TV: Adolescence (2025)

An essential watch: a shattering, exquisitely acted portrait of a family's sorrow

TV: Adolescence (2025)

Streaming on Netflix

It’s 6:00am in Yorkshire, North England, and the solid, modest Miller family are asleep when a SWAT team batters down their front door, streaming in hot, pointing guns and shouting their reason for the push-in. They’re there to arrest 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), charging him with murder.

Surely, they’ve got it wrong, say Jamie’s father Eddie (Stephen Graham), his mother Manda (Christine Tremarco) and older sister Lisa (Amelie Pease). Terrified, they wail that Jamie could never commit such a heinous act.

Detective Inspector Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Detective Sergeant Frank (Faye Marsay) say otherwise, and in rough short order they’ve tossed Jamie into a police van and told his bewildered family they can follow behind and meet them at the police station.

There, in piercing detail, we learn what it’s like to book a 13-year-old child. It’s harrowing to watch, and Jamie’s cries of innocence fall on the deaf ears of authorities who are simply doing their jobs.

A strip search (not shown on camera), blood samples, finger printing and a hasty meeting with a solicitor leave Jamie dazed and us wondering what could have happened.

Under questioning by Bascombe and Frank, it emerges that Jamie has participated in Instagram exchanges involving revealing photos of women, all while following the victim’s Instagram account.

Even more damning, CCTV videotape shows what looks like brutal violence – with Jamie stabbing a 13-year-old schoolmate named Katie seven times.

Seated in the interrogation room beside Jamie, Eddie breaks down. “What have you done?” he asks his trembling son.

Detectives Bascombe (l.) and Frank (r.) roam Jamie’s school in search of a damning knife

That’s Episode 1. Episode 2 switches dramatic gears as Bascombe and Frank go to Jamie’s school, looking for clues about who knew Jamie and might have helped him get a knife (which hasn’t yet been found). The panorama here is astonishing, since we’re taken into classroom after classroom where students are asked to cooperate.

Out of the blue, there’s a fire alarm and the whole milling student body, plus faculty, are hustled outside. Order simply disappears. But the dogged Bascombe, with the help of his own son, also a student at the school, chases down the student who gave Jamie a knife on the night in question.

The case is looking closed. But months later, in Episode 3, Jamie is still being held in detention, awaiting trial.

This is the most thrilling and chilling episode, stripped to dramatic barebones, very like a stage play, where for nearly an hour Jamie squares off with Briony (Erin Doherty, in a pitch-perfect performance), a court-appointed psychologist there to assess the teen-ager’s mental state.

Put more succinctly, does Jamie realize exactly what he’s done, that is, does this overwrought, violent adolescent understand the meaning of death?

Cooper – this is his first acting role – and Doherty tussle with, tease, taunt and starkly confront one another in an acting face-off unlike any I’ve seen on television. (Cooper was 14 when the series was shot, he’s now 15.)

Unflinching psychologist Briony (Erin Doherty) stares down the edgy Jamie (Owen Cooper)

This is the most riveting hour on any screen I’ve seen in ages. Like each of the series’ three other episodes, this entire encounter is shot in a dazzling single take.

The camera swerves toward, away from and around the pair without ever diluting the tension between the two characters. This is masterful performing and directing. It’s an uncannily great scene in a series packed with powerful ones.

Cruel reality finds its mark, as it apparently must, in Episode 4. Thirteen months into their ordeal, Eddie, Manda and Lisa are trying to resume a “normal” family life, as Jamie awaits trial.

He’s being held in a more remote “training” facility, and they’ve kept in touch with him, yet he seems to be gaining more of a mind of his own, a wish to take his future into his own hands.

All three family members realize they’ve lost him in the most fundamental sense. His criminal status has stretched every nerve in their ceaseless care for him as a cherished son and brother. Two young lives, Jamie’s and the deceased Katie’s, have been torn asunder.

The family’s unraveling is searing to behold, because they can’t stop the pain, only accept it and try to discover what it means. All three actors are exceedingly fine in this devastating final episode. Graham reaches a depth of desolation that I couldn’t watch without shedding tears. Irrecoverable loss seems impossible to bear.

Graham co-wrote the script with Jack Thorne, and they’ve pared anguish down to such startling immediacy that it’s both hard to look at what’s on screen and impossible to turn away from it.

Director Philip Barantini, with his audacious single takes, keeps us not just feeling with the characters but complicit in their astonishment, fury and aching wondering: Why?

No easy answers come. At the end I felt as though sorrow could be writing scripts for any of us, whether we see it happening or not. Until one day it comes banging down our doors. This superb series might do the same to you.