Half Man might just be one of the most interesting dramas I’ve seen in years. I’ve watched plenty of shows that are just as well-made. In fact, I’d say I’ve seen a lot of dramas in recent years that are outright better in terms of writing, acting, production, and all the other metrics by which we might measure entertainment or artistry—but few that have left such a deep impression on me. This show had a story that I was turning over in my head while I wasn’t watching it—and which I’ve still been dwelling on, long after its conclusion.
In a nutshell, it’s about the turbulent relationship between these two stepbrothers, Niall and Ruben, over a thirty-year time period in Glasgow. Their dynamic is really unique. Niall Kennedy, our protagonist, is timid, sensitive, and creative. He’s homosexual but deeply closeted, and he’s lacking in a male role model given that his father died when he was young. Everything changes one day when he’s forced to share the little bedroom he’s decorated with Doctor Who and Indiana Jones memorabilia with the notorious Ruben Pallister—who’s just been released from a long stint in juvenile detention for biting off another kid’s nose. Ruben descends on Niall’s quiet (but lonely) existence like a shaved bear that’s snorted a line of pure rage—and though he’s liable to explode at any moment, he fills this void in Niall’s life and makes it more exciting. I’d also like to point out that this is very much an auteur-driven project—Half Man was created by the excellent Richard Gadd, who wrote all the episodes and stars as the older version of Ruben Pallister.
Naturally, I’m going to be covering spoilers in this post. So if you haven’t seen it yet but found yourself intrigued when reading the above paragraph, then I highly recommend you pirate the hell out of it legitimately stream it at your earliest convenience.
At its core, Half Man is about masculinity. More specifically, it’s about male repression. These are things that, as a man, have always fascinated me. Throughout the show, I kept thinking about my own life—things I’ve said, attitudes I’ve had, decisions I’ve made. Where do these things come from? How much of who I am has been absorbed by my male friends, by popular culture, by who knows what else?
In today’s post, I’d like to outline why Half Man was so impactful for me. These might not even be pure compliments per se; think of them instead as comments or reflections about what made the series distinctive. In some ways, it might be as much an analysis of my own tastes as the show itself.
A Decades-Spanning Family Saga
I’ll start here, because this is what drew me to Half Man in the first place. I’ve always loved stories that take place over many years, where characters and circumstances change in interesting ways. I like seeing how characters’ lives turn out. Two of my favorite films of all time are Peyton Place and Giant, and I love novels like Great Expectations, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, or The Color Purple. So I’m always looking for something that scratches that itch. A sweeping family saga, a bildungsroman, a multi-generational epic.
Half Man was suggested to me by my roommate Robin, who’d been watching it week by week and was four episodes in at the time. I don’t tend to try new TV shows very often—usually I need a really, really good reason to commit to watching something new. I can also be a little prejudiced against British TV, but that’s a topic for another day. The point is, I typically need a lot of convincing. And yet with Half Man, I was sold on it instantly. The reason, I think, is that when Robin pitched it to me, she (unknowingly) framed it in a way that appealed to my deep, longstanding weakness for slice-of-life narratives that take place over many years. At its heart, Robin told me, the show explored this intense, yet volatile, dynamic between two stepbrothers—and how this relationship seems to define their lives over many decades. It reminded me a little bit of Normal People, which is one of my favorite novels of all time.
And so I watched it, knowing almost nothing about Half Man except this brief pitch from my roommate. No one else I knew was talking about it. I hadn’t seen anything online about it either. But right from the very beginning, I fell in love with it. I caught up to Robin within a couple of days, and we were able to watch the rest of the series together. It was exactly how I imagined it would be when she first described it to me—a dark, realistic character study with literary ideals.
One thing I realized when watching it, however, was that as much as I love stories that take place over many years, they’re always going to be difficult to translate to screen. Unless it’s a Normal People situation, where it only covers five years or so, the main characters are each going to need multiple actors. And because of the nature of performance as an art form, it’s always a little disorienting. If an actor’s good, you get attached to them and can’t help but think of their interpretation of the character as the official version.
I thought Mitchell Robertson and Stuart Campbell were fantastic as the younger versions of Niall and Ruben. I fully bought into them as these characters. I didn’t feel like I was watching a fictional drama. I felt like I was a fly-on-the-wall in these boys’ lives. But naturally, they had to be recast if the series was going to follow them into middle age. So there was always going to be a shift that felt a little jarring. It’s the same with dramas like Domina, House of the Dragon, or First Love—all of which I adore, but can’t get around what might be an intrinsic flaw with this type of storytelling.
I’d say I actually liked the first three episodes more than the last three, even though the show’s latter half undoubtedly packs more of a punch. I think that’s because the first half of the show, which ends with Niall’s graduation from university and Ruben’s incarceration, feels more immersive. It feels like a piece of social realism, like Niall and Ruben are real boys that we’re watching grow up. Whereas the show’s second half, which picks up when they’re 37 and 39 years old respectively, feels more melodramatic. Which is to say, I didn’t forget that I was watching a fictional drama. It felt more like a performance rather than real life. I think that’s down to several factors. The recasting, for one. The convenient return of characters like Alby and Mona for dramatic effect, for another. Thirdly, the dialogue feels more melodramatic; the hospital confrontation at the close of episode four stands out in particular. Ruben felt a little too articulate here. And while they do address that by having Ruben briefly state that he’s done a lot of reading during his incarceration, the whole conversation feels more like something that belongs in a play than a social realist piece. And fourthly, along the same lines, I think having Ruben come into wealth does change the tone of the series. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed this plot point, but it leans the show definitively away from realism and into melodrama. It reminded me of the kind of sweeping, operatic storylines you see in 19th century novels like Wuthering Heights, The Count of Monte Cristo, or Great Expectations. Ruben does have echoes of Magwitch or Heathcliff in episode four. Funnily enough, Robin sent me a Tik Tok edit of Half Man set to Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”, and we both laughed at how appropriately Niall fit Cathy, Ruben fit Heathcliff, and Alby fit Linton.
