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CHRISTOPHER STEVENS
What’s most frightening is how plausible it seems.
When 13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested in his bedroom and charged with murder, in the opening scene of Adolescence, it’s obvious what police expect to find.
They’re looking for a knife. Knife crime among Britain’s teens, a rare and shocking occurrence just 25 years ago, has become endemic.
When Damilola Taylor, aged 10, was stabbed to death at a south London block of flats in 2000, the national reaction was one of disbelief. His name still resonates.
But the awful truth is that, though every violent death is just as tragic, few young knife victims today are as well known.
There are so many of them.
Netflix’s Adolescence review: One-shot Stephen Graham thriller is gruelling to watch but the teen cast’s stellar performances and unrelenting tension send a powerful message about knife crime
Young actor Owen Cooper plays Jamie Miller in the hit series
In a grimly cynical prelude to Jamie’s arrest, we see how commonplace the crime has become for police.
The two detectives at the centre of the drama, DI Bascombe and DS Frank (Ashley Walters and Faye Marsay) are checking their phones and bickering, as though the fatal stabbing of a schoolchild is just part of an ordinary day’s work.
But that’s the only moment of levity in the opening hour of this four-part drama.
After armed police smash down the Miller family’s front door and force Jamie’s parents and sister to the floor at gunpoint, the tension is unrelenting.
We see the boy weeping and shaking as he’s held in a cell, searched and interrogated.
Stephen Graham, who created and wrote the show with Jack Thorne, plays Jamie’s father Eddie – determined to believe in his son’s innocence until confronted with CCTV footage that appears to show the boy stabbing a girl to death in a car park.
The emotional impact is heightened by virtuoso camerawork that records each episode in a single, flowing sequence.
There are no cuts or breaks – we zigzag between characters, following them in and out of rooms, as their paths cross.
It’s a dizzying technique, which adds to the sense of disorientation shared with Eddie and his wife Manda (Christine Tremarco), who have no idea at first what’s going on or what their child is supposed to have done.
Kaine Davies (pictured left) as Ryan Kowalsky, Ashley Walters (right) as Detective Inspector Bascombe
The second episode, set in Jamie’s school as Bascombe and Frank quiz pupils to uncover a motive for the killing, is even more technically brilliant – a sort of television tag, where the focus is passed from police to children to teachers and back to police without a slip.
It’s effectively a live performance without retakes.
This sometimes gives the production a theatrical air, as if the action is taking place on a revolving stage. But the effect is always impressive and never distracting.
The strong supporting cast includes Mark Stanley as a solicitor well out of his depth, but the most exceptional performances come from the teenagers – especially Owen Cooper as Jamie and Fatima Bojang as the dead girl’s bereaved best friend.
Adolescence paints our schools, police and an entire generation in a grimly unforgiving light. Watching it is a gruelling experience.
But no drama has ever depicted the nightmare of knife crime better.
Stephen Graham as Eddie Miller with his wife Manda Miller (played by Christine Tremarco)
DEBORAH ROSS
I’ve been in this game a while and have watched telly since forever.
I can remember Watch With Mother, the national anthem at the end of the day’s play, everyone stopping for The Forsyte Saga.
But I can’t recall the last time I was as blown away as I was by the one-take drama Adolescence.
It’s no one’s idea of a super fun time – it’s about a 13-year-old boy accused of murder – and it is shattering, but once I had finished all four episodes I went back and started watching again, just to see how they’d done it. That’s unheard of.
I’m strictly an in-and -out person, as a rule. I would have been up for watching it a third time but then I remembered: I do have a life.
It is written by Jack Thorne (most recently, Toxic Town) and Stephen Graham, who also stars.
The idea came from Graham, who read a newspaper report about a teenager stabbing another teenager at a bus stop and, as such incidents aren’t uncommon, he wondered why it happened.
It is directed by Philip Barantini, who also directed Boiling Point (the film and subsequent TV series) in one continuous take with no edits.
This technique puts you right in the middle of the action and is technologically fraught. I don’t have the space to relate what this meant logistically, but I do recommend you read about it elsewhere.
