There's a moment in Adolescence when a father, barefoot and bewildered, watches his son being dragged out of their home by the police. The sun is barely up. The kettle hasn't even touched boiling point. He doesn't know it yet, but his life has already split into two - before the knock on the door, and after.
The scene unfolds in real-time, without cuts, without reprieve; and as the camera snakes through the wreckage of an ordinary morning turned extraordinary, you realise: this isn't just a crime drama.
It's a dismantling of everything we think we know about boyhood, masculinity; and the quiet, unnoticed shifts that can turn a child into something unrecognisable.
Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, Adolescence is a four-episode Netflix miniseries that takes the bones of a familiar premise - a teenage boy accused of murder - and builds something hauntingly original.
Jack Thorne, known for his social-realist dramas, and director Philip Barantini, whose Boiling Point used a similar one-take structure, craft a show that refuses to hold the audience at arm's length.
Each episode plays out in a single, uninterrupted shot, trapping us inside the moments that define the lives of its characters. There are no flashbacks, no omniscient narrator to contextualise events, no easy release from the suffocating tension. We are simply there; watching, witnessing.
The story follows Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), a 13-year-old boy arrested for the fatal stabbing of his schoolmate. His father, Eddie (Stephen Graham), is blindsided by the accusations, instinctively pleading his son's innocence.
But Adolescence is not interested in a whodunnit. It is not even particularly concerned with whether Jamie is guilty or not. Instead, it probes deeper, asking why a boy like Jamie - intelligent, confident, seemingly ordinary - might end up in a situation like this. What forces shape a child before he even understands what's shaping him? And when does society's failure to intervene become indistinguishable from complicity?
Owen is a revelation as Jamie; his performance oscillating between defiance, confusion and something more elusive - something that lingers just out of reach, making him impossible to pin down.
Erin Doherty, as the psychologist tasked with understanding him, delivers a performance so precise it feels surgical. Their extended exchange in Episode 3 - one of the most unsettling and masterfully acted scenes in recent television - unpacks the subtle, insidious ways in which anger is repackaged as power, how resentment can calcify into something irreversible.
Stephen Graham, as always, is remarkable. His character Eddie is a man grappling with the slow, agonising realisation that he does not truly know his son.
His face carries the weight of grief not yet fully formed; his body language a study in helplessness. Ashley Walters, playing the detective leading the case, brings a quiet intensity that balances the raw emotion flooding the series.
But the true brilliance of Adolescence lies in its construction. Barantini's direction turns the one-take format into more than just a stylistic choice - it becomes an emotional weapon.
Without cuts, there is no escape. We are locked into the same spaces as the characters, feeling their dread, their confusion, their desperation. The camera moves like an unseen presence, restless and unblinking, forcing us to sit with every moment in its full, unvarnished reality.
This is not a show that offers comfort. It does not indulge in grand monologues about the dangers of the Internet or the rise of toxic subcultures, nor does it deliver easy moral resolutions.
Instead, it leaves viewers in a state of unease, forcing us to acknowledge that the world is uneasy. That boys like Jamie exist. That their radicalisation does not happen in some shadowy corner of the Internet but right in front of us, often unnoticed, often ignored, until it is too late.
Few series in recent memory have felt as urgent, as necessary, or as profoundly affecting as Adolescence. It is a brutal, breathtaking masterclass in storytelling - both a technical marvel and a searing social commentary.
By the time the final frame lingers a moment too long before fading to black, you are left with a sinking realisation: there are no simple answers, only difficult questions... much like the phase of adolescence in human lives. Perhaps that is exactly the point of Adolescence.
-
Owen Cooper, Stephen Graham, Ashley Walters
