Half Man

Richard Gadd's follow-up to Baby Reindeer arrived in April 2026 as a six-part BBC/HBO co-production, after opening that year's Canneseries. The earlier series turned Gadd's own experience of stalking and abuse into something close to confession; Half Man is wider and more novelistic, a thirty-year study of two men bound together by something neither can name. Alexandra Brodski and Eshref Reybrouck share the directing across the run, and Gadd writes and takes the second lead.

The series opens at a wedding, where Niall's estranged 'brother' Ruben arrives uninvited and the day comes apart. From there it works back through the decades of their shared history in Scotland. Jamie Bell plays Niall, in the most substantial television role of a career that began with Billy Elliot; Gadd plays Ruben, physically transformed for the part; Neve McIntosh appears as Lori. The muted register keeps well away from the confessional heat of Gadd's earlier work, and the two timelines are left to comment on each other, with no hurry to explain.

Reception was strong: 79% on Rotten Tomatoes across seventy-one reviews, a Metacritic score of 67 and an IMDb average of 8.0 from sixteen thousand votes, which put it among the best-received British dramas of the year. Critics singled out its treatment of masculine repression and its refusal to file either man as simply victim or aggressor. It drew large audiences on both HBO Max and BBC iPlayer, and it settles any doubt that Gadd had more than one story in him.