Richard Gadd

A man is given every chance to end something and takes none of them. In Baby Reindeer (2024) Donny Dunn gives a crying woman a free cup of tea and is still serving her seven episodes later. In Half Man (2026) Niall and Ruben stay loyal to each other through behaviour that ought to finish the friendship several times over. Gadd writes the moment of leaving and then writes the man not leaving, and he wants to know why. It is the only question he has asked on television so far, and it is a good one.

He arrived at it through stand-up. He was doing autobiographical dark comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe from 2010, and Monkey See Monkey Do (2016), a one-man show about sexual assault and masculinity, made his name. Baby Reindeer was a one-man show too, at the 2019 Fringe, before it transferred to London and became the series he created, wrote and led. Along the way he wrote an episode of Sex Education, in a writers' room whose tone, rude and precise and never cruel to the person with the problem, held steady across him and everyone else; it is the one time he has worked to somebody else's plan. Francesca Moody has produced him twice.

What he does well is turn the candour inward. Baby Reindeer is harder on Donny than on Martha, and Jessica Gunning's Martha is the best thing in it because Gadd wrote her a whole person rather than a threat. The fourth episode leaves her behind to show how Donny reached that bar, filmed without music and without any mercy towards himself, and we watched most of it rigid and slightly sick. Nothing else he has written is as controlled. "I'm not Donny Dunn," he has said, and the series works because he plays Donny as a character, stoop and apologetic grin included, rather than as a plea.

What he does less well is stop talking. The monologue is still under the series: Donny's voiceover tells us what Gadd's face has already shown, and by the third episode we resented it. In Half Man the habit has got worse. Ben McKinstrie's editing moves between periods of Niall and Ruben's relationship, which should let us revise our sympathies, and the script uses each opening to explain the men's damage after their conduct has made it plain. The violence repeats without relief. Jamie Bell and Gadd keep the two men from settling into a category, and the writing leans on them harder than it should.

Gadd is a stranger performer than his co-stars and a more uneven one, and both series are strongest when he hands the weight to Gunning or Bell and lets it sit. Whatever he writes next would do well to have less of him explaining in it.