How do you solve the problem of today? That’s the question that therapists often pose to people experiencing the wide range of life’s traumas. Don’t relitigate the past, don’t attempt to fix the future, try and solve the problem of today. It’s a mantra that crops up in Netflix’s Adolescence, a four-part drama looking at the fallout from an unthinkable crime, and the many todays that must be solved, over and over, as a consequence.
It’s 6am on an apparently normal morning. Normal, that is, until armed police, led by DI Bascombe (Ashley Walters) storm into a family home and arrest a 13-year-old boy, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper). His parents, Eddie and Manda (played by Stephen Graham and Christine Tremarco), watch on in horror as their little boy is dragged to the local police station, processed and placed in a cell. Jamie is suspected of murdering a schoolmate, and alongside Eddie, as his appropriate adult, and a solicitor, must face the evidence that the police have compiled against him. It is a nightmarish frenzy, transporting the Miller family from their pocket of suburban calm to the fear, recrimination and revelations of a murder inquiry.
It is a stunning opening. Each of the show’s four episodes is filmed in one continuous take, a technique mastered by its star Graham (who co-created this project with extremely busy scribe Jack Thorne) and director Philip Barantini on the 2021 film Boiling Point. In real-time, we watch the Miller family from the moment the police enter their home, to the terrible presentation, less than an hour later, of the authorities’ smoking gun against Jamie. The confusion and tension are palpable, as is a sense of sorrow. “I hate juvenile cases,” a duty nurse says, after testing Jamie’s understanding of his situation. “No one likes them,” the desk sergeant replies. And yet, everyone does their job methodically, the camera swimming around the station to capture the minutiae of Jamie’s terminal arrival in the justice system.
That is day one. The other three episodes are spread across the next year and a half, as the investigation progresses. Bascombe and his deputy DS Frank (Faye Marsay) visit the victim’s school; Jamie is assessed in prison by psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty); and, finally, Jamie’s plea comes through on Eddie’s 50th birthday. None of these episodes beg the one-shot technique in the same way that the first does. Indeed, they sometimes feel stifled by it, because the criminal justice system is a glacial thing, and rarely operates in kinetic hour-long slots. This makes the series feel lop-sided: a virtuoso first episode that catches you clean in the gut, followed by three episodes that feel more instructional. After all, the first hour of Jamie’s incarceration is a natural starting point, but what does the creative decision to focus on day three, or months seven or thirteen, tell us about the story?
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Graham and Thorne seem to want to place the accusations against Jamie into context, both familial and social. Words like “incel”, “manosphere”, and “red pill” are rapidly deployed (“Andrew Tate shite,” comes DS Frank’s judgment). At home, his parents deal with their guilt; a guilt focused far more on their son than his victim. “He was in his room, wasn’t he?” Eddie despairs. “We thought he was safe.” It is a challenging but miserable premise, one in which no one is spared their share of the blame. Violent misogyny being fomented in Britain’s schools, families blind to their kids’ internet activities, parents handing down destructive traits. We are all part of the problem that leads to Jamies, and leads to children dead from knife wounds in bleak, empty car parks.
Cooper’s performance as the accused is very able, nimbly shifting the audience’s sympathies for Jamie. The two-handed episode that he shares with Doherty is troubling yet compelling, and the acting throughout the series (Graham is, once again, likely the standout) is a masterclass (and that’s putting aside the self-imposed constraints of the one-shot technique). The episodes themselves are more of a mixed bag: investigations at a school feel too much like a bog-standard police procedural meets Grange Hill, while the show’s resolution feels calculated towards despair. It is a fine line when creating a show that fictionalises the real experiences faced by real families, between empathy inducement and misery porn. And for Adolescence, that line becomes blurry at times.
Yet there is no doubting the intensity of that first episode. It is television in its purest distillation: unflinching, pulse-quickening. It caters both to our morbid fascination with crimes at the exotic extremes, and the sense of unravelling a moral knot. The fact that the rest of the series can’t quite match those heights is both a problem and a testament to the impact of that opener. Never less than well-made, Adolescence sustains a rawness that makes it a tough but compulsive watch.
