‘Pure, unyielding torture pornography’: is Half Man too unpleasant to be good TV?

Richard Gadd’s follow-up to Baby Reindeer is a relentlessly punishing look at characters being crushed by the unending horror of their lives. At times, it feels like it was made by emo teens

If you look up Baby Reindeer on Netflix, you’ll find it categorised as a comedy series. This may come as news to anyone who has actually seen it, because they might have been labouring under the delusion that it was a terror-filled rolling panic attack of a show, sitting somewhere between psychological thriller and all-out horror.

But the initial labelling makes some level of sense. Richard Gadd was a comedian and Baby Reindeer was based on his Edinburgh show of the same name. Plus, what could be cuter than a baby reindeer? It would be very simple to infer some level of comedy from the description.