Adolescence Review: Netflix Miniseries is Both Technically Thrilling and Emotionally Harrowing

Adolescence may be the most terrifying show you watch this year — and one of the most necessary.

While the Netflix miniseries might initially sound like a procedural you’ve seen before, its harrowing story of a teenage boy accused of stabbing a classmate to death is anything but traditional. 

A drama that’s unafraid to take big emotional and narrative swings, Adolescence wrestles with everything from toxic masculinity and male rage, to social media use, cyberbullying, and the failures of the modern-day school system. It’s complex, difficult, infuriating, and utterly riveting television.

Adolescence begins as a pair of police officers roll up to what appears to be an ordinary house. But what follows is anything but ordinary. 

The police break down the door and march upstairs, yelling at the home’s various residents to get on the ground or put their hands up, before seizing and arresting a thirteen-year-old boy named Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper).

As his parents protest this treatment of their child, Jamie is taken to the station. Then we follow along with him in the cop car. What could he possibly have done to merit this kind of reaction? It’s unclear.

But by the end of the first episode, both the audience and Jamie’s desperate family—father Eddie (Stephen Graham), mother Manda (Christine Tremarco), and sister Lise (Amelie Pease)–learn the details of the accusations against him.

The cops believe he has stabbed a female classmate to death. While Jamie insists he’s innocent, the evidence they have is pretty damning. 

What helps set Adolescence apart from other crime shows of its ilk is that it’s not just a crime drama, but a four-part story told across a series of connected moments.

Each episode unfolds in a single unbroken shot, with the camera following the action without pause—around corners, through windows, down hallways, and into visiting rooms.

The first episode depicts Jamie’s arrest and booking, rapidly switching perspectives between the investigating officers, the Miller family, and the public defender assigned to the case.

But rather than follow the immediate aftermath of these events, each subsequent hour explores the fallout of the crime he is accused of committing.

The second installment follows DI Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and DS Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) into Jamie’s school to interview his friends and teachers, collecting information about the accused, his dead classmate, Kate, and the world the two of them shared.

The third shifts gears entirely, chronicling a tense evaluation session between Jamie and a psychologist named Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty), and the final hour returns us to the Miller family as they try to celebrate Eddie’s birthday while weighed down by tragedy.

By all rights, such a directorial choice should feel gimmicky — a try-hard method of grabbing attention in an overcrowded entertainment landscape. Instead, the move adds a sense of real-time immediacy and almost unbearable tension to the story, as the audience is dragged relentlessly through events and never given the chance to look away.

The series’ cast is impeccable throughout. Nothing about this show works without the incredibly talented Cooper at its center, who pulls off the sort of mesmerizing debut performance that should land him whatever role he wants for the foreseeable future.

His nuanced turn as Jamie walks a fine line between heartbreak and menace, from his tears as he’s searched and booked at the police station to his hair-trigger temper when asked uncomfortable questions during his session with Briony. 

It’s the sort of performance that’s so good that you’ll likely leave the series a bit confused about whether you’re meant to pity Jamie or be afraid of him, and it seems likely that’s on purpose.

Graham, who’s also a co-creator and writer of the show alongside Jack Thorne, is as good as he’s ever been as Jamie’s father Eddie.

It’s an emotional and layered performance. He’s one part working-class provider, one part loving father, one part middle-aged man with his own complicated relationship to masculinity and the ways it’s taught him to show affection to his son.

To be fair, Adolescence isn’t all that interested in the crime Jamie may or may not have committed—or even his fate, which is left fairly ambiguous at the end of the show. Instead, it’s much more concerned with the radicalization of young men like him, including the deep loneliness and casual misogyny that seems to fuel much of their actions.

The series is too brief to address such topics much beyond the surface level—the show name-drops Andrew Tate without much context—but it confronts these questions most directly in its third episode. In it, Jamie, now at a juvenile detention facility, is evaluated by a psychologist as to his understanding of the charges against him and his ideas of right and wrong.

What follows is a powerhouse of a two-hander between Cooper and Doherty, an intricate, horrifying back and forth in which Jamie bares his soul and his teeth by turns. 

Confessing to his own fears of inadequacy and ugliness even as he casually demeans the young women in his social circle and cites incel statistics about male oppression, it’s a horrifying sequence that perfectly encapsulates the messy, can’t-look-away nature of the show writ large. 

Some will likely find Adolescence’s lack of focus on Jamie’s alleged victim disturbing. After all, the show itself lampshades the fact that, in cases like this, it’s the killer whose name is remembered and not that of the person whose life they took. 

It’s a fair criticism, particularly since Jamie and his classmates make some fairly uncomfortable accusations and comments about the sort of person Katie was that she’s simply not around to refute. 

But it’s also hard to imagine a way that this show—as focused as it is on toxic masculinity and the pressures and challenges specifically facing teen boys — would have been able to tell a worthwhile story about the presumably very different experience of life as a modern teenage girl. 

Adolescence is not an easy watch and, as such, doesn’t offer any easy answers to the many problems it highlights. Instead, it’s more like a primal scream in the dark — and it will stay with you well after the final credits roll.

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Adolescence is now streaming on Netflix. 

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