We watched this Netflix drama with some friends the other day. Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, and directed by Philip Barantini, it came out just last month, and has already made headlines around the world.

It's the story of a 13-year-old boy who kills a female school-mate. That's no spoiler. The puzzle throughout this four-part drama is not WHO committed the crime (it's clear by the end of the first episode), but WHY he did it.

The idea was driven by a spate of British knife crimes involving teenage males attacking teenage females.

It's a powerful story, whose impact is amplified by the way it was shot. Each episode (of an hour or so) is filmed in a single take. It's hard to believe -- it's all done so seamlessly -- but it's true: "There was no stitching of takes together," says cinematographer Matthew Lewis, "It was one shot in its entirety, whether I wanted it to be or not."

It's brilliantly effective. You're just sucked into the action, sitting tense in your seat. We'd decided to watch all four episodes back to back, and though we took five-minute breaks, just to stand up -- and to breathe... -- we were all ready to get straight back into the next round.


This is where I spent my adolescence. At the time, of course, I fretted and chafed, but looking back I can see how lucky I was

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The first episode gives us the arrest. It's shocking. Seems like total overkill. There's lots of evidence, it turns out, and I guess there are protocols for these things. But you see all that bash-the-door-down stuff, with the police brandishing weapons and yelling, and then you see a frightened kid, cowering in the corner of his bedroom... Arrested on suspicion of murder? Surely not? But here we are. Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) is being arrested. His distraught parents, Eddie (again Stephen Graham) and Manda (Christine Tremarco), are caught between horror at the smashing up of their house, and incredulity: It's a mistake, says Eddie. You see it all the time on TV. It'll be sorted. Jamie is taken to the police station for questioning. Eddie is permitted to be his "appropriate adult".

I was struck by the language. So British. So modern British. People didn't talk like that when I lived there. Do x "for me"... "I need you to" do x. "I'm going to do x -- is that OK?" Just "pop" your clothes back on... There's a sort of infantilizing, for-the-surveillance-cameras artificiality about it. It's supposed to be respect, but I'm not sure it is. It's more an assertion of nannyish power. I guess it's better than the harsh alternatives...

Then we see the school. Episode two. My God, we think. Is this what it's really like now? The school is a hell-hole. How much does anyone actually learn here, asks DI Bascombe, the doing-his-best policeman whose son is a pupil there...

DS Frank, the other cop in the lead pair, is reassuring. She's the product of a school like this, she says. There'll be good teachers here, and good students. Just one good teacher, or the discovery of just one talent -- that can be enough to save you. Once a kid finds something s/he can do well, the world looks different... But Jamie, it seems, got neither of those breaks.

We also see plenty of little bits of sexism in the school environment. Some of it is unintended (eg, the teacher who is showing the cops around introduces the man by name but not the woman). The unintended, though, as we know, adds to an already skewed edifice just as efficiently as the intended. And some of it is just plain pernicious: Male students give female teachers lip with seeming impunity; when a female student attacks a male student, he is doubly dumped on by his male cohort -- for being knocked down, and for being knocked down by a girl...

The school episode is also where we start to learn about the internet culture that young teenagers have come to be familiar with. It's DI Bascombe's son who initiates him, desperate to stop him "blundering around, not getting it".

The early teen years have never been easy for anyone. Any number of fine novels attest to that. Physical change is happening, whether you like it or not; insecurity becomes a way of life; you don't know what to do with your evolving body, or the changing expectations around you. It's an awkward, awkward stage, and always has been. But it's only comparatively recent generations that have had to go through all that in the echo-chamber of the internet. Stupidities go viral, and live with you for ever; counter-moves take on a life of their own; and there's always some malevolent prick out there waiting to take advantage of all your insecurities, and feed you venom.

We end on a note of hope, however. DI Bascombe has been reminded that he is letting his boy drift, and it's time to open up some lines of communication (I'd definitely make friends with this young man, who is a connoisseur of the town's chip purveyors).



The third episode. Mostly this is a one-on-one between Jamie and Briony, a female psychologist (Erin Doherty). Throughout, the series is brilliantly acted, but Cooper, as Jamie, really comes into his own here. His face moves from relaxed (as he chats away like any other smart-arse kid), to fixed and serious (as he explains the online world of the "manosphere"), and then to manipulative, and onwards to raging. Cantrell and Hopkins put this last transformation very well: "While Jamie is, for the most part, an outwardly 'normal' and well-adjusted teen, his explosive rage and aggrieved entitlement is revealed in a climactic scene in episode three, when he intimidates and shouts down a female psychologist... 'You do not control what I do!' he yells. 'Get that in that fucking little head of yours!'" You can feel how this boy has been scripted from afar. This is not really Jamie talking. It's the hate-filled, misogynistic voices from the internet.

