Review: Adolescence (2025)

Is it groundbreaking storytelling or a gimmick?

We are in a post-peak tv era. We’ve blown past the point of oversaturation, where the sheer volume of entertainment at our fingertips is so overwhelming that not even the algorithms can keep up. Opening up your Netflix profile and seeing their suggestions used to have a spooky accuracy, now it feels like more of a, “Sure, why not?” approach. It used to feel like hit shows that broke through on streaming did so more organically. That the open platform of a streamer made it easier for the best and most unique offerings to find an audience. The extent to which that was ever really true is up for debate, but these days it's clear that the industry has shifted. Streaming platforms are struggling to hold onto a shrinking number of subscribers by cracking down on password sharing and pouring money into expensive original content, all with no guarantee there will be an audience. Streamers are throwing more spaghetti at the wall than ever, but they’re losing views to the “new media” landscape. Netflix killed Blockbuster (and the box office), but now YouTube and TikTok are killing Netflix.

All that said, for every starry limited series designed to go viral or win awards, there’s always one or two programs each year that break out seemingly on their own. And if you’ve been on the internet in the last couple of weeks, you know that the show right now is the British series Adolescence. Since premiering on Netflix three weeks ago, it’s achieved one streaming milestone after another. If there even is a monoculture anymore, this show has captured it. Its success is undeniable.

Told in four parts, Adolescence is the story of Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), a 13-year-old boy accused of stabbing a female classmate to death. It’s a bleak and relentlessly paced odyssey into the heart of darkness that is modern teendom, with the violence at the story’s center being inextricably linked to the rampant toxicity that kids, and especially young boys, are exposed to online. The series has garnered strong marks for its performances, writing, and direction and has even elicited public responses from modern-day bridge troll Elon Musk and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

But it's become just as famous for how it was made. Each of the four hour-long episodes is shot in one take - a “oner”. Stephen Graham, who stars as Jamie’s father as well as being the show’s co-creator and co-writer, has stated in interviews that they shot each episode in three weeks, completing two takes a day on shoot days. This is an approach that requires meticulous planning, highly technical rehearsals, and a cast and crew with the focus and stamina to shoot for over an hour without cutting. It’s also a huge creative risk, one that requires no small degree of conviction that the ends will justify the means.

So when I finally sat down to watch it this week, I wanted to see for myself if these four episodes, or shots, were worth the fuss. Was it groundbreaking storytelling? Or was it a gimmick? I’m more skeptical than most when it comes to these things. Spending all the time and energy necessary to shoot something the way Adolescence was shot doesn’t mean that what they’re shooting will be worth watching. The bells and whistles can feel like a crutch, a way to gussy up a story that isn’t all that exciting. I feel this way about Tarantino sometimes (sorry!), while Birdman didn’t exactly do it for me. I’m more of a Spotlight gal. My natural grumpiness, combined with the sensationalist true crime genre the show seemed to be playing into, gave me pause.

But I have to give credit where it’s due. Adolescence is very compelling television. The performances are strong across the board, a few of them are even truly remarkable, the emotions and conflicts it presents feel real and grounded. More than anything else, I appreciate how ambitious it is. It’s rare these days to watch something as overtly political as Adolescence is and not feel like it’s pulling punches or reaching for some kind of bland consensus. The creators are asking a direct question: How does a crime like this happen? And they don’t try to find a clear answer - because there isn’t one. It does present a few possibilities for what may have contributed to Jamie’s violent nature fomenting a misogynistic murder, with the biggest ones being his exposure to the manosphere online and the bullying that appears to be near constant, all of which goes over the heads of the parents and teachers in his life.

When it comes to the shooting style, the oners are an imperfect tool. The immediacy and vibrancy of the live performances a show like this is able to capture do set it apart, and addresses a major problem I have with how a lot of things are shot today. Most series rely on constant cutting between different angles and setups, to the point where I am no longer able to distinguish if a performance is well executed by the performer or well cut by an editor. But I’m still stumped on whether the technique worked for me overall.

The first episode plays out frenetically, with the camera practically assaulting Jamie and his family as he is arrested and booked for the murder of his classmate. It’s a nonstop sprint playing out in real time, with no breathing room or beat until the final scene when the audience sees the truth of what happened the night before. It’s shot to be riveting and action-packed, but it’s hard on the viewer to follow a story that plays out so relentlessly, in addition to the subject matter being so dark. At the end of the episode, I was exhausted.

Episodes two and four play out similarly, with the former following the police investigators touring Jamie’s school, and the latter following his family a year after the crime. None of those episodes worked as well for me as episode three, by far the strongest of the series. The episode shows a counseling session between a psychologist (a wonderful Erin Doherty) and Jamie as she evaluates his mental state to submit an independent report to the judge in his trial. It’s a tense, extremely well-written episode that plays out almost entirely in one room, and does a much better job of exploring the show’s complex themes than the other episodes because it can do so tangentially. The performances are the best in the series, and some of the best in recent memory. And the camera work is the most focused and restrained. The audience is given time to breathe, time to observe the characters in a scene without constantly being whipped in a new direction physically and narratively. It’s a triumph.

In the end, I don’t have a clear take on whether or not Adolescence delivers on what it sets out to achieve. It’s a show that asks more questions than it aims to answer, and I appreciate how it pushed me to ask questions as a viewer that I think more people should. Maybe the answers will only be clear further down the line, as the industry responds to its success as it chases the next.