The more realistic option would have been to have Ruben struggle to find work upon his release, which would have reflected the difficulties ex-convicts face with societal reentry. I feel like that would have been more immersive and matched the tone of the first three episodes. I could see an alternate version of the show where Niall didn’t completely fuck up his Oxford scholarship and tries to help Ruben following his release from prison. But that would have been quite different story—and I’m not saying it would have been a better one. There’s a lot about the last three episodes and Ruben’s wealth in particular that I really liked. I’m just saying it felt a little unrealistic, especially seeing as how Ruben and Mona’s house is insanely nice. Not only is he paying for this incredible property, he’s also subsidizing things like Niall’s rent and therapy. The harsh reality of our world is that this kind of rags-to-riches journey is extremely rare. Boys that grow up in poverty, that come from abusive homes, that go to prison, that have behavioral issues, often find their options shrinking as life goes on. They typically end up in cycles that reinforce their hardships. For stories set in the modern day, I find it more powerful when the challenges of the majority determine the plot. At the same time, I can’t deny that I have always been interested in rags-to-riches narratives as well. Maybe social mobility is fascinating because it’s so rare.
So while I did have mixed feelings about Ruben’s wealth, it didn’t affect my enjoyment. It just made me wonder if it could have been explained more realistically. The twist that Ruben’s not only rich, but happily married, while Niall is living a lonely, destitute existence, does set up some really interesting situational irony and some fascinating character development. Niall’s declaration in episode four that he’d give anything just to live for a moment in Ruben’s shoes is one of the most powerful lines in the whole series. It tells us that Niall feels, fundamentally, that is a victim in the game of life. For him, to be a man is to have power. Not political power, but simply power over your life in a general sense. The ability to make things happen. Even though they reconcile, the weight of years of disappointment stokes a fire of rebellion in Niall. Due to the passage of time, Ruben is no longer this mythical figure in Niall’s eyes. He still loves him, of course, but he’s not quite as star struck as he was in his youth. And there’s this real sense that Niall is driven by this quintessentially fraternal need to outcompete him in some way (see: Lochlan in The White Lotus season 3). The fact that Ruben supports him financially only fuels this desire. It’s humiliating to be indebted to someone who’s never tried hard at anything or had respect for rules, when Niall himself has lived his whole life conforming to external expectations.
But how can Niall exert dominance over a man that’s physically stronger than him, earns more money, and has a beautiful wife? Just to be clear, I’m not saying that those are the three most important things in life—but they are perhaps the main ways men traditionally measure their masculinity against one another. They’re factors that have become inextricably tied to the male ego. I earn more than you. I’m bigger than you. I have a girlfriend and you don’t. You’d think that, being a writer, Niall might have grown out of these juvenile patriarchal concepts. But his dissatisfaction with how his life has turned out has only entrenched these ideas. And I really like that. It’s true to real life that men who are more intellectual or well-read are just as susceptible to societal pressures around masculinity as anyone else. I think overcoming those pressures has much more to do with your capacity for empathy and self-reflection. It’s also true that people who are middle aged don’t necessarily grow out of these things either. I should further note that, while Niall is undoubtedly his own worst enemy, his masculine competiveness with his stepbrother isn’t entirely one-sided either. Ruben habitually flexes his strength over Niall by getting him in headlocks and manhandling him. He refers to him as “Bambi” to reinforce this notion that Niall is delicate or effeminate—something Ruben does to tacitly imply that he himself is the opposite. Ruben goes out of his way to pay for things that Niall needs. Ruben brags about his sexual exploits to Niall and makes out with Mona in front of him. And we know that Ruben does all of these things to feel more secure in his own masculinity.
This sense of masculinity is, we soon learn, about as secure as a stack of Pringles beneath a hydraulic press. Ruben’s spent his whole life trying to overcompensate for the way his father made him feel like less of a man. The discovery that he’s impotent shatters all of this work. To him, there’s no greater sign of masculine failure than being unable to father children. It’s a measure of masculinity that trumps money, physical strength, and having a pretty girlfriend. For Ruben, fatherhood is the most important part of masculinity. He wants to be what his own father wasn’t. When Niall tells him that Ava is pregnant, the roles are suddenly reversed for the first time. Now Ruben feels like less of a man than Niall, something that’s painful for him but deeply rewarding for Niall. This is what Niall has been searching for all this time. He’s finally outcompeted his stepbrother. You can tell Niall relishes in asserting his virility over Ruben. For the first time in his life, he feels powerful. He feels like a man. But of course, this satisfaction proves to be his undoing.
The Relatability of Niall’s Youth
The dynamic between Niall and Ruben is so unique, but you don’t need to be Scottish, working class, gay, or even a man to find the series relatable. I think what the best stories do well is hook you with something unusual and then use those unusual circumstances to explore universal truths.
Half Man taps into something that I’ve always been fascinated by, which is our tendency to become over-attached to someone if we feel like there’s something important we’re missing in ourselves. As the title suggests, Niall doesn’t feel like a complete person. He lost his father when he was young, he doesn’t have any siblings, and he doesn’t appear to have any friends either. Someone in this situation is naturally predisposed to latching onto someone like Ruben. Before Ruben moves into the house, Niall feels incredibly powerless. He’s constrained by gender expectations and hounded by bullies for not living up to them. Since he has no companionship in his life and he’s relentlessly tormented at school, he seeks refuge in things like sci-fi worlds and fantastical heroes. But while these can provide a temporary comfort in the form of escapism, they don’t make up for a lack of real human connection.
It’s in this context that Ruben enters Niall’s life. Niall knows him by reputation and we get the sense they interacted a little when they were younger, but it’s this moment—when Ruben moves into the house—that changes everything for our protagonist. At first, this is a terrifying prospect for Niall. His room is the only safe space in his whole life—the only place where he doesn’t have to be on guard or try to be anything. All of a sudden, it’s like he has to share that space with the type of person who bullies him at school—only worse. As we know from the outset, Ruben is capable of much more than wanking into a deck of Indiana Jones trading cards for a laugh. We’ve all been guilty of that. Ruben is a different beast altogether—he doesn’t care about getting caught or going too far, because he’s driven by rage rather than social conformity. If something sets him off, it’s almost impossible to reason with him. He’s like a pitbull that locks its jaw and won’t let go.
