If you look up Baby Reindeer on Netflix, you’ll find it categorised as a comedy series. This may come as news to anyone who has actually seen it, because they might have been labouring under the delusion that it was a terror-filled rolling panic attack of a show, sitting somewhere between psychological thriller and all-out horror.
But the initial labelling makes some level of sense. Richard Gadd was a comedian and Baby Reindeer was based on his Edinburgh show of the same name. Plus, what could be cuter than a baby reindeer? It would be very simple to infer some level of comedy from the description.
Not a single person has inferred that Gadd’s follow-up, Half Man, is a comedy. It is clearly not in any way, shape or form. It is punishingly, relentlessly, the least comedic thing that has been on television in recent memory. Half Man is a long, slow, flat, bleak wound. This is a show so dark that its subplot about a suicidal cancer patient is one of its least depressing aspects.
The brutality is endless. Ruben – Gadd’s character, played by Stuart Campbell in flashback – is a mindless thug whose temper reaches ever greater peaks as the episodes wind on. His beatings are as numerous as they are graphic, to the extent that the sight of a stomped face has almost become a visual motif.
But the violence is just one element of Half Man’s bleakness. None of the characters experience a single fragment of light. They are either being crushed by the unending horror of their lives, or self-medicating out of it with bursts of joyless hedonism. It’s Requiem for a Dream, but with worse haircuts. It is hard to stomach.
If there’s a tonal relative to Half Man, it’s the more heavy-handed episodes of Black Mirror, such as Shut Up and Dance, in which misery upon misery piles on a character until they try to kill themselves, then a Radiohead song plays and it’s revealed that the character was a paedophile all along. However, Black Mirror can get away with this because its format allows the next episode to tell a different (often goofier) story. Half Man can’t do this. It is trapped in its own unpleasantness for the duration and dragging us along for the ride.
Maybe a better comparison would be The Leftovers, the first season of which was unflinchingly miserable enough to include mass bereavement, a death cult, animal murder, sobbing masturbation and a woman in so much torment that she paid strangers to shoot her in the chest. But even The Leftovers couldn’t sustain this bottomless despair for very long; its second and third seasons deliberately employed irony and absurdism to alleviate the gloom. Pointedly, it became a great show only after it thought to do this.
What is annoying is that I enjoyed some of Half Man. The performances are exactly as intense as they need to be, the framing of the story is ingenious and – if you squint as hard as you can – the emotional tenor of the show briefly lightens by a billionth of a lumen once every half an hour. If nothing else, it makes it easily the grimmest show to contain a Napoleon Dynamite reference.
By far the most interesting part of Half Man is how it has become a referendum on Baby Reindeer and the uproar over how poorly it camouflaged its real-life inspiration. At the end of Half Man, Jamie Bell’s character has become a successful author, largely because he’s written a book about all his miserable experiences with Ruben. However, when he gives a press conference to promote the book, he is infuriated when all the journalists ask him whom is it based on. Given that Gadd was writing Half Man when journalists started doing this to him, it makes the show feel like his right of reply, which makes it a fascinating document in its own right. More of this type of self-interrogation would have been extremely welcome.
But all of that is clouded by the pure, unyielding torture-pornography of it all. The show routinely makes it impossible to root for any of the characters, even the ostensibly sympathetic ones, at which point it becomes the grimmest screensaver imaginable. It is so swamped by its supposedly big, important themes that it keeps forgetting about emotional subtlety. At its worst, it feels as if it was made by a 14-year-old emo acting out to get noticed.
Lots of people have pointed out that, as a show about male rage, Half Man shares territory with Adolescence. But the distinction is easy enough to spot. Adolescence is a show about adolescence that feels as if it was made by men. Half Man is a show about men that feels as if it was made by adolescents.
