Adolescence is four hours you won't shake off

Adolescence opens with armed police smashing through a family’s front door at dawn to arrest a thirteen-year-old boy for murder. The camera follows them in, follows the boy to the station, follows his father into the interview room, and does not cut. Not once in the hour. Every episode of the series is a single continuous take.

It would be easy to call that a gimmick. It isn’t. The unbroken camera means there’s no escape for you either: no cutaway to catch your breath, no music telling you what to feel. You’re in the room while it happens, in real time, and you can’t leave.

Four rooms

Each episode is one place and one moment: the arrest, the school, a session with a psychologist, the family months later. Stephen Graham co-created the series with Jack Thorne and plays the father, Eddie, a decent man slowly realising he doesn’t know his own son. Philip Barantini directs all four episodes, and the craft is extraordinary.

But the reason people talk about Adolescence is Owen Cooper as Jamie. It was his first screen role, and the third episode, an hour of Jamie alone with a psychologist played by Erin Doherty, is as tense and frightening as anything in a horror film. It’s just two people talking.

What it’s about

The show is less interested in whether Jamie did it than in how a boy ends up there: the phones, the online world adults can’t see into, the schools that can’t keep up. It doesn’t lecture. It just shows you, and lets you do the worrying.

Worth it?

Four episodes, about an hour each, on Netflix. If you have Netflix, watch it. It isn’t comfortable, and it isn’t meant to be, but it’s the kind of television people will still be talking about in years.