'Adolescence' is full of tense moments. So was this shoot

Herculean effort went into choreographing the Netflix miniseries' second episode, filmed as one continuous shot at a labyrinthine school

- Story by Bill Desowitz

The series filmed on a real school campus.

T'S A GOOD THING THAT “Adolescence” and “The Studio” aren’t competing head to head for boldly filming every episode as one continuous shot: It'd be like comparing apples to oranges.

The Netflix limited series and Apple TV+ half-hour series are both favored to win Creative Arts Emmys for cinematography. But while Apple TV+'s Hollywood satire instills high anxiety, Netflix's psychological crime drama, created by Jack Thorne and star Stephen Graham, which explores misogynist violence and cyber-bullying, thrums with dread.

The four-episode series finds 13-year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper) arrested for the murder of classmate Katie (Emilia Holliday) and progressively reveals the tragic fallout. The continuous-shot technique, with the lightweight, unconventional Ronin 4D camera, puts us right beside the characters. We're along for the ride, following them and surveying the surroundings with documentary-style realism.

“The camera is an exact mirror of what the characters are going through at any time,” said cinematographer Matthew Lewis. “And that’s really critical to making a one-shot feel like it is part of the language of the show and not a gimmick. For the audience, it acts as a remedy for our terrible attention spans by not cutting.”