'Adolescence' Is a Show About How Dads Shouldn’t Let Their Kids Use Social Media

This newsletter was written in one take

You’re all right, love. Netflix; Hannah Roman

I have to admit, I was not checking for Adolescence at all. Netflix’s latest surprise hit British limited series caught me off guard. When I read about it before it premiered, I thought it sounded promising. It’s created and written by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne. Graham is a terrific actor (I loved him as Tony Pro in The Irishman), and Thorne is one of those highly prolific British writers who works in multiple genres and varies wildly in quality from project to project, so you never know what you’re going to get. Their previous collaboration, the excellent 2019 limited series The Virtues, written by Thorne and Shane Meadows and starring Graham, was a keenly observed character study of an alcoholic man confronting his childhood trauma. But it was, you know, a keenly observed character study of an alcoholic man confronting his childhood trauma. It wasn’t a crowd-pleaser. I watched it on a niche streaming service that I don’t think even exists anymore.¹

Graham (who also stars as the stricken father of the suspect) and Thorne must have decided that they wanted a bigger audience for their next keenly observed character study of people affected by a traumatic event. For Adolescence, which over the course of four episodes looks at different moments over the course of a murder case, they added a hook: each episode is filmed in a continuous take. And they brought it to Netflix, the only place where a show like this has the chance to become a hit.

Graham and Thorne, both of whom have theater backgrounds (Thorne is most famous for co-writing Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), which makes sense. Graham is best known for his acting, but this could give him a new career as a writer and producer. It’s directed by Philip Barantini, who previously worked with Graham on a one-shot movie called Boiling Point where Graham plays a chef having a terrible night. I haven’t seen it, but Adolescence makes me want to watch it. Barantini will probably win a directing Emmy for this show. The Limited Series field at the Emmys is unusually weak this year, and Adolescence seems likely to shoot to the top of the field the way Baby Reindeer did last year. A pattern has been established, and I will never overlook a late-breaking British Netflix limited series ever again.

Dadolescence

Adolescence’s one-take experiment gives it a feeling of excitement it wouldn’t have otherwise. It’s an impressive technical feat, especially the second episode, which takes place in a school with dozens of characters and hundreds of extras milling around, and ends with a drone shot that lifts off from the school and lands at the crime scene. The coordination it must have taken for that episode, which has so many variables that could break the take, is mind-boggling. And then that’s followed up with the third episode, an entirely different version of a continuous take, where it’s all in one room with two actors as the camera floats around them. I highly recommend reading this interview with cinematographer Matthew Lewis about how they shot the show, and this thread from Netflix with behind-the-scenes details.

But flashy technique alone is not enough to make a show good. It has to serve the story, and if the technical details don’t work in tandem with the writing and the acting to elevate the entire project, they become meaningless. Adolescence does not have this problem. The performances are uniformly excellent, and the writing is timely and empathetic and makes its points in a way that doesn’t feel heavy-handed. It’s not sensationalized. It’s measured and observational, allowing the possibility that any and all of many social problems may have contributed to the tragic crime, from misogynistic online radicalization of young men to cyberbullying to generational divides to failing schools to hereditary rage, and admitting that there’s no simple or satisfactory explanation for why it happened and what to do to keep things like this from happening again.

But it is making a point, and a persuasive one (though it was one I already agreed with), that giving social media to kids is one of the worst ideas in recent human history. Bad things happened before social media, of course, but the ease with which it allows them to happen is new and destructive. Kids can’t share nude photos and cyberbully each other and get algorithmically pushed toward hateful ideas if they don’t have access to the technology that enables these things. We’re nearing 20 years of widespread social media use, and we have enough anecdotal evidence to see that we’re better off without it, especially kids. The negatives outweigh the positives. The only good social network at this point is Substack Notes. The worst thing I can say about it is that it’s annoying, which is much better than “actively harming society” like the rest of them.

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For TV Guide, I reviewed Netflix and Shondaland’s new murder mystery comedy The Residence. It’s fun and has a great set. Mostly it’s great to see Jason Lee again.

A game of Clue at the White House. It's such a simple, perfect idea that it's a surprise it took this long for someone to do it. And The Residence, Netflix's new murder mystery comedy, executes the idea very well. It's a fun mystery with a skilled cast and excellent production design. As a murder mystery, it's not doing much you haven't seen before in the rule-bound genre, and have in fact seen very recently and will soon see again, in the form of the Knives Out movies. But it achieves exactly what it sets out to do, and that is always something to be admired.

1. The Virtues is currently streaming for free with a library card on Kanopy, one of the best streaming services, which you should definitely get if you don’t already have.