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‘Baby Reindeer’ Creator’s New 6-Part HBO Max Series Is Quietly Taking Over Streaming

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When Richard Gadd‘s Netflix thriller Baby Reindeer first debuted on Netflix in 2024, no one could have expected the phenomenon it would become. In fact, even after its first week, many still couldn’t have predicted its success, with the show earning a 49% viewership surge in its second week as the world continued to talk about it. The show broke into the Top 10 most-viewed English TV series of all time, earning roughly 90 million views in just 90 days. It’s safe to say that Baby Reindeer is one of the biggest breakout hits on Netflix ever.

Gadd, who wrote and starred in the series based on his own tragic experience, also became a breakout star thanks to Baby Reindeer‘s success, with many waiting patiently to see what he could conjure up next. That next project, Half Man, was picked up by HBO instead of Netflix, and already seems like a smart acquisition that aligns neatly with the streamer’s recent move to the UK and Ireland. The series follows two half-brothers, Niall (Jamie Bell) and Ruben (Gadd), as an explosion of present-day violence transports us back through the most pivotal moments in their lives.

Baby Reindeer was a tough act to follow, and Half Man might not quite live up to its predecessor. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, this new series has earned a respectable 76% from critics, falling far short of the near-perfect 99% earned by Baby Reindeer. In a review by Collider’s Therese Lacson, she dubbed the series “masterfully tense,” adding that “the themes of obsession, guilt, addiction, and a desperate search for peace in a life full of chaos have become Gadd’s calling card.”

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Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz
Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In?
The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs

Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.

🚨The Pitt

🏥ER

💉Grey’s

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🔬House

🩺Scrubs

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01

A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct?
Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.





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02

Why did you go into medicine in the first place?
The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.





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03

What do you actually want from the people you work with?
Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.





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04

You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it?
Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.





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05

How would your colleagues describe the way you work?
Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.





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06

How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure?
Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.





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07

What does this job cost you personally?
Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?





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08

At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back?
The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.





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Your Assignment Has Been Made
You Belong In…

Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.

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Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center

The Pitt

You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.

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  • You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
  • You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
  • You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
  • Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.


County General Hospital, Chicago

ER

You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.

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  • You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
  • You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
  • You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
  • ER is television about endurance. You have it.


Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle

Grey’s Anatomy

You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.

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  • You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
  • Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
  • You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
  • It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.


Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ

House

You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.

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  • You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
  • You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
  • Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
  • The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.


Sacred Heart Hospital, California

Scrubs

You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.

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  • You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
  • You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
  • You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
  • Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.

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‘Half Man’ Is a Global Hit on HBO Max

Richard Gadd and Jamie Bell in Half Man
Image via HBO

At the time of writing, Half Man is the fourth most-watched show on HBO Max in the world, scoring top ten spots across the globe from Brazil and Italy to Switzerland and the U.S. Just three shows are currently proving more popular on the streamer, including the third-placed smash-hit medical drama The Pitt, which won five Primetime Emmy Awards for its opening season. Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage is keeping the world laughing in second place, with the controversial third season of Euphoria topping the global charts.

Half Man is streaming now on HBO Max. Make sure to stay tuned to Collider for more streaming stories.


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Release Date

2026 – 2026-00-00

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Network

BBC One

Directors
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Alexandra Brodski, Eshref Reybrouck

Writers

Richard Gadd

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