“Nightmarish” and “immersive” can feel like overused words when describing the experience of watching a TV drama. But they are adjectives that do not fully encapsulate what it feels like to follow the Miller family in Netflix’s four-parter Adolescence. From the opening minutes, when the door to their unassuming detached home is broken open by armed police, who storm in and arrest 13-year-old Jamie on suspicion of murder, to the devastating ending, this is jaw-dropping TV.
Written by Jack Thorne and the actor Stephen Graham (who plays the father, Eddie), each episode is shot by the director Philip Barantini in a single take (he deployed a similar technique in the kitchen-set film — and subsequent TV series — Boiling Point, also starring Graham). It is an approach that means he can fill the screen with what feels like every conceivable register of emotional experience without let-up.
We feel the terror of Eddie, mom Manda (Christine Tremarco) and teenage daughter Lisa almost as if in real time but no one is as petrified as young Jamie, played with astonishing skill by Owen Cooper (who was 14 when the drama was filmed). We learn that he has wet himself as he is taken away to the police station for questioning about the crime which, we gradually discover, involves the death of a girl who was stabbed with a kitchen knife the previous night.
Like the worst clammy nightmare, there is little relief in the terrifying sequences, filmed in Yorkshire but set in an unspecified northern town, that convey the full horror of such an experience alongside the almost mundane minutiae of what an arrest entails — the fleet of police cars and vans heading to the station before the routine business of taking swabs, organizing a solicitor and an appropriate adult. It also shows that while this is without question the worst day the Millers will experience, to the officers it is nothing special.
“Hate juvenile cases, me,” the duty nurse, who has been brought in at an ungodly hour to assess the boy and take his blood samples, says with a sigh. “No one likes ’em,” the custody sergeant replies. The lead detective, Ashley Walters’s DI Luke Bascombe, spends much of the time munching on apples, his substitute for cigarettes, which he is discomfited to discover make him burp a lot. Bascombe shows Jamie and his family routine kindness.
No spoilers on how the story unfolds but a telling detail comes midway through episode one when Jamie, on the advice of his solicitor and Eddie, declines to give the password to his phone. As most parents of teenagers will tell you, these annoying devices now play a rather important role in the lives of adolescents as the key to their private and social lives, and they are objects that (I speak from experience) they guard tenaciously.
It seems clear that, once unlocked, Jamie’s phone will hold the key to the case, in a story that involves bullying, inappropriate messages, taunting and the malign influence of the incel community, that cohort of self-proclaimed involuntary celibates who engage in misogynist discourse within the so-called “manosphere”. The controversial social media personality Andrew Tate is mentioned in episode two — the same Andrew Tate whose podcast was searched for by Kyle Clifford the night before he murdered three members of the Hunt family last summer.
Since Adolescence dropped on March 13 it has been hailed as one of the best and most socially urgent shows of the year, garnering near universal praise and five-star reviews. It works as a gripping human drama in a heavily localized setting but also a socially conscious one of the kind we haven’t always come to expect from a US streaming behemoth such as Netflix.
While Jamie’s family are convinced that a terrible mistake has been made, it becomes apparent towards the end of episode one that the police have compelling evidence against the boy. And as with Jamie’s unlocked phone, this highlights the enormous difference between the family’s apparently sweet young lad and what he seems to have become. The credits open with Jamie’s awkward face, smiling a shy, crooked grin in his school uniform, a grim foreshadowing of the moment when his mugshot is taken in the police station. But it is emblematic of the disconnect between the image parents can have of their children’s lives and the reality of what they are getting up to in the segregated world of teenage online discourse.
“There were certain incidents that really stuck out where young boys — and they are young boys, they’re not men, their brains aren’t fully formed yet, hence the title — were killing young girls,” Graham told the audience at a recent Netflix showcase. “One day it just really hit my heart. I just thought, what’s happening? Why is this the case? What’s going on with our society as a whole, as a collective?”
It is telling that early in the investigation the police mutter suspicions about Eddie, wondering what he is like and whether he may have exerted a nefarious influence on his son, but as Graham suggested ahead of the drama’s broadcast, it is a blind alley. “Without being disrespectful, when these things are on the news [and you have] a couple of kids from council estates, you blame the family. We blame the mum and dad. We’re all guilty of it.”
The key to the drama lies in the one-upmanship of the social media world, the ready availability of sexually explicit material and the fact that young people with developing brains are being exposed to a slew of material that would be unthinkable to anyone brought up before the Noughties. Jamie is someone saturated with rage and helplessness. How we have reached this pass is a question Thorne and his co-writer were keen to address.
As Graham has said: “When we were kids, if Kenny Everett was on the telly and it got a bit racy, you’d be sent to your room and then you couldn’t watch it. But today, even within the context of that home, when lads and girls go to their bedrooms they have the world at their fingertips.”
It is a particularly emotional subject for Thorne. He was diagnosed with autism in 2022 and has spoken in interviews about how he spent his solitary-sounding childhood staying up late, obsessively reading and being “the kid who didn’t fit”. He can barely contemplate the places he might have gone to had his younger self lived in a world of smartphones. It has certainly intensified his anxiety for his own son, Elliot (named after the sweet hero of the film E.T.), who is now eight.
Thorne said he and Graham explored the manosphere while making the show and that “as soon as we opened that box, it made sense of everything … the show is not an anti-Andrew Tate thing. The videos the kids are watching are a lot darker than Andrew Tate, and the people giving out their advice are a lot more dangerous than he is. It’s terrifying. I’ve got an eight-year-old kid and it made me want to put him in a box and keep him there for the next ten years.”
Once you reach the end of this drama, you might want to sit by yourself for a few moments but you will know exactly what he means. Immersive? Nightmarish? Sure. For some parents it might be the most frightening thing they have ever watched.
Adolescence is streaming on Netflix
Ben Dowell is a U.K.-based journalist who covers the arts and media
