If you’re the parent of a school-age boy, Netflix’s harrowing new drama “Adolescence” will “chill your blood”, said The Telegraph‘s Anita Singh.
Each episode of this “quietly devastating” four-part series is filmed in a single-take, opening with the arrest of 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), accused of stabbing to death a girl from his school. His “shell-shocked” parents – dad Eddie (Stephen Graham) and mum Manda (Christine Tremarco) – follow him to the police station, where he chooses Eddie to be his appropriate adult at his interview.
It is a “masterclass” from Graham, who also co-wrote the show with Jack Thorne. Even when he is silently walking through a DIY shop or driving a van, he manages to convey “more emotion than 99% of other actors can manage when they’re talking”.
This was 15-year-old Cooper’s first screen credit, secured after he sent a tape to the casting director, and it is a performance that is “completely natural and riveting”, said Rolling Stone‘s Alan Sepinwall. He goes from “calm, even playful, to sad, or to utterly terrifying, within the span of seconds”.
It becomes quickly clear, though, said Abby Robinson at the Radio Times, that this is not a “mystery thriller, or even really a crime drama“. Instead, the writers are more interested in “interrogating why young men and boys are killing women and girls”.
Graham came up with the idea for the show after reading about a spate of real-life violent attacks, including the fatal stabbing in 2021 of 12-year-old Ava White by a 15-year-old boy, and the 2023 murder of 15-year-old Elianne Andam by a 17-year-old boy, in a row over a teddy bear.
The resulting script is an “incredibly powerful and poignant study of the devastating, sometimes fatal, impact of toxic masculinity“, and how boys and young men are “dangerously susceptible to the poison being peddled by snake-oil salesmen like Andrew Tate“.
Jamie’s radicalism is all the more shocking given the stable north-England home he has come from, and it is this that makes it such an “arresting and disturbing watch”. It should become “mandatory viewing, particularly for boys and their parents” and be “added to the national curriculum without delay”.
Watching “Adolescence” is a “deeply moving, deeply harrowing experience”, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. The show’s “technical accomplishments” are matched by an “array of award-worthy performances” and “a script that manages to be intensely naturalistic and hugely evocative at the same time”. This is as “close to televisual perfection as you can get”.