This episode also fills in more of the detail of his past, so that while we shrink from him, we also pity him. The kid thinks he's ugly. Where did that idea come from? Well, from the people who are all too happy to anonymously assure a self-doubting boy that he's part of the 80 per cent of males that women will never love, and that his best bet is to resort to stratagems -- exploiting, for example, the humiliations of girls. This episode shows us a scary kid, not a scared kid, but we also see a youngster who is desperate for attention, desperate for the psychologist to tell him she likes him.

The fourth episode takes us on a real roller-coaster of emotion. Mum, dad, and sister Lisa (Amelie Pease) are trying to celebrate Eddie's 50th birthday as though they're any other family. But Eddie is enraged when he discovers his van has been graffitied (and, in one of the details that the series is so good at, the insulting word is mis-spelled). They try to, in mum's words, get the day back, and there's a great scene in the van where the parents recall the fun of their courtship. Different days, when Eddie could make a fool of himself, and Manda could cherish the scene as an endearing private memory, as opposed to having his idiocy broadcast to an anonymous audience that's all too willing to disgrace and demean... But the trip to the hardware store is wrecked by a conversation with a shop assistant who seems to think Jamie's action was quite justified, and a violent encounter with the kids who did Eddie's van over. Eddie flings the paint he has bought on his van, verbally aggresses the security guard, and drives home, the two women huddled silently alongside him.

On the way home, there's a phonecall from Jamie, who has decided, finally, to plead guilty. We're not sure quite why he has refused all this time to acknowledge what he has done. Thorne suggests that, initially, "Jamie knows what he’s done, he’s terrified, and he hasn’t computed how final it was... He’s looking for his dad to tell him, 'You’re safe and I love you.' And his dad can never give him that ever again."

I wondered, though, how positive a sign it was that Jamie is accepting responsibility by the end. After hearing that conversation with the guy at the hardware store, we can't help suspecting that perhaps Jamie is out to become a martyr. Maybe not. He did sound chastened.

That question, like so many others, is left open, but his decision refocuses the whole business for the family. Maybe they still had vague hopes of a different outcome, and are now confronted with the irrevocable. There's a heartbreaking scene between the parents, in which they wonder where they went wrong. And the end of the last episode is gut-wrenching: Eddie, in his missing son's room, desperately sorry, tucking in the teddy-bear who's the symbol of a tragically lost innocence.



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Jack Thorne writes: "Two and a half years ago, Stephen Graham phoned me up to ask if I was interested in writing a show about knife crime. He wanted to talk about young male violence towards women and he had two stipulations: he wanted to do it in a series of single shots, and he didn’t want to blame the parents..."

It's tough being a parent these days, that's for sure. Yes, of course, we can point out some of Eddie's failings. He wanted to toughen his son up a bit by taking him to football sessions. The problem was that Jamie was obviously no good at football, and Eddie had no idea how to deal with his being no good... We're also told that Eddie's own father meted out corporal punishment with no holds barred, whereas Eddie always vowed to be different. So, has he gone too far in the other direction, and become too hands-off? He's never been violent to anyone in the family, but he does have his rages, and obviously doesn't know how to manage that anger safely. But then, how many of us do? Plus, he has been busy, working long days. Not enough time for communication. Not enough time to encourage the things that Jamie IS good at. But how many of us are in a position to criticize others' work-life balance choices? The point the series makes is that there's nothing egregiously awful about Eddie (or Manda). They're ordinary people, who just weren't sufficiently aware of the dangers around them.

Countless mums and dads have failed to get the tightrope act of parenting right, because it's a terribly difficult (increasingly difficult?) role to play. The difference now, I suppose, is the child's capacity to disappear into a darkened room and commune, unfettered, with any black influence in the universe. True, itinerant pundits and books and radios have also spewed out hatred down the ages, but at least they're only one voice at a time. On the internet, in your self-chosen echo-chamber, it's easy to believe that the whole world is saying just one thing, and suddenly you're privy to the secret, and you understand where all the bad things that have happened to you have come from -- and it's liberating to be in on the "truth", and comforting that there are fellow-sufferers in on it too... And so you drink in more and more of this intoxicating, brain-numbing draught.

But even that doesn't explain how, exactly, ideology turns into action. Thorne again: "Jamie is not a simple product of the 'manosphere'. He is a product of parents that didn’t see, a school that couldn’t care and a brain that didn’t stop him. Put 3,000 kids in the same situation and they wouldn’t do what he did. Yet spend any time on forums on 4chan or Reddit, spend any time on most social media platforms and you end up, quite quickly, in some dark spaces."



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The brilliance of Adolescence is that it offers no easy answers, no simple division of the world into good guy and bad guy.

As Thorne explains: "What you hope when you make a piece of social realism is to create a conversation. We wanted to make something that people want to watch, of course, but we also wanted to pose a question that got people talking on their sofas, in pubs, in schools, maybe even in parliament. This show is a tragedy. Katie’s loss is the apex of that tragedy, but I hope it’s OK to say that Jamie is a tragedy, too. We will not solve the problem by kicking this issue into the long grass. This requires urgent action."

Judging by the waves it has made, the series has achieved its aim. What is needed now is to avoid kneejerk reactions.