Owen Cooper, right, stars as Jamie Miller in Adolescence on Netflix. The show tells the story of how a family’s world is turned upside down when Miller is arrested for the murder of a teenage girl who goes to his school.Netflix
There’s a lot of talk out there lately about how the quality of streaming television is diminishing.
Netflix, in particular, has been singled out for setting its sights a little lower than it used to do – at “gourmet cheeseburgers” as one of its executive put it.
But Adolescence, a new four-parter that drops in full on March 13, shows the world’s biggest streaming service is still taking big swings in the miniseries space at least. It’s still making television – art, if we can use that word – you’d never have seen in the prestreaming days.
In the tradition of Fleabag and Baby Reindeer, here comes another boundary-pushing British show with a major theatre creator behind it, one that’s going to have global impact – at awards time and on any viewer who has sticks with its gripping episodes, each recorded in a single uninterrupted shot.
Adolescence, the title’s the only thing a bit off, is about being a boy today, about a crisis in masculinity that’s linked to social media instigators and digital loneliness and increasing online sex segregation.
It’s also simply about one particular 13-year-old boy name Jamie (Owen Cooper) who is accused of stabbing a girl from his school to death.
The initial episode begins with Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) arriving at Jamie’s home with dozens of other armed police officers to take the teen into custody. This takes place in front of Jamie’s father, a plumber named Eddie (Stephen Graham), his mother, Manda (Christine Tremarco) and sister, Lisa (Amelie Pease), all shocked.
What looks almost like a military operation is all to arrest a scrawny young man – who, after peeing himself in fear, is given a moment of privacy with his father to clean himself up and put on clean clothes.
The high-stakes drama is most visible in the dual terror on the face of father Eddie: What are the police doing to his son, and did his little boy actually do something to deserve this?
There’s fascination to be found next in the details of Jamie’s journey to jail – a long, mostly silent ride to the police station, the assignation of an “appropriate adult” to advocate for him, the required invasive strip search, again, seen primarily through the eyes of his father.
Finally, the camera takes the viewer to the place and the moment we’re most familiar with from TV shows about murder – the interrogation room.
But this scene doesn’t play out like we’ve seen so many times before. The cops don’t have to trick or trap Jamie; they have evidence and present it to him and his father.
The reaction of Eddie again is where the story is best told. Graham, one of Britain’s greatest working-class actors (and advocates for working-class actors), channels all the complex emotions of his character in the moment in his face and big, burly body – the fatherly instinct to protect and support, the recoil of shame and horror, the trauma of what he witnesses. It’s extraordinary acting and left me stunned and staring at the credits until they finished.
Erin Doherty appears as Briony Ariston in a scene from Adolescence.Ben Blackall/Netflix
In the second episode, Bascombe heads to Jamie’s school to conduct interviews with his classmates; the investigation isn’t over yet. From the focus on the family, we move to the impact of the murder and its root causes in wider society. We see the unruly classrooms, the temporary teachers, the bullying, the phones everywhere all the time.
Bascombe has to turn to his own son, Adam, to decipher emojis on an Instagram post that may hold a clue to motive; this father and son illustrate how hard it is to communicate across generations when they literally don’t even speak the same language.
After a student pulls the fire alarm, a tremendous peice of small-screen choreography ensues involving hundreds of extras. The director, Philip Barantini, knows what he’s doing; he previously worked with Graham on the 2021 one-shot film Boiling Point.
The one-shot style is visually engaging but also connects Adolescence to television drama’s original roots in the theatre and live broadcasts of plays and teleplays.
It’s no surprise the script is co-written by a very good playwright – Jack Thorne, who previously delved into fathers and sons and wrestled with questions of masculinity in his Tony-winning play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. (Co-star Graham is his co-writer.)
Adolescence is not a whodunnit; it’s not even much of a whydunnit. Thorne and Graham refuse to oversimplify the situation.
What mystery there is in the intense psychological drama – which has huge emotional impact – is where it will move to next
In the third episode, there’s a performance by Erin Doherty, who played young Princess Anne in The Crown, that is another brilliantly layered piece of acting – a performance on top of a performance. I don’t even want to spoil what her role is.
The final episode then begins in such an unlikely place to wrap things up that I paused to double check that the series was only four episodes. But it ended up feeling like the only right place to end Jamie’s story.
One-shot can go wrong, coming off as static or show-off.
In Adolescence, however, the form underlines a theme of the story – that we all have one path through our lives with no chance to edit our journeys. An outburst of anger can change your life, end a life, alter a whole town.
For parents, the terrifying truth is that you can only do your best in raising your children. You’ve got one shot – and your best may not be enough.