I wonder whether every British state school has a Ruben Pallister. I found Stuart Campbell’s performance as the young Ruben in the first three episodes utterly convincing. He felt like someone I knew. Not a specific person, but someone that could have existed at my school and reflected various characters from my youth. Everything from his look to his mannerisms rang true for me. And there were, back in the day, different types of bullies that harassed people for different reasons. There were the bullies that picked on people as part of a social game—putting them down to feel better about themselves, humiliating them to make others laugh, that kind of thing. This would be like the Gus character we see in Half Man. They exist within the established social structure and will typically stop harassing their victims when they get bored, feel they’ve “gone too far”, or become worried they might get caught. Then you get the kind of bullies like Ruben, who might still harass others for social reasons, but who are dealing with complex behavioral issues like antisocial personality disorder. Rather than simply trying to score social points, they need an outlet for their rage. They might be dealing with childhood trauma, poverty, or a difficult home life—and therefore feel like outsiders themselves. I remember kids who would more or less stick to themselves, existing on the fringes of the social structure, but whom everyone would respect or placate when they came around. People would say things like “It’s not even worth it getting mixed up with them,” or “He’s the kinda kid that would genuinely stab you”. Obviously, these may have been classic schoolyard exaggerations, but it was the sense that those kids were capable of going crazy that set them apart.
While the introduction of someone like this has the consequence that Niall is constantly on edge in a place where he should be relaxed, the proximity to this kind of person is exciting for him. A lot of people will undoubtedly find this mixture of fear and excitement quite relatable. Unlike Gus and the other bullies at school, Niall can’t simply avoid Ruben. He’s stuck with him. And that forces him to adapt, testing the limits of his personality and expanding his experiences. I think Niall feels a part of the real world for the first time. Now he’s no longer just trying to get through school and escape from reality via fictional worlds. Even though Ruben threatens him, mocks his hobbies, and puts him down, the sheer fact that he’s there is valuable to Niall. Lonely people will put up with being mistreated in exchange for companionship. I think this is very relatable. When I was at school, there was a lot of bullying within male friendship groups—often passed off as harmless banter. And it was something inextricably tied to masculinity, because the justification was that this is just how men were supposed to behave, and that if you couldn’t take it, you weren’t a real man. But it was universally acknowledged that it was better to have a toxic friendship than no friends at all. I even remember guys having sidekicks or lackeys that they’d abuse to reaffirm their own masculinity, but whom they’d fearlessly protect if anyone else bullied them. I always found that really interesting.
“You said you wished he’d move abroad the other day so you could be free.”
– Joanna, episode three
I think that any man that went to a British school, regardless of their experience, will find all of this relatable. Even if you didn’t make the same choices as Niall or suffer the same hardships, you’ll understand the masculine pressures driving him. Because Ruben seems to embody a hypermasculine persona (which we later realize is born out of the trauma of his father making him feel like less of a man), Niall feels more alive around him. He feels doorways opening for him and the possibility of taking part in everything he’s missed out on. With Ruben he smokes hash, he does some boxing, he has deep conversations, he keeps secrets, he engages in mischief, and he sleeps with women. All of those experiences make him feel more like a man, like a normal person, and therefore he’ll repress or ignore the way Ruben mistreats him. Ruben becomes a real-life hero to him. In fact, he replaces the fictional heroes that Niall has found comfort in during his youth. I’ve always found our need for heroes really interesting, and it’s a need we fill with real people and fictional characters alike. It’s not a random detail that Niall idolizes The Doctor and Indiana Jones—both are men that are capable, respected, and even feared in their respective worlds. They’re empowered—which is the exact opposite of how Niall feels at school. He feels like things happen to him, rather than being able to shape the world around him. He feels like the victim of a world that wasn’t designed for him. And so he admires these men that make things happen—the sheer optimism at the heart of these two characters and others like them. When he and Ruben start hanging out, Ruben very much replaces The Doctor and Indiana Jones in Niall’s psyche. He’s someone that does what he wants, that doesn’t care about the consequences, that feels powerful. He effortlessly gets Niall laid and puts a decisive end to the bullying that’s so far made his school experience a living hell. Just think about how crazy that must feel for someone in Niall’s position, who likely assumed that nothing would ever change for him.
I’ll bet almost everyone who watched this show related to some aspect of it. To feeling alone. To feeling ashamed of who you are. To feeling desperate or jealous or paralyzed by fear. To feeling powerless and wanting to take charge of your life. To feeling a mixture of hatred and love toward someone. To having someone enter your life and completely transform it—for better or worse. To torture yourself over what other people might think about you.
The Importance of Mona
When we first met Mona Shiels in episode one, I didn’t think she was going to be a major character. The series has this fleeting style, with each episode covering a significant moment in Niall and Ruben’s relationship, rather than each one picking up where the last left off. There was something very naturalistic about the first three episodes, and it was because of this style that I didn’t expect any characters to recur throughout the series other than Niall, Ruben, and Lori. And yet, we see Gus, Alby, and Mona find their way back into the lives of our main characters. I thought each of them were going to be examples of people that leave an indelible mark on your life as you cross paths, but whom you never see again. Unless they’re a really close friend, you tend to lose touch with the people you knew from school or university. There’s a kind of scattering that goes on in your mid-twenties, and every now and then you remember someone you used to know and wonder what the hell happened to them. I imagined that Gus would always be the kid that bullied Niall in school, that Alby would always be Niall’s first gay experience, and that Mona would always be the girl that climbed through Niall’s bedroom window that one time.
There’s a part of me that wishes that had been case, because I think it’s true to real life that someone might have a profound impact on you and then disappear. When I first saw the flashforward revealing that Alby was Niall’s groom, I was a little disappointed, because I thought it too much of a coincidence. It felt a little contrived—like a reminder that I was watching a TV show and not real life—but I do like how they handled Alby’s return. The last three episodes do feel less immersive, and it feels very much like we’re following the logic of a TV show rather than real life. But this shift from social realism to melodrama does allow for some interesting characterization. If we’d lost Gus, Alby, and Mona to Niall’s youth, there’s no doubt that three new characters just wouldn’t have had the same depth and impact. And the most interesting of our side characters, for me, is Mona Shiels (presumably Mona Pallister by the time we see her again?).
