Half Man Asks What Straight Men Are Really Afraid Of

Richard Gadd’s follow-up to Baby Reindeer just arrived on HBO, and it’s doing something most prestige TV won’t touch: holding up a mirror to the homophobia baked into straight male culture itself.

Half Man follows two men—the violent, chaotic Ruben and the closeted, gentle Niall—over decades after their mothers fall in love and turn them into reluctant“brothers.”But this isn’t a love story between them. It’s something messier and far more unsettling: a chronicle of how desire, shame, violence, and twisted intimacy become inseparable in the lives of men who refuse to examine what they actually want. The show’s third episode, which aired Thursday night, hinges on a moment that crystallizes everything: Ruben’s lawyer tells him that in 1993 Britain,“the only thing a jury hates more than a thug is a fag”—a line that cuts to the heart of what Half Man is really exploring.

The“gay panic defense”that gets deployed in the episode is a real legal strategy that still exists around the world, even though it’s based on thoroughly debunked 1920s psychology. The Matthew Shepard murder in Laramie, Wyoming in 1998 brought national attention to it, and since then significant work has been done to ban it. Yet per the LGBTQ+ Bar Association, the defense has still been raised at least 15 times in the past decade in murder cases involving LGBTQ+ victims. What’s chilling about Half Man’s treatment of it isn’t just that the defense exists—it’s that the show uses it to expose how much queerness sits at the center of straight male culture, whether those men acknowledge it or not.

If Heated Rivalry, the runaway hit hockey drama, kicks off what New York magazine called a“mass psychosis event”of women watching two men fall for each other, Half Man asks the uncomfortable question: what’s making men so desperate to avoid looking at their own desires? The show doesn’t treat the closet as a backdrop or an established condition the way Heated Rivalry does. Instead, Half Man meticulously shows how it gets built—brick by brick, shame by shame, violent touch by violent touch. Every scene of brutality between the brothers carries an undertone of something neither can name, and the show refuses to let us look away from it.

What lingers most is a line spoken not by either main character, but by Joanna, Niall’s classmate, in Thursday’s episode. When asked why she’s abandoned a teaching career despite studying it, she says:“I’ll end up teaching people like me, and part of me needs to break that cycle. You know, for the sake of humanity.”In a show about how trauma and shame get passed from one generation of men to the next, that’s the most radical statement of all—the recognition that someone has to choose not to replicate the violence they’ve inherited. Half Man suggests that choice is terrifyingly rare.