Half Man: A First Look at Richard Gadd's New Series
The creator of Baby Reindeer writes and stars in a series that transports us to 1980s Scotland, between a present yet to be written and a past to contend with. On HBO Max
Richard Gadd was under scrutiny. Baby Reindeer (2024), the seven-episode miniseries with an autobiographical genesis about his experience with a stalker, was a sharp work possessing emotional precision and a management of biographical detail that seemed impossible to replicate. An Emmy winner, it was a global phenomenon that inevitably led industry insiders to ask: what's next?
Half Man, which premiered worldwide as the opening series of Canneseries 2026 and landed on HBOMax on April 23rd, is the answer. It's no longer about telling something that actually happened to the author, but rather about inventing, about building characters without the safety net of potential and discovering if Gadd's gaze can still surprise even when he finds himself investigating worlds he hasn't directly inhabited, once again taking on the dual role of creator and co-starring actor.
Half Man: To Be or Not To Be
The first episode begins with a wedding party and an unfolding scene of violence. Niall Kennedy (Jamie Bell) is the groom, but we meet him away from the festivities against his will, dragged into a farmhouse barn by Ruben Pallister (Gadd himself). An opening that makes no concessions: it doesn't initially explain, leaving the task of introducing the dynamics between these characters to the long flashback that characterizes almost the entirety of this pilot.
The time jump takes us back to the 1980s, to a Glasgow school where Ruben (played in his teenage version by Stuart Campbell) has just been released from a juvenile detention center and re-enrolled in school. Young Niall (Mitchell Robertson) is a victim of bullying in the school halls, but the arrival of Ruben, who becomes his housemate, changes the situation. The boys' mothers are friends - and perhaps something more - and so they find themselves sharing a home day and night, beginning a bond that transforms from initial mutual distrust into something far more complex and ambiguous.
Ruben and Niall strike a pact of mutual convenience, an exchange of favors that cements seemingly impossible friendships. Ruben beats up a bully who was tormenting Niall; Niall helps Ruben pass a crucial exam for his academic future. But Gadd's screenplay, which manages pacing with remarkable confidence, allowing scenes to breathe at the right moment and tightening them when tension demands, is not content with this scheme.
The Seeds of a Future Yet to Be Written
In each of the exchanges between the two boys, something darker is deposited: manipulation disguised as protection, control camouflaged as affection, dependence born where loneliness is deep enough to make any bond seem better than nothing. This is the territory Gadd knows better than anyone else: how a toxic relationship takes hold in a person's life, not necessarily through the obviousness of evil but through the gradualness of need, of dependence.
A first episode that offers nothing superfluous and doesn't try to reassure anyone. Half Man opens with the same uncomfortable frankness that made Baby Reindeer a perhaps unrepeatable experience. Characters built and established on opposite but complementary registers, in a journey back in time and memories, where 1980s Scotland is brought to life effectively, without any nostalgic frills. It remains to be seen how the remaining five episodes will bear the weight of the structure and whether Gadd the author will be able to build a raw and credible narrative complexity without the autobiographical source at hand.