In episode one, I didn’t pick up on any indication that Mona was Ruben’s childhood sweetheart. She’s not in any of the school scenes and she doesn’t get mentioned in episodes two and three. At the time, I interpreted her as one of many girls in Ruben’s orbit. Or the latest in a string of fuckbuddies. It was clear they were friends, but I didn’t think they were an official couple. When Mona returns in episode four, and she’s presented as Ruben’s soulmate, it felt like a plotline that was being made up as the show went on, rather than something that had been planned out from the beginning, like “We need a love interest for Ruben—can we bring back that chick from episode one and retroactively make them high school sweethearts?”. But while it did feel this way at first, it didn’t really create any problems. Ruben appears thoroughly single in episode two, given that he repeatedly mounts the free-spirited French girl like a crazed billy goat with a week-long priapism. And we learn in episode six that the randy bastard goes out of his way to track her down to give her another go-around after his first release from prison.
When taking this together with the passage from Niall’s novel in episode five that the character based on Ruben only had eyes for the character based on Mona, I think it’s likely that Ruben and Mona had an on-and-off relationship during the last couple years of school. I imagined them both coming from difficult home lives and poorer backgrounds than the other kids, and drawn together by this shared sense of hardship. Ruben is defined by his abusive father. If Mona also had a mom or dad that didn’t offer her the healthy parental love she needed (be that due to abuse, addiction, absence, or something else), I could see her and Ruben giving each other the warmth they lacked at home. I think those kind of connections can feel very powerful for teenagers. Therefore, I could see them having an intense, possibly volatile relationship during the last year or two of high school. And then, after a difficult decade apart in their twenties (with Ruben in prison and Mona perhaps struggling to adapt to adult life), they have a chance encounter and remember the comfort they offered one another in school. This makes a lot of sense to me—that they’d find each other again while vulnerable, having been humbled by their twenties, and recognizing that they’ve both grown a lot in the intervening years, come to see the encounter as a destined opportunity for mutual rebirth.
So what makes Mona Shiels so significant? In a nutshell, she tells us a lot about Niall and Ruben’s sense of masculinity. Niall and Ruben are the two main characters of quite a concise limited series. They’re the only two characters put under a microscope and therefore the only two characters with an arc. The likes of Lori, Joanna, Alby, and whoever that mustached fella standing in as Niall’s lawyer in the finale was, don’t have character arcs. They’re there to reveal more about Niall and Ruben—and Mona reveals a lot.
In episode one, Mona helps Niall lose his virginity. It’s clear that Niall is gay, but it’s not so clear at this point whether he really knows that. We see his eyes linger on the boxing poster Ruben tells him to hang up and we see him watch Ruben dancing, but we don’t know whether Niall is conscious of these homosexual feelings yet. They might just be feelings for all we know. Personally, I got the feeling that he was still in that early, questioning stage, where he might feel unexplained urges but he hasn’t really thought about them yet. Like every boy in high school, Niall wants to feel like a man. And what it means to be a man, as the show does such a good job of demonstrating, is decided collectively, by mainstream culture and patriarchal power structures, rather than something young boys define individually for themselves. It’s so important, as a teenager, to feel normal. And being able to have sex with a woman is pretty much the ultimate test of manhood. The male ego is inextricably tied to this idea. As Half Man shows, gay men are still impacted by these patriarchal forces. These forces are especially powerful for teenagers, both because we have a natural imperative to make connections outside our family unit at that age (leading to conformity), and because a lot of gay men (such as Niall) are either still coming to terms with their sexuality or haven’t even examined it yet.
Niall wants to feel like a man. And Ruben, keenly aware of these patriarchal forces, wants to help Niall feel like a man. In his eyes, this is the greatest kindness he can offer him, and I think it makes Ruben feel powerful (and good about himself) that he’s able to do this. While the specific circumstances in which this happens might be unusual, I think a lot of guys will be able to relate to this in some way. For example, I remember some of my friends earnestly trying to help me with girls in various ways and feeling very strongly about what I should do. Even if I was annoyed by their methods or uncomfortable with their advice, I appreciated that they were going out of their way to help me and I could see in their eyes that they genuinely wanted me to succeed. And I knew that this came from their own experience of the patriarchal forces that could make us feel inadequate or abnormal. One time I was at a party and a friend of mine asked the girl sitting between us for a kiss. She obliged, and then he asked her if she’d like to kiss me as well. The kiss wasn’t very satisfying, because it didn’t feel natural. But it reminds me of the scene where Ruben encourages Mona to sleep with Niall, and how women are placed in these roles where they can “grant” masculinity. It’s like men need women to feel like they’re enough, and I’m curious whether there’s an equivalent experience for women. I never got the sense, from my conversations with women, that men confer femininity in the same way women do manhood. But I’m curious, so let me know in the comments or via email if you have any thoughts. I can only speak to the male experience—and I think the different expectations society has about gender have created this interesting link between male confidence and the ability to attract women.
Anyway, what follows is probably the most interesting (and hilarious) sex scene I’ve ever seen. Niall looks like a deer in the headlights seeing this confident, large-breasted girl straddling him. At first, he doesn’t seem to know what to do—not just because he’s gay, but because of the strangeness of the situation. Mona tries to get him going, saying “Touch my breasts,” and placing his hands on her tits—but it doesn’t work. The turning point is Ruben. It’s only when Niall looks at Ruben that he’s able to get hard. I’ve never seen a sex scene like this. The camerawork shows that Niall is completely focused on his stepbrother at this point. We don’t get any more shots of Mona. Instead, the camera focuses on close-ups of Ruben’s lips and his hand on Niall’s chest. There’s this intense, unbroken eye contact between the two of them, and it’s shot like they’re the ones making love, even though we know Mona is there off-screen. Ruben makes a calming horse noise and says “Trot, don’t gallop”. He then takes Niall’s face in his hands—a strikingly intimate gesture—and tells him “Follow my rhythm”. We get more lingering shots of Ruben’s open mouth as he leans over Niall, and you get the sense that Niall is absolutely intoxicated by him at this point, like nothing exists for him at that moment except the two of them. Unable to control himself, Niall cums inside Mona (and not for the last time this series!). When we see Niall the next morning, he’s got this smile on his face we’ve never seen before, laying back with his hands behind his head. And we know that this experience has nothing to do with sexuality; it’s all about gender. He’s glowing with the confidence of someone who, for the first time, feels like he’s enough. Someone who feels like a whole man, not a half one.
