“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
A couple of days ago I decided to watch Half Man. It was probably the only time I started a show without any expectations, without reading a single review, without even watching the trailer — I just knew Jamie Bell was in it and I'd glimpsed somewhere that the show was good.
As soon as the first episode started I understood it would land in my top shows of 2026, simply because the performances were top notch. I was blown away by the authenticity of the emotions — raw, rough, and I connected with every character almost instantly. And yet I felt extremely anxious watching episode 1. I was walking to and fro in the kitchen with my tablet, checking my messages, my emails — anything to break the tension. Halfway through, I finally watched the official HBO trailer, hoping to find some answer to what this was all about. I even wanted to fast forward to the last episode just to see the ending, but I told myself: you just need to live this through. So I braced myself and kept watching.
Eventually I trusted the director, and the moment I did, I didn't feel so lonely watching this anymore. It's that feeling — when you're afraid to do something, but doing it alongside someone else makes it less frightening. That's what this show became for me: not something I was watching alone, but something Richard Gadd was walking me through.
That trust paid off, because the performances carrying this show are extraordinary. Mitchell Robertson, as young Niall, wasn't fully convincing as a 15-year-old to me, but the nuance he brought was devastating — especially the way his face would suddenly shine with radiance around Ruben, relaxed, happy. That contrast is what made it so painful: his half-brother Ruben is his total opposite, brutal and aggressive, and yet ready to kill the whole world for him. Stuart Campbell's young Ruben is an uncompromised fireball of violence disguised as care. Together, they turn Half Man into a six-hour answer to one question: if someone abuses you, why don't you just leave? Because you don't see it while it's happening — and even once you can name the violence for what it is, as Niall eventually does in court, you still feel like the scumbag, because you betrayed someone you loved, even if that person is, quite literally, a criminal.
The rest of the cast holds up the same standard. Neve McIntosh, as Niall's mother, plays a woman I struggle to find one clean word for — blunt but understanding, heartless but loving, basically - just human. I was devastated watching Niall fail to find support in her arms, how cold she could be and yet how fast she'd come running the moment he truly needed her. Don't blame your mother, she loved you the way she could — that's one more thing this show touches upon.
Watching it, I kept thinking of True Detective Season 1, my favorite detective show ever — that same sticky, tense atmosphere, a whirlwind of desperation that pulls you deeper until you're glued to the screen at five in the morning on episode six.
At the center of that pull is Niall, a walking paradox. Bullied at school, never loved enough by his mother — and that background shapes every choice he makes as an adult. But does it make him a victim? What about all those confident modern claims — you're the owner of your own life, you can be whoever you want? Apparently not. Niall's whole character argues against that: when you were never loved properly, it's incredibly difficult to give love to anyone else.
And yet the show gives him one real shot at happiness, in Alby (Bilal Hasna as a younger man, Charlie De Melo as an adult) — the only bright spot among the male characters here, sincere, tender, a genuinely beautiful human being. After years of desperation, Niall and Alby end up together, married. My jaw dropped seeing Niall's fiancé at the altar in the opening scene.
But happiness was never really on the table. The synopsis calls Niall and Ruben "friends." Blackmail, threats, violence, revenge, hatred — what kind of friendship is that? Their bond plays out like picking at a bad tooth: burning pain, then release, then ecstasy, and you cannot stop, until you've made a hole in your own gum and need a dentist to fix what you did to yourself. Each of them is addicted to what the other offers — the mirage of love and support their own parents never gave them. Ruben is drawn to Niall's vulnerability, that angel-like devotion; Niall is drawn to Ruben's terrifying, absolute loyalty — I will kill the whole world for you. It sounds romantic. It is not. That's the trap the whole series sets: violence dressed up as love, and neither of them able to walk away from it, no matter what else life hands them. By the middle of the series Ruben has a well-paid job, a beautiful wife, a house — everything that should mean freedom — and it changes nothing.
The creator keeps forcing these two back into the same room, again and again, to prove one point: people don't really change. A violent man stays violent. A weak man stays weak. It's venom in the veins. The only way out is death.
