TV looks very boring right now. There are some exceptions—series like Severance, Euphoria, and Industry that have a discernible visual aesthetic shaped by directors and cinematographers with good instincts—but aside from these, there are very few shows that make the case for themselves as anything other than plot delivery systems. That’s why I perk up when I encounter a show that could better be described as a “formal exercise,” something that does a little more than simply pointing the camera at people talking and cutting around the excess.
Each hour-long episode of Adolescence, the new limited drama series from Netflix about a young boy accused of murdering a classmate, is shot entirely in one take, following in real time as the teens and adults involved in sussing out the crime uncover deeper, more uncomfortable truths about how modern society drives people toward violence. The harrowing result demands your attention in exactly the way that disposable “second-screen entertainment” has all but abandoned.
The show’s four episodes take place at a different point during the aftermath of the crime: one follows the entire process by which young suspect Jamie (Owen Cooper) is arrested and detained in a Yorkshire police station, while another follows the two detectives assigned to the case (Ashley Walters and Faye Marsay) as they interview various students at the local school, peeling off at times to peek at conversations between teachers, students, and parents on the sidelines of the event.
The camera observes everything like an invisible character (or a ghost) stepping in close to people’s faces as they fight through unfathomable emotions or floating down the maze of hallways inside a detention center and then zooming away, somehow, for an aerial view of the whole town.
It’s a technique that demands to be appreciated. How did they get that camera through that cracked window? How has no one flubbed a single line? It’s also easy to discount as the viewer sinks into the narrative, forgetting, perhaps, that these are essentially actors reciting a play in four acts.
Where conventional camerawork that relies on lots of takes and cuts at a frenetic pace can lure a viewer into a bored half-hypnosis, Adolescence’s extreme long takes do the complete opposite, urging attention to every detail. Actors are allowed to pause to take breaths, to stumble over dialogue in naturalistic ways, to let microexpressions flicker across their faces while the camera moves around them unblinking.
Stephen Graham, prominent in two episodes, plays Jamie’s father Eddie, appalled by the accusations leveled against his son that cause him to doubt his capabilities as a parent. His moments of silence, in which he is forced to reckon with the ramifications of what’s happened, are some of the best and most devastating acting I’ve seen in a long time.
That realism helps in the moments where the show gets candid about its messaging, yet never in a cloying way. Adolescence, is, in essence, a story about the ways in which the systems of society, managed halfheartedly by the adults who maintain them, are wholly unequipped to handle the young generations that have been brought up on a constant drip of internet, and the cruel, predatory ways in which it’s weaponized by their peers.
Bullying is subtler, appearing as social media comments full of coded emojis instead of physical fights on playgrounds, unrecognizable to anyone past the age of 28. Small inadequacies are compounded into impassable hurdles in the minds of children who are just learning about sex and attraction and the complex ways the genders interact, ripe for indoctrination into the worst corners of online “self-help.”
A conversation between a student and his father about the “manosphere” reads as both silly and terrifying, exposing the widening gulf between the social web of the youth and the bewildered adults who are supposed to protect them. There’s a thickening sense of doom that blankets the show, suggesting that what’s done can never be undone, and some problems have no solutions at all.