Jumping forward to episode five however, we don’t really see any reference or callback to this when Niall meets Mona again as an adult. In some ways, the fact they’ve already slept together does make her brief affair with Niall less impactful. But there are definitely strengths to making the character of Ruben’s wife someone from his past, as opposed to someone new he meets after prison. When Niall encourages Ruben to move on from Mona in the wake of her affair with Benji, Ruben dismisses the idea that he can love someone else. He describes Mona as special, and I think Ruben sees her differently following his first release from prison. The passage of time—especially the loss of his twenties to incarceration—seems to have changed his outlook on life in general. He’s not the free-spirited rogue we saw in the first three episodes. Now he seems driven and full of purpose. He seems less interested in having fun in the moment and more interested in building something. There’s a solemnity to him, like he’s gone from not having a care in the world to being way, way too serious. Mona has a lot to do with this—I think he feels grateful to her for not giving up on him and helping him readjust to civilian life. We don’t know exactly how they reunited after his release, but I’ll bet he doesn’t see it as luck or coincidence. The Ruben we see in the last three episodes is someone we know for sure believes in things like fate and destiny. Maybe he retroactively idealizes the relationship they had as teenagers, obsessed with the idea that they escaped the hardships of their rough upbringing to build a normal life together.
“Men don’t declare bankruptcy”
-Ruben Pallister, episode five
You can tell that Ruben is trying to be a better man following his release from prison, even if he hasn’t quite done enough self-reflection to truly change. But it’s clear that he’s earnest in wanting to be a good father and to atone for being a bad son. Mona is the key to these twin motivations. She’s not some random girl—she’s someone he grew up with, who’s seen the worst of him and loves him nonetheless. Therefore, he feels very protective over Mona and the life he’s built with her. He’s convinced himself that he’s not the same person he was, but that rage is still there, below the surface. Interestingly, he only becomes more old-fashioned in his sense of masculinity as he gets older. In episode one, he doesn’t mind sharing Mona with Niall because he just sees her simply as a girl in the generic sense. As one of many girls to be conquered. By episode four, she’s not one of many—she’s the one. She’s not a girl, she’s his girl. And so he’s possessive to a psychotic degree. Just the idea of her wearing revealing clothing in the presence of other men sends him into a blind rage. If another man shows her any attention whatsoever, he sees that as a threat to everything he’s building. He doesn’t see her as something separate from himself anymore. Any male attention she gets is a direct challenge to his masculinity. And this mindset is what sets in motion his downfall, because it triggers the rage that he’s been trying to keep in check. His suffocating possessiveness pushes Mona away from him and she engages in several sexual liaisons behind his back.
And here we come back to little old Niall, the silliest goose on television. My interpretation of Niall is that he’s gay rather than bi, but he places importance on Mona because she’s important to Ruben. Remember, despite everything Ruben has done, Ruben is Niall’s hero. Take this line from Niall’s novel “Billy looked up to Cosmo, who was everything he was not. He had a violent, unafraid quality, like he could go off anytime somehow”. I actually think we have a greater tendency to idealize people who are patently flawed, rather than those that are squeaky clean. Despite everything Ruben’s done, Niall can’t help but romanticize him. And because Ruben pedestalizes Mona, Niall does too. In his novel, he describes Mona thus: “she walked like fairy dust, as though brightening every corner of the school”. He’s only drawn to her because Ruben is drawn to her. And Mona, in turn, is briefly drawn to Niall because her characterization, in this novel, makes her feel seen and cherished at a time when her husband is treating her like property.
The reason Niall appears overcome with lust in episode five isn’t because he finds her, as a woman, physically attractive—it’s because having sex with Ruben’s wife makes him feel powerful. To him, there’s no greater way he can outcompete his stepbrother than by cuckolding him. Niall, for all his compassionate behavior, doesn’t truly see Mona as a person either. He sees her as Ruben’s wife. That’s why he makes love to her with a passion that he never shows Ava. When Mona reveals that she’s cheated on Ruben with various men down the years, Niall becomes enraged. Mona is absolutely right that the reason for his fury comes from a sense that he’s not actually special. It diminishes the achievement of being able to seduce Ruben’s wife if she’s already getting pumped by half of Glasgow. I really liked this detail, because it shows that once again, everything is about masculinity. Mona is the battleground through which these stepbrothers compete. She is the custodian of their masculinity—able to make them feel like men and able, equally, to take that feeling away.
Niall’s Gay Foils
Half Man is a very gay series. There are lots of gay characters doing lots of very gay things. We’ve got everything from furtive cottagers and bathhouse blowies to giddy midnight dogging and arse-stretching chemsex. It’s the all-gay economy over here. But below the surface, the show’s not really about that. At its core, Half Man is a story about masculinity. Niall’s homosexuality is just an interesting vehicle through which we explore that theme. Everything is filtered through the lens of male repression, and everything leads back to it. And the other gay characters in the show serve as interesting foils for Niall, because they each have their own relationship with their homosexuality.
Alby, for example, is a direct counterpoint to our protagonist. Whereas Niall is terrified of his homosexuality, Alby completely owns it. When Niall meets him during Freshers’ Week, Alby displays a remarkable degree of emotional intelligence for a man of his age. He lives life on his own terms and isn’t ashamed of who he is. This makes him very attractive to Niall, but it also scares him, due to the way it shines a light on his own shame. He feels incomplete in comparison, in the same way all of us have no doubt felt incomplete when faced with someone that seems to be in charge of their own life. He feels, for lack of a better phrase, like “half a man”. And we the audience feel a rush of sympathy for Niall here, because we know how other people can make us feel the sharp sting of our own inadequacies, like we’re not progressing the way we’re meant to. Alby and Ruben are, on the surface, polar opposites—but they both seem to know who they are and how to navigate the world with ease. Niall covets this confidence more than anything else—but he’s simply too obsessed with what other people might think.
