Séamas O'Reilly: The strength and horror of Adolescence is how much we have to learn

Stephen Graham says he was inspired to make the show in response to recent murders of girls committed by young boys, and the horrors of the misogyny being peddled to young men all over the internet

Mark Stanley as Paul Barlow, Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller, and Stephen Graham as Eddie Miller in Adolescence.

Writing a weekly column often means having to qualify previous statements, shortly after making them. So, a week after you thought you’d heard the end of my opinions on modern masculinity, Netflix’s  Adolescence arrives to put me back on my soapbox. A show so good that it forces me, for the second time in three weeks, to declare that the best TV show of 2025 has arrived.

With apologies to Severance, whose second season has indeed been a masterwork in gripping speculative fiction, Adolescence is in another weight class entirely. Its plot centres on Jamie, a 13-year-old boy accused of a terrible crime, and the ramifications this has for him, his investigating officers, his school and, most especially, his family.

What follows is a ripped-from-the-headlines tragedy that plays like a thriller, a horror, and a documentary simultaneously.

I’ll permit one further detail that I would not class as a spoiler, specifically for those who may have heard reviews touting  Adolescence as bruising or, at times, tough to watch.

This is not a violent programme, nor one which features gore, injury, sensationalised violence, or jump scares. There are, perhaps, 10 seconds of Adolescence that one might even class as violence, mostly from a single, devastatingly effective glance at some grainy, distant CCTV footage.

The discomfort of the show is of an entirely different sort, borne from the vastness of its psychological portraits, and the devastating realism of its characters.

Erin Doherty as Briony Ariston and Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller in Adolescence.

Each of its four episodes is also filmed in a single take, with a roving camera moving through the action, without pause or cut, creating an unbroken hour of television delivered with the pace and intensity of live theatre. As a feat of staging, it’s dumbfounding. As an exercise in overwhelming intimacy, it’s miraculous.

There were, we’re told, three weeks of rehearsals per episode, plus one week of shooting with two takes a day. The result is an effect that is at first breathtaking, then absorbing, and, finally, so fully embedded in the fabric of the show that you stop noticing it for long stretches of time. This is only interrupted each time you realise that — at any point — an actor could have fluffed their lines or fallen over or walked into a wall; or that the camera has somehow gone from on top of a car to inside a house to inside a police cell with no interruption; or zipped from tightly shot, impossibly intimate interior scenes in narrow school corridors or tight spaces between back gardens to majestic aerial photography that soars above everything below, taking in the entire town. This it does so seamlessly that each moment of realisation, of wondering how on earth the camera has done what it’s just done, is like a magic trick happening before your eyes.

That the show was made in this fashion could — and, by rights, should — be an unwieldy gimmick, grafted on to a serious drama about an important subject. It’s frankly miraculous that it doesn’t seem like a needless, even damaging, flourish, or demean the unfussy, naturalistic tone the show manages with aplomb. In a sense, the best thing I can say about Adolescence is that its production is simultaneously one of the most impressive technical achievements I’ve ever witnessed in years of watching television, while also being entirely secondary to the sublime craft on display in every other department.

It’s grounded by immaculate performances across the board, most especially in the central part of Jamie, played by Owen Cooper, a performance of such meticulous realism that it is simply absurd that this is his first acting role. Not just on TV — in anything. There are moments of naturalism in his performance that are so unflinching it’s painful to watch. There are, however, no duff notes in any of the acting on display. Ashley Walters excels as investigating officer DCI Bascombe, Erin Doherty astounds as Jamie’s child psychologist, and Christine Tremarco is simply astonishing as his kind, wounded mum.

Anchoring all this, perhaps, is Stephen Graham’s performance as Eddie, Jamie’s dad. There are few superlatives left to offer Graham who, with Jack Thorne, also served as the series’s co-writer. He’s been just about the finest actor of his generation for some time, and in Eddie he’s found yet another conduit for his full suite of powers; a warm and loving man thrown into an impossibly awful situation, filled with a combustible mix of fear, shame, confusion, and anger that wars with his intrinsic sense of moral decency. It is a powerhouse of a performance. His command of Eddie’s shock and rage is not merely impressive, but very nearly paranormal.

Stephen Graham in Adolescence

Graham says he was inspired to make the show in response to recent murders of girls committed by young boys, and the horrors of the misogyny being peddled to young men all over the internet. At its core, Adolescence is about this male rage; the boys suckered in by an ideology that feeds on their fear, shame, cruelty, and resentment; the impotence felt by fathers confronted with the unfamiliar worlds in which their children now live.

It’s to the show’s credit that this is not a simple morality play, however. There is one mention of Andrew Tate, and a few scattered explorations of terms like ‘incel’ or ‘redpill’. In just one of the show’s commitments to realism, the scenes in which teens attempt to explain internet slang to uncomprehending adults are often as excruciating as such conversations are in real life.

But this is no black-and-white blame game which comes packed with easy answers, or any answers at all. Those looking for a worthy parable with pre-packaged solutions will come away empty-handed — in that sense, if no other.

What the show does have is questions; about male anger and entitlement, about knife crime in Britain. About family breakdown, bullying, and social provision. The strength, and the horror, of Adolescence, is how little we can know, and how much we have to learn.