What to stream this week: Richard Gadd’s punishing new show, plus five more picks

This week’s picks include the tough follow up to Baby Reindeer, a menacing Brit thriller set in a sect, Mark Wahlberg’s alleged new comedy and a US comedy with an Australian star.

Half Man ★★½ (Stan*)

Richard Gadd, whose 2024 Netflix series Baby Reindeer was a wrenching, unforgettable debut, pushes his grasp of trauma, violence, and self-deceit beyond its limit in this punishing follow-up. Freed from autobiographical parameters, Gadd has written a show that straddles the line between unrelenting and repetitive.

This new six-part series covers the corrosive brotherly bond between the closeted Niall Kennedy (Jamie Bell) and the swaggering Ruben Pallister (Gadd, layered in muscle). Told over 30 years, the story captures their painful back and forth, but both men deprive the viewer of self-illumination.

Savagery is the punctuation here. A stand-off in private between the two at a middle-aged Niall’s wedding, which Ruben crashes, ends with a punch serving as the cut to a classroom blow in late 1980s Glasgow, where a teenage Niall (Mitchell Robertson) is being bullied. When he gets home, the nervy boy discovers a domineering new roommate just released from juvenile detention, Ruben (Stuart Campbell). Niall is both fearful and entranced. Ruben has a volcanic temper, but he’s also a crutch for Niall.

“Toxic masculinity” is a phrase Half Man will attract, but Gadd wants to peer beneath any labels. While the historical detail is cursory, the show serves as a period piece in depicting how Niall’s nascent sexuality is a secret he’s desperate to keep.

With an echo of Douglas Stuart’s acclaimed novels, Niall struggles with the repercussions of his actions, living in terror of Ruben finding out. Homophobia is normalised in 20th-century Glasgow, and a telling point that Gadd makes is that even when it isn’t, Niall – a struggling author – still acts like it is.

Gadd gives a charismatic, chaos-laden performance. His Ruben doesn’t breathe, he simmers. But it’s locked in to Gadd’s physicality, and deprived of insight until the ritualistic close. It’s Niall who is the barometer, and Bell captures not only his self-evasion and panic, but slowly spins the perspective so that Niall nettles Ruben, and even secretly damages him. Both actors deliver what their roles require, but the narrative of Niall’s dynamic with Ruben repeatedly reaching a horrifying breaking point becomes a kind of unavoidable ritual.

Gadd can end an episode with a terrific twist, and he has an unnerving way with long, intimate set-pieces, starting in that shared teenage bedroom. But there’s barely a shred of Baby Reindeer’s blackly consolatory comedy here, and the narrative takes too long to find an outside voice that can navigate both Niall and Ruben. Its focus on the pair is exhaustively tight – Niall’s interior life as a writer is rarely felt. Half Man seeks understanding through extremes, but that can also leave you desensitised to this demanding show.

Unchosen ★★★ (Netflix)

The menacing framework of this British thriller is the Fellowship of the Divine, a deeply conservative Christian sect based in a rural English community where the men work in the wicked world and women stay home with the children. Landlines are permitted, but mobile phones are banned. They’re all in plain sight, waiting for the Rapture, but it comes early for one young wife, Rosie (Molly Windsor), when a rugged outsider, Sam (Fra Fee), saves her daughter from drowning. Her response to his dripping wet body is both ecstatic and aroused.

Unchosen’s creator, Julie Gearey (Intergalactic), examines this cloistered, rule-bound world from multiple angles, but once Sam, who has his own secrets to hide, enters the community, desire, ambition and deception come to the fore. Not only is Rosie tested, but also her husband, Adam (Asa Butterfield), the ambitious son of the Fellowship’s current head, Mr Phillips (Christopher Eccleston), and his enforcer wife, Mrs Phillips (Siobhan Finneran).

Without forsaking the observations on dogmatic control, these brisk episodes are willing to get a little frisky. The narrative moves quickly, sometimes stretching the plot’s plausibility, but Windsor is a worthy anchor as a young woman reappraising everything she believes about the wider world and her possible place in it. The show knows that whatever machinations it presents, they’re balanced by a timely depiction of faith as a form of control.

Balls Up ★½ (Amazon Prime Video)

This alleged comedy has all the structural and performance elements required to create humour, but is stunningly unfunny. You may experience a bemused snort or two, that’s it. Mark Wahlberg and Paul Walter Hauser play a pair of American marketing dudes whose big scheme at a football World Cup hosted in Brazil goes so badly that the locals literally try to murder them. There’s Something About Mary’s Pete Farelly, a long way from his enjoyably low-brow 1990s collaborations with his brother Bobby, directs, while Sacha Baron Cohen turns up. It doesn’t help.

Ludwig ★★★★ (Binge and BritBox)

If you haven’t caught it yet, this subterfuge procedural is a terrific take on the British murder-of-the-week genre. David Mitchell plays John Taylor, an introverted puzzle-maker who is forced to leave the house when his identical twin brother, Cambridge police detective James, goes missing. James’ wife, Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin), persuades the ill-suited John to impersonate James, so he can retrieve crucial information, but that means John gets assigned murder investigations. The great twist: John’s puzzling skills and logical outlook make him a terrific detective. A thriller, wry comedy and clever murder mystery all in one.

St Denis Medical ★★★½ (7Plus)

If, like me, you’re not particularly sold on the Scrubs revival, then get your hospital hallways humour from the two seasons of this American medical sitcom, which packs a tidy allocation of goofy gags and a tinge of melancholy into the 22-minute mockumentary format.

Wendi McLendon-Covey is the nominal lead, playing Joyce Henderson, the perpetually hopeful administrator of an underfunded Oregon emergency room. But there’s a suitably diverse ensemble cast of misfits pitching in to do their collective best here, including Australian Josh Lawson as an egocentric trauma surgeon. Similarities to The Pitt? Very few.

Untold: Chess Mates ★★★½ (Netflix)

There has been a spate of chess documentaries recently, but this is the only one where anal beads (possibly) play a crucial role. Told with a raised eyebrow, the latest edition of the Untold sporting docs series recounts the 2022 scandal where then world champion Magnus Carlsen accused brash hopeful Hans Niemann of cheating in their tournament match, a controversy fuelled by theories that Niemann used a vibrating sex toy to prompt his successful moves. There’s no definitive answer, but this is an amusing study of elite competitors, complete with idiosyncratic supporting cast.

*Stan is owned by Nine, which also owns this masthead.

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