It opens with two police officers (Ashley Walters, Faye Marsay) in a stationary car chewing the fat. It’s easy-going and naturalistic, but moments later the adrenalin kicks in as they lead a team that has been dispatched to the Miller household to arrest young Jamie (Owen Cooper).
Here, the door is battered down and it’s chaos as the police charge in shouting: ‘Get on the floor!’ The family reel with shock, horror, disbelief, confusion.
Eddie (Graham), the father, a plumber, keeps repeating: ‘You’ve made a mistake.’ And: ‘You’ve got the wrong lad.’
The new show has been written by Stephen Graham alongside Jack Thorne – and the actor also stars in the show
The show had us in tears with its gut-wrenching acting – but we couldn’t help but keep watching episode after episode
Could Jamie, a sweet-looking boy with dark, tousled hair, have done it, whatever it is? (We don’t properly know for a while.)
This, by the way, is the sole action sequence, yet it’s so urgent and kinetic it makes the set- pieces from, say, Line Of Duty, seem underwhelming.
I should also add that while we expect nothing less than excellence from Graham – he can convey pain while boiling a kettle – Cooper is extraordinary. Child actors can be ropey but we’re in safe hands here.
We follow a weeping, terrified Jamie as he travels, in real time, to the police station in the police van. As he’s booked in at the desk it feels as authentic and true as any episode of 24 Hours In Police Custody.
He is met by glimmers of kindness – ‘Have you had breakfast? Do you like corn flakes?’ – but also humiliation. (Oh God, the strip search.)
The show was inspired by Channel 4’s 24 Hours In Police Custody
The cast manage to avoid stereotypes, while remaining relatable with their characterisation
Eddie is appointed his appropriate adult and asks the questions you would ask. If you don’t have a solicitor, and the police provide one, does that mean the solicitor isn’t any good? I have always worried about that.
The first episode is set mostly within the police station as the police eventually present their evidence. You have to wait, just as the family does.
The second episode involves the two detectives visiting Jamie’s school, the third is a two-hander between Jamie and a child psychologist (Erin Doherty) that could be a self-contained play in itself.
The fourth, which is the most devastating, brings us back to the family. Each episode is one take and picks up the narrative further down the line.
At no point does this deal in what I call ‘direct arrow psychology’. Eddie is not a deadbeat dad.
Christine Tremarco, I forgot to say, is superb as the mother, and this mother is not a depressed alcoholic or anything like that. It’s not simplistic.
It allows many factors to come into play, including social media and the ‘manosphere’. Andrew Tate is mentioned but that aspect is not overplayed.
There has been criticism along the lines that the victim, Katie, who was stabbed seven times, barely features. I get that. Look how long it’s taken for me to mention her.
But surely it’s important sometimes to ask why, like Graham did, which necessarily puts the focus elsewhere.
I don’t think I could bear to watch it a third time, actually. And I do have a life, whatever anyone says.
KATE FLETT
News and documentaries regularly moisten my eyes, but it is so rare for me to cry while watching TV dramas that I can’t recall when it last happened.
An exception is Netflix’s Adolescence, each of the four hour-long episodes of which unfolds in one continuous shot.
This labour-intensive production process creates intimate, claustrophobic, never-less-than-gripping TV; a hyper-real version of Real Life.
Yet, it’s the combination of authentically economic dialogue (Copper: ‘Can you explain what “being under arrest” means?’ Kid: ‘It means being here’) and the intensity of the actors’ performances that delivers continuous solar plexus sucker-punches.
Everybody involved brings their A-game: Ashley Walters is phenomenal as DI Luke Bascombe, and Stephen Graham (also co-writer/producer) and Christine Tremarco as Eddie and Manda – the parents of 13-year-old Jamie Miller, accused of murder – are faultless too.
But Adolescence belongs to young Owen Cooper as Jamie (left). If you’re a parent, he’ll break your heart; if you’re not, be grateful.
Episode one’s final five minutes feature some of the most exceptional small-screen acting I have ever seen.
All episodes of Adolescence are available to stream on Netflix now.