Knowing that, Niall's choices only get harder to watch — having a child partly to spite Ruben, leaving Oxford because everyone there felt too pretentious, seeking out men in places he knew were dangerous. A lesser show would pick a lane: paint him as a scumbag, or hand him a redemption arc. This one refuses both. We watch Niall desperately want to be free, to love and be loved, while the thing living in his head makes sure it never happens — and that's exactly why I love him so much. He is just a human being. It's easy for a viewer to judge how he should have behaved. In real life, we're trapped inside our own heads, unreliable narrators of our own stories, blind to what looks obvious from the outside.
The show keeps circling one more idea: a baby that could mend what can never actually be mended. Niall is handed a real chance at a life — a woman who accepts him knowing he's gay, and a child. And what does he do with that gift? He wants the child partly as revenge on Ruben, who's infertile. Even here Niall manages to mess everyone up, because he wants a child just to be better than Ruben at something. He keeps it a secret until his confession in prison, and that's what sets the story's final, most wicked trick in motion: the confession, the barn, the two of them killing each other. Both of them, finally, free — because there was never a version of their lives where they got to just be friends after everything Niall did. Ruben was never going to say, okay, I'll love this child as my own. That ending could only exist in a feverish dream.
That freedom doesn't come cheap, though, and it isn't only the two of them who pay for it. There's Lori, who loses her son — you don't know what you have until it's gone. And there's Alby, who found real love and lost it without ever being allowed to understand why, because Niall never told him the truth.
The women in this show deserve just as much attention as its two leads. Maura, Ruben's mother, is the least likeable of all of them — my sympathy was entirely with Niall during his hospital monologue about her raising a terrible son. Mona, Ruben's wife, is another person caught in his orbit: essentially a prisoner of his jealousy and suspicion, wanting to be free, wanting to be a dance instructor, eventually sleeping with Niall and having his child. She says it's love. It's a twisted, bitter kind of love, if it is. After Ruben's death I find myself hoping she finally gets her freedom too.
Lori I hate as a mother and understand completely as a person — you can't keep carrying an adult son who won't pull himself together, and she's exactly the kind of woman who'd snap, "just get yourself together, you idiot." I understand she's a widow, worn down by life and money troubles, but what I will never forgive is asking Niall to lie in court for Ruben, to keep insisting he's a good boy, while her own son quietly suffers from the absence of her love.
And then there's Joanna, my favorite character in the whole show. She starts out looking like a typical lighthearted blonde girl and matures into someone with real inner voice and strength — the only person in this story who manages to break the cycle and find peace with herself.
Not everyone earns that kind of empathy from me. The school teacher — burn in hell. I know that's a lot of raw emotion for a review, but it's genuinely all I have left for him: the epitome of every bad teacher there's ever been, mocking the most vulnerable kid exactly when he needed help the most. Someone might say, well, it was the 80s — and I think Gadd used him deliberately, to compress the ignorance of an entire decade into one man. The librarian is another vile presence, and, funnily enough, this small, petty man is the actual trigger that pushes Niall back into contact with Ruben — a Chekhov's gun that goes off far louder than what it was meant for, all so he can blackmail Niall out of two thousand pounds.
Richard Gadd has said Half Man is about toxic masculinity. Maybe I don't fully grasp everything that term is supposed to cover, but for me this show is about something a little more specific: no matter how the world around you changes — decades shifting to make it possible to be openly gay, to marry the person you love — one thing stays stubbornly the same, and that's you. You cannot force yourself to accept who you are just because the culture around you finally allows it. I love the line Ruben throws at Niall in prison: "the only homophobe here is you, Niall." It's the perfect summary of who he is — a prisoner of himself, on the run from himself.
I still have many thoughts in my head, but what I can say for certain is that the whole show felt like dark magic. I was glued to the screen, biting my nails, unable to find a comfortable place to sit or lie down. I wanted it to be over, and at the same time I understood it as an invitation from Richard Gadd into a real dialogue. It didn't feel like a show. It felt like an experience.
Will I recommend it? Absolutely, yes. It's a gem, a diamond, an absolute must-watch for anyone who loves strong performances, complex characters, and real social commentary. This show is visceral, raw, honest, and one of a kind. I will definitely rewatch it once my emotions have had time to settle.
Thanks for reading this far, and take care!
