Richard Gadd is back with Half Man, a six-part iPlayer drama that starts from Friday and opens on a wedding day gone wrong. In the first flash-forward, adult Niall is dressed in his jacket and kilt when Ruben arrives and leaves him stunned.
The show is set on the outskirts of Glasgow in the 1980s and begins with two "brothers," Niall and Ruben, who are not blood relatives. Ruben, played as an adult by Gadd and as a younger man by Stuart Campbell, was sent to a young offenders' institution after biting a man's nose off, and he is two years older than Niall, played by Jamie Bell as an adult and Mitchell Robertson as a boy.
That setup is the point. Half Man is another story about a terrifying black hole of a person ruining the life of someone who shows them weakness, and Gadd has cast himself as the monster this time. After Baby Reindeer, his earlier scripted drama about his own experience of being stalked, made him one of television's most powerful creators, he has returned with a much broader, and darker, act of self-scrutiny.
The tension in Half Man is not whether Ruben will cause damage. It is how much Niall will let him in before he does. The wedding scene makes that clear at once: Niall is the one standing in the formal clothes, shaken by the arrival of the man who unsettles the room simply by turning up.
Gadd's new series lands as viewers are still adjusting to the reach he won with Baby Reindeer, and it is already being framed by the same ruthless instinct for uncomfortable intimacy. The trailer arrived ahead of the April 23 launch, but the drama itself begins this week, with the damage built into the premise from the first scene.