As we learn, Alby’s self-possession is rooted in his own trauma. He’s not magically gifted with a stronger spirit or an easier life. He’s faced the same struggles Niall has. And this becomes an important lesson for Niall, both in episode two when they meet, and in episode six, when they meet again. Alby was viciously beaten by other boys for the way his homosexuality threatened their own sense of masculinity. But then he decides to live openly as a homosexual—and the beatings stop. The bullies leave him alone because he’s no longer a member of the group that’s not “man enough”. Now he’s something else entirely—someone that accepts himself for who he is and completely rejects their standard of masculinity. And that scares them even more, so they leave him alone. Alby even goes so far as to thank the boy that outed him, for the way it forced him to accept himself. That’s the lesson Alby tries to teach Niall in episode two and succeeds in teaching him in episode six: you can’t control what others might say or do, but you can control what you say to yourself. And while you can never rule out future hardships, you’ll have a happier life overall if you accept yourself and live that life on your own terms.
Even more interesting than Alby, perhaps, is the characterization of Niall’s mother—Lori. This story could have worked perfectly fine if Lori and Maura were a man and a woman. But I think the decision to make them a lesbian couple adds this really interesting layer of nuance to everything. In theory, having a gay mother should have made self-acceptance easier for Niall—right? Except there are nuances of gender. What I really like about Half Man is that it shows that even though gay men are often perceived as less masculine by straight men, they’re still subject to the same patriarchal forces. Niall can’t be separated from the environment in which he grew up—every boy in his school would have felt the same masculine pressures. It reminded me of my own school days, and the realization I had toward the end that we all had the same hardware. Boys that might have been overweight or small or effeminate, that didn’t assert themselves or care about sports, had as much pride and competitiveness as any of the boys that played football, drank beer, or got into fights. They may have adopted meek personas in public for survival purposes, but spend enough time with them and you realize that we’re all the damn same. We’re all petty. We all want respect. We all have this innate wolfishness, even if it sits below the surface. The fact that Niall is sexually attracted to men doesn’t preclude his desire to be seen as manly. You get the sense that long after he’s left school, Niall is still chasing the approval of the boys that bullied him. And so he can’t face the idea of living his life as an openly gay man, because in his mind it would mean adopting a less masculine persona.
For this reason, he doesn’t look to his mother as a useful template for how to live a gay lifestyle—she’s not subject to the same forces. Lori is interesting, because she’s openly gay but there’s still a privacy to her sexuality. It’s not something she talks about, reflects on, or contextualizes. I did wonder if this was a generational thing, or whether it was more to do with gender. Lori likely didn’t go to university or have much exposure to discussions about sexuality. She was probably born in the late 1940s or early 1950s to working-class parents and lived in Glasgow her whole life. Her experiences couldn’t be more different from someone like Alby. You don’t get the sense that Lori talked to Niall much about her sexuality. I also wondered whether this was simply a reflection of Lori’s quintessential Scottish practicality; she likes women and that’s all there is to it—it’s not something to be explored. Ultimately, we don’t get too much insight into Lori and Maura’s relationship, but you do get the sense that these are two women that have struggled in life and have found solace in one another. There’s something about this I found really touching, even though it meant that Lori sometimes prioritized Maura over Niall. All of this—Lori’s gender, her privacy, her distance—shape Niall’s view of his own sexuality. Perhaps the most insightful scene comes in episode two, when Alby is encouraging Niall to come out to Ruben. He reminds him that their mothers are gay, which should make it easier. Niall responds with “It’s different with men, isn’t it? It’s more shameful”, which I think is one of the most interesting lines in the whole series. In episode six, Niall reminds Ruben that growing up he always used slurs to refer to gay men but said that “lesbians are cool”. Lori isn’t seen by Niall as less of a woman just because she’s gay. But to be a gay man, in his mind, is to be less manly. He sees it as shameful and embarrassing, and I think that’s all down to entrenched societal expectations of what a man should be like.
We also need to talk about Gus and Ruben. Gus represents internalized homophobia in a very straightforward sense—serving as a nice foreshadowing for Niall, who exhibits it in a more subtle way. Gus is constrained by the same societal pressures as Niall and every other boy at that age. He tries to assert his masculinity by putting other boys down and accusing them of being what he is: homosexual. Of course, he might not know he’s gay yet, but there’s clearly a conflict inside him that drives him to direct homophobic slurs at Niall. Like Niall, he probably connects sexuality to gender in his mind and strives to be “manly” so as not to feel abnormal. The specific way in which Gus bullies Niall at school is no accident. He doesn’t just call him names or beat him up. His behavior is explicitly sexual. He takes Niall’s trading cards, folds them around his penis, and masturbates into them. When you first watch this scene, you probably think it’s just there for shock value. But in retrospect, we see it as a twisted, subconscious expression of Gus’ own nascent homosexuality. It reminds me of a time I saw a gay journalist post screenshots of homophobic abuse sent to his account. A lot of the hateful messages seemed to be things along the lines of “I bet you enjoy getting bent over and rammed by a bunch of lads” and things like that. It struck me as interesting that these homophobes seemed to be fixated on sexual imagery. I felt that there had to be something in that. You didn’t see them focusing their abuse on other aspects of the gay experience, like “I bet you love a bit o’ musical theater, don’t you!” or “I bet you worship Judy Garland!”. No, they seemed laser-focused, almost exclusively, on the sexual aspect of being gay. I’m not sure why exactly homophobes seem so obsessed with sodomy, but I wonder if it comes from old notions that homosexuality is a kind of sexual perversion.
