For anyone who's seen Boiling Point — Philip Barantini's one-shot kitchen drama starring Stephen Graham — Adolescence is surely high on the to-watch list.
Co-created by Graham himself alongside frequent collaborator Jack Thorne, and directed by Barantini, the four-part Netflix drama/thriller takes Boiling Point's one-take format and multiplies it across four settings, following the shattered lives of a family whose 13-year-old son is accused of murdering a classmate.
Like Boiling Point, it's tense and hard to watch. But it's also stunningly acted, incredibly well written, and impossible to look away from.
What's Adolescence about?
The show establishes its highly stressful tone early on with a dawn raid. Police batter down the door of the Miller family and march inside with guns drawn, ignoring the shock and confusion of dad Eddie (Graham), mum Manda (Christine Tremarco), and older sister Lisa (Amelie Pease) and going straight to the room of teenager Jamie (Owen Cooper). It quickly becomes apparent that he's under arrest for murder, and that DI Bascome (Top Boy's Ashley Walters) and DS Frank (Andor's Faye Marsay) have a strong case.
What follows is an unbroken hour at the local police station, where the camera roves between small-talking officers, wary solicitors, and the devastated Miller family as they huddle in a sterile waiting room and try to piece together what their son — who maintains his innocence — has been accused of.
It's TV at its most anxiety-inducing, somehow made even more intense by the unrelenting one-shot format. Like the Millers we're not given the luxury of cut-aways — we have to experience the entire chaotic ordeal alongside them in real time. The subsequent episodes (each of which is its own one-shot) jump forward by days and then months, giving us an insight into the aftermath, first at Jamie's school, then during a therapy session, and then finally coming back full circle to the Millers as they attempt to rebuild their lives.
Adolescence's one-shot format is a directing masterpiece.
Making a miniseries where each episode is shot in one take sounds more like a technical exercise than something that'll benefit the viewer. But the thing is, it does. Barantini's ambitious directorial format works perfectly for this tense show, and the change in locations between episodes keeps things fresh. The police station and school settings of the first two episodes are a chaos of sound and movement, an assault on the senses that mirrors what the characters are feeling. The third episode — which essentially just features Jamie and a psychologist (A Thousand Blows' Erin Doherty) — bubbles with the tension of a play. And the finale follows the Millers through a birthday, where they try to make the best of it despite everything. Here, the camera refuses to look away as the characters alternate between anger, sadness, and brief moments of happiness.
Calling Adolescence a TV show feels like it isn't doing it justice. It's somewhere between TV, film, and theatre, almost a new type of viewing experience altogether. The performances are crucial here, and fortunately everyone — from veterans like Graham and Walters to newcomers Cooper and Pease — does an outstanding job. The realism is constant, comprehensive, and painful.
Does Adolescence have any weaknesses?
The subject matter at the heart of the show is difficult, and the story is so relentlessly miserable that it won't be for everyone. As two characters discuss directly in one episode, the focus is also very much on the accused rather than the victim, who is little more than a name in the show. But Adolescence's story isn't a crime mystery so much as a psychological study — it's an exploration of the manosphere culture that's having a real world affect on teenagers, and the societal and familial triggers that might lead to a seemingly ordinary 13-year-old doing something unthinkable.
On this level, and on almost all others, the show is chillingly effective.
