Half Man: Richard Gadd’s follow-up to Baby Reindeer is uncomfortably exciting – and downright brutal | television

pThe art of suspense in Baby Reindeer was the feeling of watching a monster being born. Comedians who star in their first scripted drama tend to gently base their characters on themselves, prodding their vulnerabilities without doing appropriate damage — but Richard Gadd torched that safety net by portraying his own experience of being stalked, along with other, darker moments of victimhood, with an honesty that was a violation.

On screen and in his old real life, Gad’s helpless admirer, Martha (Jessica Gunning), stalks him ceaselessly, like a villain in a horror movie. Once Baby Reindeer’s word-of-mouth popularity exploded and Gadd won major awards for playing him at his most vulnerable, even though his success made him one of television’s most powerful creators. This tumultuous breakup was wonderful. The prospect of seeing a new Richard Gadd show is, of course, exciting. It’s also a little scary.

What’s immediately interesting, psychologically speaking, about the six-part BBC iPlayer drama Half Man (out Friday) is that it’s another show about a terrifying black hole of a person ruining the life of someone who shows him weakness. But now, writer and creator Gad portrays himself not as the target but as the monster. Unrecognizably muscular and sporting a scraggly beard and a brutal cut—a combination grotesque enough to transform the wearer into a horror icon, like Leatherface or Michael Myers—Gadd’s new alter ego is all id. It’s revenge, pure and raw.

The story of two ‘brothers’, Niall and Robin, begins on the outskirts of Glasgow in the 1980s. They’re not blood relatives, but when Niall’s widowed mother starts a relationship with Robin’s divorced mother and invites her to move in with her, Niall has to share his teenage bedroom with two-year-old Robin, or at least does so once Robin is released from the young offender institution he was placed in for biting a man’s nose. For neurotic and weedy Niall (Mitchell Robertson), angry psychopath Robin (Stuart Campbell) is a devil’s bargain. Badass Big Brother comprehensively deals with the bullies who ruined Niall’s school days and – in the first of many scenes where you can feel yourself daring Gad to keep watching, when all your instincts are looking away – Robin directly helps Niall lose his virginity. In return, Niall helps Robin cheat on his exams, and generally offers him kindness that no one else has.

The two are bound together from that moment on in an agonizing symbiosis, an uncomfortable erotic occlusion of a relationship that Niall simultaneously disapproves of and cannot live without. An opening sneak peek has already shown us grown-up Niall (Jamie Bell) surprised and shaken by Robin’s (Gadd) appearance at his wedding: Niall is wearing his jacket and kilt, but Robin is stripped to the waist and they’re alone in a barn, away from the other guests. Not for the last time, Half Man is about to bring you violence so vivid, you’ll think you can taste the blood in your mouth.

With the guiding rails removed for depicting real events and female characters relegated mostly to unheeded voices of reason, Gad’s preoccupation with broken masculinity runs riot. It borders on pornography. And again, past trauma not only explains the men’s (self-)destructive behavior: it makes it inevitable, to the point where their crazy choices are incredibly difficult to accept. Meanwhile, Gad’s interest in shame as a driver of male misery blends uncomfortably with his inability to resist making sex as shocking as violence, so that while Niall struggles with his own desires, he rarely has the opportunity to explore them in a non-extreme way. The dialogue is also rigorous: across several epic gambits in which Bale and Gad give astonishing performances so frank as to be almost brutal, both characters are analyzed to death. But when Gad strikes a chord, he still hits it harder than any other TV writer.

She wonders where Gad goes from here. Can he make a third drama on the same themes, even more horrific than the first two? This would certainly be a bad idea. But I probably wouldn’t say that to his face.