This link between homosexuality and deviancy is echoed by Ruben in episode three. At first, his legal strategy to claim that Alby groped him just seems like a purely cynical exploitation of the gay panic defense—a very real legal practice where punishment for assaulting or murdering someone is mitigated if the defendant can persuade the jury that the victim made a homosexual advance on them. But while this is undoubtedly true, and likely suggested to Ruben by his lawyer, it seems clear that there’s a deeper motivation behind Ruben’s actions. You’ll notice in episode three that the more they talk about it, the more Ruben starts to act as if Alby actually did grope him. It’s almost like he repeated the lie so much that he believes it. The reason for this, I think, is that Ruben associates homosexuality with pedophilia due to the abuse he suffered from his father. We know from episode six that this abuse warped Ruben’s ideas about gender and sexuality. Although horrifically traumatic, he describes it as being “the closest” he’s “ever been with someone”. It confuses him about what it means to be a father or a man or a heterosexual. And so when Ruben screams at Niall in episode three “Someone gropes you, they attack your fucking soul. Who you are as a man!”, you can tell that he’s speaking from experience. I got the sense, in that scene, that despite knowing that Alby is innocent, Ruben feels justified in falsely accusing him. In this way, Alby is a kind of stand-in for Ruben’s father, and would be seen as receiving the punishment that Ruben’s father never got.
I kind of wished that we explored Ruben’s homophobia more in the second half of the series. In some ways, I do like that they made Ruben so chill when Niall comes out to him, as it shifts the focus purely onto Niall’s internalized homophobia. On the other hand, I feel like they could have done more to connect the more tolerant Ruben of the present to the bigoted Ruben of the past. I like that Ruben accepts partial responsibility for Niall’s fear of coming out. He acknowledges that words have impact, but he kinda dismisses it as just him being immature. The problem is, Ruben didn’t just make a few insensitive jokes—he actually tried to play on entrenched homophobic biases to accuse an innocent person of groping him. That seems a little more significant than a few slurs or off-color remarks. I think the main reason this transformation is so jarring is that the show is strictly from Niall’s point of view and we don’t see much of Ruben’s journey. While watching the show, I thought that something was going to happen in prison that might change him. I wasn’t sure what, exactly, but prisons are interesting because their segregation on the basis of sex means that relationships between inmates are almost exclusively homosexual. I wondered whether Ruben might have a gay experience in prison. Even if he just observed other inmates engaging in same-sex relationships, that could still be something that changes him. This wasn’t the case, however, but it would have been a nice way to continue some of the things they set up in the early episodes.
For example, in episode one Ruben gets Niall in a chokehold, which then becomes an embrace, and they fall asleep in each other’s arms. This leads to Niall having a little trouser accident (I couldn’t tell if he ejaculated out of arousal or simply pissed himself out of fear). I initially thought that Ruben was potentially bisexual, but the hints we get in early episodes—as with the gay panic stuff—don’t get followed up on in the second half of the season. While we were watching the series, Robin was adamant that Ruben was gay. I still thought there was a chance they might explore his sexuality in episode five, when Niall follows him to Aberdeen. Ruben seems to be staying with a friend that we don’t see, and there’s something about him guiltily sneaking away from the house in his wifebeater that felt very gay to me. I thought we were going to get a revelation that he’s got a secret boyfriend or something like that, but that never happens. Instead, the show focuses on masculinity as its main theme. I did find it strange that they didn’t follow up on the seeds they planted on those early episodes about the dynamic between Niall and Ruben being possibly sexual in nature, but I enjoyed what they chose to explore nonetheless. After we finished watching it, I was like “I guess Ruben wasn’t gay after all”, but Robin insisted he was—so let me know in the comments if you agree with her.
The Tragedy of Niall Kennedy
I have to admit, I have mixed feelings about Half Man showing us so much of its ending. We know from the very beginning of the series that Ruben’s surprise appearance at Niall’s wedding is sinister in nature. We see Niall acquiesce as Ruben takes him to a nearby barn and beats the everloving piss out of him. But there’s so much mystery to keep us guessing; we want to know why Ruben is doing this and why Niall seems to be accepting it. And while these two questions aren’t spoiled prematurely, I wasn’t sure about whether I liked the reveal of the outcome—Ruben’s death—at the end of episode four. Part of me wanted the scene to be exactly the same, but cut short before Lori removes the white sheet on the stretcher. I can see why they did it, because we’re not expecting Ruben to die during this fight, and it sets up the later twist that Niall dies as well. So it bothers me less in retrospect than it did at the time.
But could Niall’s story have ended differently? Personally, I don’t think so. Half Man would be quite a different genre if it did. And that might be part of the reason why they showed us so much of the ending—to firmly establish the bleak, tragic tone of the series and discourage any expectations that this is a feel-good redemption story or a will-they-won’t-they romance. I don’t think it could have ended satisfyingly if Niall and Ruben had forgiven each other for everything. They’ve made up before, so another reconciliation wouldn’t have enough impact. Most viewers would assume that the cycle of estrangement and closeness would continue. I guess a more subtle ending could have Ruben go to the wedding with the intention of killing Niall, but finding himself unable to do so. Maybe he’d leave the country or go back to prison after assaulting him, and Niall would go on to live a peaceful life with Alby. But I don’t think that would be satisfying either. The specter of Ruben would always be there, and we the viewers wouldn’t really have any confidence that he’d truly stay away or that Niall would be able to truly let him go.
The other possibility, of course, is that Niall kills Ruben in self-defense and spends the rest of his days happily married to Alby. That works a bit better, because unlike the previous two scenarios, it definitively ends the cycle and establishes a new status quo. But it still doesn’t quite work, because it frames Ruben as a villain that’s standing in the way of Niall’s happiness. And that’s really not the case. The main obstacle to Niall’s happiness throughout his life has been himself. The crux of the narrative is the dynamic between the two stepbrothers; how they need each other and how they can’t seem to let each other go. It’s about the cost of this intimacy. And so any ending that “solves” the relationship thereby undermines its power. Ultimately, it’s not about Niall and Alby. Nor is it about Niall’s sexuality. It’s about Niall’s attachment to Ruben, in all its intensity and ambiguity.
