Jamie Bell and Richard Gadd hold our attention through a difficult relationship drama. But Half Man repeats its suffering and explains its people too often; six episodes leave less room for discovery than they should.
Half Man is gripping in stretches and exhausting across its six episodes, with performances that deserve a less repetitive script. Richard Gadd writes about two men whose loyalty keeps surviving behaviour that ought to end it. He is interested in how affection, attraction and aggression become difficult to separate, and in the excuses people make for someone they cannot relinquish. The explanations become more insistent as the series goes on.
Jamie Bell plays Niall, while Gadd takes Ruben, and their performances make this destructive attachment worth following. Neither man can be settled into a convenient category and left there. Our sympathies shift because the writing allows hurt and cruelty to coexist, and the actors resist making either seem like the whole person. Bell and Gadd sustain an interest in these men that the increasingly repetitive writing puts under considerable strain.
The early episodes are particularly good at leaving attraction uncertain. Affection can be sincere without being safe, and the series allows the younger men’s feelings to remain difficult to name. We felt uneasy watching that closeness become inseparable from the threat of violence. Their loyalty makes it harder to dismiss the relationship, even when the behaviour gives us ample reason to wish they would keep their distance.
Across the changing timelines, however, Gadd becomes less willing to let behaviour speak for itself. Ben McKinstrie’s editing brings different periods of the relationship into view, giving us opportunities to revise our sympathies. The script too often uses those opportunities to confirm what we already know, explaining the men’s damage after their conduct has made it clear. Later stretches need more than another demonstration that neither can manage this attachment without causing harm.
Directors Alexandra Brodski and Eshref Reybrouck sustain the tension, with little respite from the pair’s unhappiness. Carlos Catalán’s cinematography and Emer O’Sullivan’s production design cannot compensate for how thinly some of the surrounding people are written. The series needs those people to have lives that matter when Niall and Ruben are not demanding attention. Underwritten supporting characters are especially costly in a drama that depends on our understanding more than one person’s experience.
Evgueni Galperine and Sacha Galperine provide the music, but the series gets most of its pressure from Gadd’s writing. Trauma accumulates, and there is seldom enough relief for one injury to feel different from the next. We were worn out by the repeated violence, and eventually found ourselves attending less closely to suffering that ought to have mattered. A little variation would have made the difficult passages harder to dismiss.
The handling of Niall’s sexuality is less assured than the performances, too. A drama so concerned with masculinity needs to be careful about making repression explain too much. Here, it risks treating a complicated man’s desires as further evidence of his damage, rather than allowing them an existence beyond it. The early treatment of attraction leaves more room for doubt, and the series loses something when it becomes determined to explain.
A relationship drama that asks us to stay with unpleasant behaviour needs to keep finding something worth our attention in the people responsible. Half Man does this intermittently, and its actors make the most of those passages. There is enough here for viewers interested in male intimacy and its failures, provided they can tolerate the insistence. It is not a sensible choice for an evening that already needs rescuing.
