It’s hard to believe it’s been almost two years exactly since writer-creator-star Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer dropped on Netflix. The Scotsman’s darker-than-dark thriller — inspired by his own experiences with an obsessive stalker — turned Gadd from Edinburgh Fringe comic to international superstar seemingly overnight, bagging BAFTAs, Emmys, and Golden Globes like nobody’s business as the series dominated social media discourse for months on end. Now, Gadd is back (and seriously jacked) with Half Man, a BBC-HBO drama in which he and Jamie Bell (All Of Us Strangers) play two Glaswegian men who come together, and apart, and together again in a story spanning four decades. Check out the trailer below;
Okay, so the bad news is it looks like Richard Gadd is not giving himself a break from bleak drama for a fun multi-cam sit-com. The good news is that Half Man looks like the kind of meaty, thematically hefty, generational drama you sense that nobody could do quite like Gadd. As we see here, Half Man tells the story of Niall (Bell, played in his teenage years Mitchell Robinson) and Ruben (Gadd, played in his teens by Stuart Campbell), two opposite-sides-of-the-tracks lads who find each other as kids and — through trauma-bonding, toxic brotherhood, and numerous twists of fate — find themselves still held in each others’ orbits as adults. If the two minutes of Niall and Ruben we glimpse here are anything to go by, it seems that there’s layers to their relationship plenty enough to put both onions and Shrek to shame, and there probably won’t be a dry eye in the lounge by the time the series is over.
The official synopsis for the six-episode series reads: “Niall and Ruben are brothers. Not related in blood but the closest you can get. One, fierce and loyal. The other, meek and mild-mannered. Inseparable youth. Brought into each other’s lives through death and circumstance, all they have is each other… But when Ruben turns up at Niall’s wedding three decades later, everything seems different. He is on edge. Shifty. Not acting like himself. And soon, an explosion of violence takes place which catapults us back through their lives, from the eighties to the present day.”
What’s up with Ruben? What’s up with Niall? And what’s up with Ruben and Niall? We’ll find out for ourselves when the first episode of Half Man lands on BBC iPlayer on 24 April at 6am sharpish. While we wait, we’re off to drop Mr Gadd a text asking for his workout schedule. Seriously, the man looks like he’ll be dashing from the set of this to star in the next season of Gladiators!
