Half Man

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

The series opens at a wedding, where Niall's estranged 'brother' Ruben arrives uninvited and the day comes apart. From there the drama works backwards 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. Shot in a muted register that resists the confessional heat of Gadd's earlier work, the series lets its two timelines comment on each other rather than race towards explanation.

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, putting it among the best-received British dramas of the year. Critics singled out its treatment of masculine repression and the way it declines to file either man as simply victim or aggressor. It drew large audiences on both HBO Max and BBC iPlayer, confirming Gadd as a writer whose second act is not a repetition of his first.