‘White, unyielding torture porn’: Is Half Man too boring to be good TV? | | Television

Mef you are looking up Reindeer baby on Netflix, you’ll find it in the comedy category. This may come as news to anyone who has seen it, as they may be laboring under the illusion that it was a horror-filled horror show, sitting somewhere between psychological thrillers and all-out horror.

But the first sign has another meaning. Richard Gadd He was funny and the Reindeer took his cue The Edinburgh exhibition of the same name. Also, what could be cuter than a baby boy? It would be easy to infer a certain level of humor from that description.

Not one person ever claimed that Gadd followed, Half Manit’s a comedy. Obviously not in any way, shape or form. It’s punishingly, relentlessly, the funniest thing on television in recent memory. Half Man is a long, thin, thin, black scar. This is such a dark show that his role as a suicidal cancer patient is one of them at least side breakers.

His cruelty is endless. Ruben – Gadd’s character, played by Stuart Campbell in a flashback – is a mindless criminal whose anger reaches a peak as the episodes go on. His beatings are as numerous as they appear, until the sight of a trampled face is a sight to behold.

But violence is one of Half Man’s main concerns. None of this group is exposed to a fraction of light. They are either crushed by the eternal fear of their lives, or self-medicated by bursts of joyless hedonism. It’s important to Loto, but I get a bad haircut. It’s an upset stomach.

If there’s a relative of Half Man, it’s the heavier Black Mirror stories, like Shut Up and Dance, in which a person’s misfortunes befall him until he tries to kill himself, then a Radiohead song plays and it’s revealed that the person was a sleepwalker. However, Black Mirror manages to overcome this because its format allows the next episode to tell a different (usually goofier) ​​story. Half a Man cannot do this. It gets stuck in its unpleasantness for a long time and draws us in for a ride.

Perhaps a better comparison would be The Leftovers, the first season of which was so tragic that it included mass murder, a murderous cult, cannibalism, crying masturbation and a woman so tormented that she paid strangers to shoot her in the chest. But even The Leftovers couldn’t endure this deep depression for long; its second and third seasons deliberately used humor and absurdity to tone down the darkness. In short, it was a great show unless they decided to do it.

What’s annoying is that I enjoy some of Half Man. The performances are as powerful as they need to be, the story structure is clever and – if you look as closely as possible – the view of the show briefly lights up with a billion lumens once every half hour. If nothing else, it makes it easier to have a more powerful show with Napoleon Dynamite.

What’s really interesting about Half Man is how it’s become a referendum on Baby Reindeer and the buzz about how it completely changed its original inspiration. At the end of Half Man, Jamie Bell’s character has become a successful writer, mainly because he wrote a book about all his problems with Ruben. However, when he holds a press conference to promote the book, he gets angry when all the reporters ask him who the book is from. Since Gadd was writing Half Man when the press he started doing this to himit makes the show almost like its own answer, which makes it an interesting document in itself. More self-reflection would be most welcome.

But all that is overshadowed by the pure, unrelenting torture of pornography. The show always makes it impossible to root for any of the characters, even the sympathetic ones, so it’s the most watchable one imaginable. It is so full of its so-called big, important topics that it forgets the subtleties of thought. At its worst, it sounds like it was made by a 14-year-old emo doing it to get noticed.

Many have argued that, as an expression of male rage, Half Man shares a role with Boyhood. But the difference is easy to spot. Youth is a show of youth that feels like it was created by men. Half Man is a men’s show that feels like it was made by teenagers.