If at around 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday, you heard a sound that you might describe as “a goat being castrated” and wondered, “What the hell is that?” then I owe you an apology. I had just finished the last scene of Adolescence and was so overcome by a tsunami of sadness that my vocal chords transformed into a foghorn and I involuntarily let out a sob that sounded like the Aflac duck quacking with a sinus flu.
The final moment of the hit Netflix series Adolescence—I won’t spoil it here, but if you see me in person, immediately set aside 90 minutes to 4 hours for us to sit and talk about it—is a rare, earned emotional unleashing. I’d call it breathtaking, but apparently I had enough breath to let out my honking wail. The series had so powerfully portrayed the humanity behind a tragic story, especially the way one event impacts how people operate on a second-by-second basis, that the last scene of the series was fantastically both an epic hurricane of catharsis and also positively mundane.
We’re all buzzing about the incest vibes of The White Lotus and still coming down from our Gabby Windey and Dylan Efron crushes from the last season of The Traitors, so we haven’t been parched at the water cooler when it comes to shows we’re all collectively obsessed with. But it’s rare for a true drama series to punctuate the zeitgeist in the way that Adolescence has in the last week. The best, and probably most accurate, comparison is Baby Reindeer last year.
The four-episode series, if you haven’t surmised from my histrionic rambling about crying, is a dark one. It is about a 13-year-old boy named Jamie who is charged with the murder-by-stabbing of a female classmate. After the premiere about the arrest and questioning of Jamie, subsequent episodes follow detectives attempting to find answers about his motive at his school, a psychologist trying to understand his red-pilled mindset, and his family dealing with life wearing a Scarlet Letter as the kin of an accused killer.
It’s been the Number 1 show on Netflix’s most watched list all week. We live in an age where streaming services burp and fart out their own, publicity-minded metrics about viewership of their projects. That said, it’s an interesting tidbit that Adolescence’s Netflix-reported 24.3 million views in its first four days of availability was only just shy of that for the Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt-led orgy of CGI nonsense that is the critically panned action movie The Electric State, which had 25.2 million views.
The Electric State cost $320 million to make and received so many rotten tomatoes that it could jar marinara sauces from now until 2030. Adolescence, produced for a fraction of that budget, has received the kind of reviews that happen only once a year in TV—and audiences immediately turned out for it, even without any huge stars in the cast. It turns out that people really just want to watch things that are good.
There’s no visual effects the likes of The Electric State to be found in Adolescence, but there is some impressive cinematic wizardry. Each episode, which all fall just shy of an hour, was filmed in what’s called a “one shot,” as in the camera never cuts—it follows the action and the actors in one continuous take.
One shots are cool because they take a wild amount of finesse and technological prowess to pull off, but also because when a viewer realizes what’s happening, that the jumps and angles and cuts we’re conditioned to see on screen aren’t occurring, they’re blown away—and, because of that, drawn in.
Some people may have been clued into this about Adolescence before watching and some may have discovered what was happening while streaming the show. Either experience elicits the same reaction of wonder: How did they do that? Whoa, this car scene has been happening in real time! I can’t believe the actors could do this all without mistakes! This is incredible.
The thing about Adolescence is that it’s not a gimmick. The whole one shot flair is both astonishing and necessary, and it’s rare to get to say that about peacocking filmmaking tricks.
In order for the story to work, for the performances to resonate, and for the emotion to really, truly burrow into you, Adolescence needed to immerse you in this world. Everyone in the show is receiving information on the fly and reacting to it in course; because of the way it was filmed, so too are we. We’re gathering information, confused about innocence or guilt, wrecked about what certain revelations mean, and scrambling to make emotional sense of it all—just like the characters in the show. I’ve never had an experience like that watching. It was exhilarating—hence my guttural reaction to its conclusion.
It’s a treat to get to whole-heartedly endorse a TV show. And I’ve even left out the best part—you can binge the whole thing in less than four hours. Who has time these days? If you haven’t yet, watch Adolescence, and then let’s chat about it. I’ll know where to find you; I’ll hear the foghorn sob when you’re done.
