Spoilers for all six episodes. If you haven't watched it, go and do that first, then come back and tell me I'm wrong.
I finished Half Man tonight and came straight here to rant, because some things won't keep. I don't watch much telly. The few things that get through to me tend to get a lot of words out of me, and this one got through. I've been arguing with it since the credits rolled. Not the good kind of argument, where a thing is so clearly brilliant you just want to sit inside it. The other kind. The one where you respect the craft and resent what it did with it.
So let me get the easy part out of the way. It's well made. Richard Gadd came off Baby Reindeer knowing exactly how to hold your face to the screen, and he does it here for six hours without once letting go. Jamie Bell is extraordinary. Quietly so. I got through the whole thing in two sittings, which for me is roughly the commitment of a minor religion. It was never going to be boring. It holds you whether or not you fancy being held. That was never my problem with it.
My problem is what it spent its money on.
Half Man builds the dark with total conviction. The repression, the shame, the violence that arrives dressed up as love, the boy who learns that wanting the wrong thing gets you choked in your own bedroom. All of it rendered in unsparing close-up, lit with the budget of a cathedral. The show knows precisely how to make queer pain look like art. It is beautiful. That is the problem.
What it never builds, with anything like the same care, is the other thing. The life on the far side of all that fear. Niall grows up and gets out. There's a wedding, and a man named Alby, and I could not tell you a single true thing about that relationship, because the show couldn't be bothered to show me. We see the boys. We barely see the men. Alby turns up near the end like a prop the plot needed rather than a person Niall loves. The marriage is a fact the script reports, not a thing I ever got to watch happen. A line on a register. Not a life.
The show will give you the boys for hours, every charged and frightening minute of it. It goes shy at the exact moment Niall finally gets something good.
So when the violence lands in that barn, the scales were never even. Six hours of ruin on one side. A name on the other. That is the imbalance I can't get past.
There's a line near the end, the 'you could have come out' register, that I think is meant to land as hard truth. Instead it just felt brutal. Not brutal in the way the show wants. Brutal in the way that takes a whole architecture of fear and violence, then hands it back to you as a choice the frightened person simply failed to make. As if the closet were a door you forgot to open, rather than a thing built around you, brick by brick, by everyone who said the quiet part with their fists. It plays as wisdom. It reads as blame.
And here's where I have to be fair, because I can hear the other reading and it isn't a stupid one. You could say the whole point is the cost of repression, that Half Man isn't endorsing the misery so much as indicting the world that manufactures it, and that the absence of a warm, grown-up queer life is precisely the wound the whole show means to leave open and aching behind everything else. The ambiguity at the end, the body under the sheet, all of it deliberate. Gadd has said he wants you to take from it what you take. Fine. I take that seriously.
But a critique of the closet still has to let me see the thing the closet costs you. If the only queer life a show is willing to put on screen is the one that ends face down on a barn floor, then at some point the camera starts to feel dangerously close to the thing it claims to be against. You can spend six hours proving that shame destroys people. You then owe me one honest scene of what it destroyed. Alby in a kitchen on an ordinary morning, being a person, being loved. Just that. Something to set against the ruin, so the ruin means more than just itself.
I'm not making the lazy argument. I'm not saying it hurt me so it's bad. Suffering isn't the charge. Plenty of things should hurt, and the ones that do it honestly are usually the ones worth keeping. I'm saying it hurt me by building almost only punishment and shame, then asking that to stand in for an entire queer life, when an entire queer life was the one thing it never let me watch.
I might have let all of this go as one show's miscalculation. The trouble is I've now watched Gadd reach for the same shape twice. Once is a story. Twice is a habit.
Baby Reindeer didn't fully win me over either, but it held me, and it earned its place by being his own story, told as testimony rather than as invention. It also did something Half Man doesn't bother with. It left room for other things. Teri, written like a person rather than a plot function. A whole person. A genuine argument inside queer spaces about what the show was up to, some of it grateful, some of it wary. Gadd has talked about wanting to get it right for queer viewers, because he knew which nerve he was standing on.
Watch the two back to back and a pattern surfaces I can't now unsee. Queer sexuality keeps arriving as something that happens to a man inside abuse, handed to him by someone the story half-codes as a closeted aggressor. Never as desire that simply belongs to him. In a memoir, that's a life. Repeated as a choice, in fiction, it starts to read like a thesis: that the wanting and the wound are the same thing, and the man who desires is also the man who does harm.
I don't think Gadd means it that way. I doubt anyone does. I think he's drawn to shame because shame photographs beautifully and cuts deep. But intention isn't the whole of what a pattern says out loud. It says it anyway. Tell me twice that queerness lives in the bruise, with almost nothing set beside it, and the second telling does work the first one didn't, whether you meant it or not.
Baby Reindeer opened a real conversation. Half Man, so far, mostly hasn't. That might be the most telling thing about it. A show can spend a fortune on anguish and still leave the people it is ostensibly about with nothing to say back to it, because there is nothing in it they recognise as their own, only the part that hurts.
Both of those are true at once. I was gripped to the last frame, and the last frame made me cross. On balance, the second feeling is the one that has lasted.
I won't watch it again. I usually hedge on that sort of thing, and I'm not hedging now. Once was the whole of it. A second pass would just be me picking the same fight with a screen that can't hear me. Pointless. In fairness, Gadd does spend a good stretch of it with his shirt off, which is a quiet argument for the rewatch all on its own. I'm choosing to be strong about that.
Most television I've forgotten by the time the kettle's boiled. This one I'll be cross about for weeks.
Filed under: things that were this good and still got it wrong.