One-shot crime drama is a tough but compulsive watch

‘Adolescence’ asks whether the Andrew Tate ‘manosphere’ drove a 13-year-old to murder someone

- Nick Hilton

How do you solve the problem of today? That’s the question that therapists often pose to people experiencing the wide range of life’s traumas. Don’t relitigate the past, don’t attempt to fix the future, try and solve the problem of today. It’s a mantra that crops up in Netflix’s Adolescence, a four-part drama looking at the fallout from an unthinkable crime, and the many todays that must be solved, over and over, as a consequence.

It’s 6am on an apparently normal morning. Normal, that is, until armed police, led by DI Bascombe (Ashley Walters) storm into a family home and arrest a 13-year-old boy, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper). His parents, Eddie and Manda (played by Stephen Graham and Christine Tremarco), watch on in horror as their little boy is dragged to the local police station, processed and placed in a cell. Jamie is suspected of murdering a schoolmate, and alongside Eddie, as his appropriate adult, and a solicitor, must face the evidence that the police have compiled against him. It is a nightmarish frenzy, transporting the Miller family from their pocket of suburban calm to the fear, recrimination and revelations of a murder inquiry.

It is a stunning opening. Each of the show’s four episodes is filmed in one continuous take, a technique mastered by its star Graham (who co-created this project with extremely busy scribe Jack Thorne) and director Philip Barantini on the 2021 film