Adolescence, a four-episode Netflix drama about Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), a bright 13-year-old boy from a normal everyday family, getting arrested for murder, might sound like regular-thriller hokum from the streaming giant — but like the series’ premise, looks can be deceiving.

The nearly four-hour-long show is a study of agony, but it is not agony for agony’s sake; fakeness, cliched turns of story and weepy melodrama are kept far away by a heart-palpitating sense of worry — that this could all be as real as real can be. It is a story — rather an account, like a report one sees on the news, just more intimate — of a family’s turmoil, whose existence is violently yanked out of whatever measure of normalcy they know.

Creators/writers Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (the latter also acting as Jamie’s father, Eddie), along with director Philip Barantini and cinematographer Matthew Lewis weave complex human emotions between technical, artistic and managerial brilliance. Yes, managerial, because every episode is designed as a complex single continuous shot that is filmed without creative cop-outs.

Let me elaborate: doing long continuous takes (called “oners” — spoken as “one-er”) demands meticulous planning and a second-by-second precision from the cast, the production team and even the extras. A slip of a line, a stumble on reactions, a delay in the actors’ sorting and shifting of emotions, and one has to redo the take from the start.

Netflix’s mini-series Adolescence transcends the barricades of intellectuality and craft and makes for the greatest work on TV in decades

To make it more manageable, sections are divided, hidden by creative cuts. See the making of Sam Mendes’ 1917 and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 murder mystery Rope — the first film in history to tackle the oner with seamless perfection.

In Adolescence’s case, it is the best advertisement of DJI’s Ronin 4D camera system, and the closest relative would have been Alexander Sokurov 96-minute long Russian Ark from 2002, which was filmed in a single take, in a single day. That film had 2,000 extras — but don’t count out the number of people working behind and in front of the scenes in this show. Especially when one sees episode four.

The show’s uniqueness doesn’t stop at a peculiar point. Every episode features a different aspect of a linearly moving story. In the first episode, Jamie is apprehended by the police. In the second, set three days later, the police look for answers at the school. The third happens seven months later, and is nearly entirely set in a room where Jamie talks with an evaluator. And the fourth shifts to Jamie’s family, 13 months later.

There are no smart split-screens in the process, showing different people and different locations. We see what the camera sees, as witnesses to the events that are transpiring in real-time, and their unexpected but familiar revelations of the real-world issues, we see but ignore: peer pressure, social media bullying, teen fragility, fatherhood, one’s personal shortcomings, the freedom parents give and the lack of strict parenting in today’s society.

Then more layers are added: misogyny, the importance of staying together as a family, and accepting our own inexperience and lack of education about this rapidly changing world — a dilemma every middle-aged man or woman faces since time immemorial.

Adolescence accepts and transcends the barricades of intellectuality and craft, and instead focuses on the gut-wrenching simplicity of the ordeal, and how all it hits home and still makes for the greatest work on TV in decades.

Backed by brilliant, award-worthy performances by Stephen Graham, Owen Cooper, Ashley Walters, Erin Doherty, Faye Marsay, Christine Tremarco and Mark Stanley amongst others, Adolescence is rated suitable for ages 16 and over. The show is a benchmark-maker in every way

Published in Dawn, ICON, March 30, 2025