little resemblance to these shows. It’s about working-class Scottish men, for one thing. More importantly, it forgoes timeliness and humor for timelessness and solemnity — proposing, in its strident and laborious way, that the blinkered pursuit of manliness is itself a stalwart producer of crisis.

Set mostly in and around Glasgow, the show tracks the tumultuous, decades-long relationship between a meek, closeted writer-to-be named Niall Kennedy and his adoptive brother, Ruben Pallister, a kind of embodied masculine demiurge irresistible to women and prone to outbursts of berserker rage and sexual violation. (“It’s like one needs a head and the other needs a body,” one of Niall’s classmates cracks about the duo.) Niall, hobbled by shame, wants to become a Real Man. He couples himself to, resents, and eventually novelizes his bruiser brother to that end, neglecting to cultivate his own nature and outright denying it in favor of what the show unsubtly depicts as a destructive addiction to the vitalizing model of maleness he mistakes Ruben to be. “You might be the painter now, but I’m the rolling hills,” Ruben taunts Niall during a hospital scene, playing into Niall’s perception. He could instead have compared himself to a demigod or minotaur: a mythological half-man about whom mere mortals sing, whose fanciful stories they can’t stop returning to. “It’s like I’m fucking high off of you or something, chemically dependent,” Niall elsewhere confesses to his brother.

Gadd has sought to make a work of serious televisual art about these characters and their dysfunction: His rolling hills are conflicts between men and manhood in which characters struggling to attain their ideal of the latter are disfigured by it. They sink beneath dense layers of shame and repression. Chasing their desires dishonestly and refusing to speak about their pains in plain English to their loved ones renders them malformed and monstrous, and they proceed to disfigure others.

Photo: HBO

Each episode begins and ends near the present day, at Niall’s wedding to a man, where guests wearing floral dresses and kilts dance in slow-motion. The grass shines green; the sky beams blue. But then Ruben, recently released from prison and clad in black leather, shows up uninvited. He cuts a dour, menacing figure, one meant, it seems, to illustrate that the present encapsulates but is dominated and ultimately doomed by the revenant past. Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet are both invoked over the course of the show, and a stultifying air of fated tragedy clings to it. The rest of Half Man, which takes place between 1986 and 2014, has a grim, washed-out look.

In the first episode, Ruben, portrayed in adolescence by the excellent Stuart Campbell and as an adult by a bestial, beefed-up Gadd, moves into Niall’s room. This is in the 1980s, and their working-class mothers, who are in a relationship, have begun cohabitating. Niall, played in his school days by a doe-eyed Mitchell Robertson and as a struggling novelist by a superb Jamie Bell, reaps the benefits of Ruben’s protection when Ruben beats up Niall’s school bully. For his part, Niall helps Ruben cheat on an exam and learns to ape his swagger, albeit in a diminished, pathetic form. Soon, the two teenage boys start referring to each other as “my brother from another lover.” In the subsequent episodes, we see the disastrous results of the men’s fraternity.

Like the public discourse around masculinity, Half Man is cyclical and monotonous. Its final three episodes are funhouse reflections of the first three; threats and acts of violence reappear in exaggerated forms. In the second and fifth, Ruben stomps a man’s face in. In the first he brings a girl home and has her take Niall’s virginity as he watches; in the fourth he sodomizes Niall with a hood ornament. Niall is hardly innocent, especially in his adult years. An inveterate liar and manipulator, he assumes the role of monster whisperer, cuckolding Ruben and then siccing him on another man who Ruben suspects has had dealings with his wife. Watching Niall become a slimy, pitiable creature twisted by internalized homophobia over the show’s course might sound like a necessarily joyless affair, but Gadd managed to infuse his autobiographical 2024 Netflix miniseries Baby Reindeer, which follows a faltering, sexually confused comedian not dissimilar to Niall, with vim, vigor, and even humor. (“When you spend so long swallowing your shame it is so hard to stop it becoming part of you,” that show’s protagonist says at one point; Niall might as easily have spoken that line.)

Writing in 2018 for The Hedgehog Review, the writer Phil Christman defined masculinity as “an abstract rage to protect,” and Niall and Ruben can both be read accordingly, with Niall directing his rage inward, toward his “real” self, and living out a fitful, desperate life — and chasing an ill-suited ego ideal — in order to guard his sexuality from detection. Ruben, it turns out, is less a demigod than a poorly applied bandage on a determinative, suppurating wound. In a prison scene from the show’s final minutes, amid a flurry of revelations, we learn that Ruben has manifested his flagrancy and wildness as defensive mechanisms after suffering egregious childhood sexual abuse from his father. This late disclosure, in which trauma is trotted out to explain a character’s actions and way of being, struck me as trite if on trend. Gadd and Bell’s all-in performances manage to lend the scene an unlikely credibility. Gadd snots and weeps in his seat; Bell looks on helplessly. But Ruben and Niall’s frenzy of honesty arrives too late to save them or the show.

If I was not convinced by this series — if I feel it’s dramatically torpid, high on its own supply of butch stink, warped by its own struggle to represent masculinity, neglectful of its female characters, and a series of unfortunate events rather than a proper story — I can still appreciate the neatness of its conclusion: Relationships like Niall and Ruben’s are, literally and metaphorically, a dead end. Masculinity is like a ripe, hairy armpit, by turns toxic and intoxicating. It can make eyes water out of joy, want, sadness, fear, or pity; it comes in numerous distinct flavors; and its most pungent varieties may indicate that a man has fallen into anti-sociality or psychopathy or has otherwise gone beyond the pale — and that something is rotten about him because something is rotting within him. But even a man who stinks to death will have his partisans.