Half Man is a tragedy in the classic Greek sense, in that Niall starts out as a noble character—but one with a fatal flaw. And this flaw (his attachment to Ruben) leads to his downfall. He lets this attachment ruin his life. But his real downfall isn’t about his external circumstances. Sure, he goes on to live a miserable life devoid of love and affection, and he never realizes his academic or artistic potential. That adds to it. But the real downfall is Niall’s moral decay. The sweet, good-natured boy we once knew grows into a man that’s selfish, prideful, bitter, and completely reckless. As a boy, he was a dedicated student, a caring person, and a cautious decision-maker. As an adult, he doesn’t seem to think things through. He lashes out at people and picks fights. He doesn’t take care of himself. He makes brash, impulsive choices that have really destructive consequences for other people. It’s really upsetting, as a viewer, because we remember what an adorable kid he once was. But this is all classic tragedian storytelling—an inherently good protagonist that loses their virtue, usually due to a fatal flaw like jealousy, pride, or obsession.
“One of the most lethal acts of self-harm you can commit is convincing yourself you’re worthy of a higher purpose”
– Lori Kennedy, episode four
Inevitability is another hallmark of tragedy as a genre, and I’d say that there is something that feels inescapable about Niall’s fate. Due to the early loss of his father, his social isolation at school, and the prevailing attitudes toward masculinity in working-class areas of Glasgow in the 1980s, Niall was already predisposed to latching on to someone like Ruben. And due to the unique, volatile way their relationship evolves, a violent confrontation was always a likely outcome. Niall describes Ruben as a “drug” that he can never get enough of. And it’s true—Niall can’t seem to let him go. He lets his feelings about Ruben dictate his entire life. He drops out of Oxford due to the complex mixture of guilt, fear, and resentment he feels toward Ruben in the wake of the latter’s first conviction. He even tries gay conversion therapy after the two reconcile, subconsciously trying to live up to what he imagines is Ruben’s standard of what a man should be. He can’t write successfully unless he draws upon Ruben for inspiration. He has a child with a woman he doesn’t truly love; borrowing Ruben’s dream rather than following his own. And he lets his desire to dominate and outcompete Ruben (by impregnating Mona) destroy his life. It’s brilliantly tragic that by the time Niall has found happiness with Alby and is finally living life on his own terms, that he’s already signed his death warrant. Ruben was going to find out that Niall was Baird’s father at some point I think. Obviously it was stupid of Niall to tell Ruben, but I interpreted this as a moment of delirious euphoria on Niall’s part. He feels so light and free at being able to communicate honestly with Ruben for the first time, that he gets “drunk” on this feeling; possessed by a desire to get literally everything off his chest. As for Ruben, I don’t know if there was ever a chance for him to do things differently. I think he does still love Niall, but the knowledge that he’s been cuckolded is a humiliation he can’t bear. It’s the final nail in the coffin for the hypermasculine identity he’s been constructing all his life. And the collapse of this identity is something he simply can’t deal with. He doesn’t know how he can go on—how he can make sense as a person—because he’s lived his whole life according to this framework. Even though Niall shanks him with the sgian-dubh (the traditional Scottish Highland knife belonging to his father), I don’t think Ruben was ever really leaving the barn regardless. He’s finished. I don’t think he had a plan for what he was going to do afterward, and I could see him committing suicide or something like that.
The Devastating Meaning Behind the Title
Since the show’s beginning, I’d been wondering why it was titled “Half Man”. I’d heard of “Two and a Half Men”, but this couldn’t possibly follow the same logic. In Two and a Half Men, the title has a very straightforward meaning: the show follows a household inhabited by two adults and one child. So the child is quite literally half a man, because he’s not fully grown yet.
In Half Man, the title is more abstract. But its true meaning is made devastatingly clear in the series finale, when Ruben confesses that he was sexually abused as a child. I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks that this is the show’s greatest scene; the writing is subtle and the performances are incredibly powerful. And narratively, this is the most explosive and significant moment in the whole story. Ruben, one of the most repressed characters in all fiction, has finally shed his armor and divulged his deepest insecurity. And he does so in a way that illustrates really well how abuse can warp someone’s sense of reality—especially the pliable mind of a child. He details how, when his father routinely and brutally raped him, his body would get aroused. And the fact that Ruben would sometimes cum during these encounters leaves a permanent mark on his psyche. It makes him feel somehow complicit. He feels broken and wrong, like he’s a “half man”. And this metaphor is interesting, because it reveals how masculinity—according to Ruben—is not an innate or fixed characteristic. It’s something that can be gained or depleted, something that has to be maintained or worked toward. Being raped by his father makes Ruben feel like less of a man; being the provider that his father wasn’t makes him feel like more of a man.
So, is the big twist of the show that Ruben is the “half man” after all? The truth is, they both are. Ruben’s confession that his abuse made him feel like less of a man helps to explain Niall’s behavior as well. It’s another stroke of irony in the show that Ruben, though less educated and well-read than Niall, appears to be the more articulate of the two brothers in adulthood. No doubt, Niall could articulate subjects about the world better than Ruben—topics disconnected from himself, like history, politics, or literature—but Ruben seems to have a better grasp of basic truth. He correctly diagnoses Niall’s internalized homophobia in episode six and tells him he won’t be happy until he can “march to the beat” of his own drum. This calls back to Niall’s remark in episode four: “I just can’t find the click that’s gonna make me happy”. The click, the show tells us, is finding the courage to live the way you want—and not the way society tells you to. Throughout the series, both stepbrothers feel like they’re not “man enough” and struggle with a profound sense of inadequacy. I think Ruben feels like a “whole man”, so to say, in isolated moments. When he does certain things that live up to the metrics of masculinity he’s internalized; having sex with beautiful women, beating up other men, earning money, owning nice things, and, interestingly, having people depend on him. I think he feels like a man in the adrenaline rush of these moments, but between them, when he’s alone with his thoughts, he feels the deep wound of what his father did to him—and he’s the “half man” again. As for Niall, I think the feeling is constant one way or the other. That is to say, I think he’s always felt like a “half man”, but this changes after he and Alby officially become a couple in episode six. Together, Alby and Ruben convince him to finally live life on his own terms. It’s unclear how much time passes between Niall’s confession about Baird’s parenthood and his wedding to Alby, but I believe that in this intervening period, he feels like a “whole man” for the first time in his life. The Niall we see in the wedding scenes is the Niall he was always meant to be—a Niall unburdened by external expectations. He’s whole. And of course, it’s the attainment of this long-awaited self-possession after having signed his own death warrant that makes the ending all the more tragic.
