Critic Reviews

Gadd’s drama is brave and blazing. It leaves you with that rare and precious feeling that everyone involved – Gadd, of course, who has once again pulled out his viscera, spread them over the page and taken a scalpel to every bloody organ, but every actor too (Bell is on career-best form and then some here) – has given us the very best of themselves.

Often, the monologues feel better suited to a play than they do to television. But the density and layered nature of the writing win the day. “Half Man” makes one thing abundantly clear: Everyone else churning out scripts for TV is a writer. Richard Gadd is a bloody artist.

“Half Man,” as you probably can guess, is a bit of an endurance test. But it has a storytelling mightiness and an acting fury you can’t deny or ignore. It wrings you out, and leaves you in awe of all involved.

Their sordid cycle of disappointment, humiliation and bitter recrimination is riveting, but also at times predictable, as we nervously begin to expect the worst even in rare moments of harmony, and creator-writer Gadd never fails to deliver on that threatened promise.

The ways in which “Half Man” acutely understands that dynamic make it a must-see series even in spite of a few misgivings along the way, ultimately presenting itself as a singular experience that sticks with you.

“Half Man” is an excellent but difficult watch. A viciousness runs through the narrative, and countless acts of violence depicted. For those who stick it out, the final episode features one of the most emotionally shattering scenes on television.

What saves the show from feeling gratuitously dark is the richness of the way it weaves all the sorry elements of the two men’s lives together. That, plus the feral brilliance of the two central performances from Bell and Gadd himself.

In “Half Man,” Gadd’s treatment of these themes [internalized homophobia, the sexual assault of men, and the evasion of blame] is richer and more mature. .... The show’s plotting and Niall’s exquisite complexity more than make up for Ruben’s relative flatness. .... The sad but realistic turns in their lives are engrossing, as is their slow convergence.

It’s tough to say how Half Man is going to connect up what happens in that room that night to what happens at Niall’s wedding decades later. But once again, as with Baby Reindeer, Gadd has delivered something so explosively charged that it’s hard to look away.

Half Man can be emotionally obliterating, and some of the particularly brutal sequences may permanently burn themselves into the viewer's brain. But the series is artful in its approach, avoiding using violence simply for the sake of shock value.