‘Half Man’ Ends With a Devastating Twist — and Baby Reindeer Creator Richard Gadd Says It Could Only Have Gone One Way

Daniel Park — Fri, 29 May 2026 05:14:01 +0000

Half Man, the HBO limited series from Baby Reindeer creator and star Richard Gadd, ended Thursday with a finale that revealed the show’s central mystery: what happened between Ruben (Gadd) and his stepbrother Niall (Jamie Bell) in the locked barn at Niall’s wedding — it turned out there were two bodies
Gadd, who wrote the project in 2019 before Baby Reindeer, told Variety the ending was “ambiguous” but “felt like the right way to end a show like this” — and told Slate there was only one way it could have concluded
Critical response to the finale was mixed: TV Insider and Time praised the devastating payoff, while TVLine called it a “sour note” and TV Fanatic found the series “exhausting” — a step down from the universal acclaim Baby Reindeer received
The six-episode series co-stars Jamie Bell; it premiered on HBO and streams on HBO Max

Spoilers below for the Half Man series finale.

Richard Gadd’s second act on HBO ended Thursday — and it went to a dark place, even by his standards. Half Man, the limited series Gadd wrote, created, and stars in (following the same model as his Emmy-winning Baby Reindeer), wrapped its six-episode run with a finale that revealed what actually happened between stepbrothers Ruben and Niall in the locked barn at Niall’s wedding. The show had kept that mystery at the center of its structure from the beginning; the finale answered it with what Slate called “a staggering scene of brutality and a twist.” There were two bodies in the barn, per Variety.

Gadd told Variety the finale was intentionally “ambiguous” but said it “felt like the right way to end a show like this.” He told Slate that there was, essentially, only one way it could have concluded — that the emotional and structural logic of the show pointed to this ending from early on. Gadd began writing Half Man in 2019, years before Baby Reindeer became a cultural phenomenon, making it a project he’d been carrying for a long time before HBO greenlit it, per Time.

A More Divided Reception Than Baby Reindeer

Where Baby Reindeer earned near-unanimous critical praise and six Emmys, Half Man has generated more friction. TV Fanatic’s reviewer admitted getting lost between episodes one and three. TVLine called the finale a “sour note” for a drama that had been consistently dour throughout. TV Insider’s exclusive conversation with Gadd characterized the ending as devastating and earned; Time called it “brutal” and affecting. The split reflects a show that was never going to be as widely embraced as its predecessor — it was always more difficult, more elliptical, more demanding, per TV Insider.

The post ‘Half Man’ Ends With a Devastating Twist — and Baby Reindeer Creator Richard Gadd Says It Could Only Have Gone One Way appeared first on Cream.

‘Hacks’ Ends After 5 Seasons With a Finale That Was Planned From the Beginning — Here’s How It All Wrapped Up

Hannah Reyes — Fri, 29 May 2026 03:09:36 +0000

Hacks ended its five-season run on May 28 with a series finale on HBO that critics called a worthy conclusion to one of television’s most acclaimed comedies — the Emmy-winning show starred Jean Smart as Deborah Vance and Hannah Einbinder as Ava Daniels
The finale opens with Deborah revealing her cancer has spread and that she plans to end her life at an assisted-suicide facility in Europe, bringing Ava along for the journey — the episode delivers a major fakeout that co-creators say was always the intended ending
Co-creators Lucia Aniello, Jen Statsky, and Paul W. Downs told Collider they had the ending planned from the very beginning of the show, which premiered in 2021: “We always knew this was the ending”
The finale drew widespread critical praise, with Vulture, Time, and the A.V. Club all calling it a fitting close to the show’s legacy-and-comedy-obsessed run

Spoilers below for the Hacks series finale.

Hacks is over — and it went out on its own terms. The series finale of the HBO comedy aired May 28, ending the five-season story of Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) with the kind of precision that suggests co-creators Lucia Aniello, Jen Statsky, and Paul W. Downs knew exactly where they were going the whole time. It turns out they did. “We always knew this was the ending,” they told Collider in a post-finale interview, per Collider.

The episode begins with Deborah telling Ava that her cancer — a lumpectomy that hadn’t been fully successful — has spread. Rather than pursue treatment, Deborah reveals she wants to travel to a European assisted-suicide facility, and she wants Ava with her. The setup plays as a genuine gut-punch for most of the episode’s running time. Then comes the fakeout: Deborah was never going to go through with it. The creators describe it as the ultimate dark joke from a character who has spent five seasons teaching Ava — and the audience — that comedy lives in the gap between what you expect and what actually happens, per E! News.

How It All Ends

The finale is built on callbacks and full-circle moments. The episode opens with a one-shot of Ava walking through her new comedy pilot, mirroring the show’s own origin. Deborah’s cancer plot traces back to a detail introduced in Season 1 — a risk associated with her Tahitian grapefruit-flavored progesterone packets — giving the finale a sense of long-laid groundwork finally paying off. Every major character gets a resolution, with the show landing on what Time called “the perfect dark joke” — bittersweet but earned, per Time. Critics at Vulture and the A.V. Club called it a series finale that honored what Hacks had always been about: the cost of legacy, the comedy of survival, and the strange, combative love between two women at very different points in their lives, per Vulture.

The post ‘Hacks’ Ends After 5 Seasons With a Finale That Was Planned From the Beginning — Here’s How It All Wrapped Up appeared first on Cream.

TV finales News - Cream

‘Half Man’ Ends With a Devastating Twist — and Baby Reindeer Creator Richard Gadd Says It Could Only Have Gone One Way

A More Divided Reception Than Baby Reindeer

‘Hacks’ Ends After 5 Seasons With a Finale That Was Planned From the Beginning — Here’s How It All Wrapped Up

How It All Ends