12 March 2025

Jack Thorne’s Adolescence is how crime drama should be done

This Netflix series is a veritable pageant of sophisticated anxiety and dread.

Does your heart at present feel like an overripe nectarine that has been squeezed once too often? I know mine does, and so I’m going to issue a kind of health warning with this review of Adolescence, a Netflix series created by the prolific writer Jack Thorne (too many dazzling hits to mention) and the actor Stephen Graham (another work hound). It is a veritable pageant – albeit of a very low-key and sophisticated kind – of anxiety and dread, and watching it may make you feel oddly frail. For my part, though I want hugely to know what happens – did the boy do it, or not? – I’m putting it on pause for a while. This week, it’s too much. But maybe next week, things will be different.

The fear it instils has various causes. Most obviously, there’s the plot. A 13-year-old boy is arrested for murder, and even if he wasn’t so small and bonny and freckled, you’d be in a state. Children killing each other: it’s an awful and unfathomable thing, ruin for everyone involved. But Adolescence is also a one-take drama, a single camera doggedly following the cast around, and no matter if they’re only walking along the airless corridor of a nick. The queasy-making bump-bump of another drama in which Graham appeared, Boiling Point, is mercifully absent (the two have the same director, Philip Barantini). But the tension is nevertheless ramped: the journey from the boy’s home to the police station in the early hours, the fresh linen of a day already stained with fear and misery, seems to take forever. As the car glides, he hardly knows what to do with himself.

Thorne has (I’m guessing) done some fine research. The details are closely observed: the drills, the routines, the swab tests. Fifteen minutes in and we don’t know who has died, or where, or how. Information is given as it would be by police officers, which is to say slowly and carefully, even artfully. Evidence – social media grabs, CCTV footage – is produced like a rabbit from a hat at just the right moment, the better to catch out this baby-faced suspect. The choreography overall – writing, acting, that stalking lens – is extraordinary, at once humdrum and symphonic. This is how it’s done, you think, drama and a decent investigation alike.

But the most important thing by far is the cast. These people are acting so superbly well, you can’t even tell that’s what they’re doing: I had to remind myself out loud that it was all artifice; that somewhere out of sight, a make-up artist was doubtless ready with a brush and some powder. Jamie, the accused, is played by Owen Cooper, and I wonder where the hell they found him. He’s brilliant: convincingly tearful but able, too, to suggest something (the truth?) withheld. His performance is hard to watch in the best way.

Graham plays his bewildered father, a plumber whose van boasts of its driver’s friendliness and reliability. He twitches as he always does, the jaw clenched, the lips moving, his emotions permanently ready to spill over the sides of the tower of himself, like quicklime in some never-ending medieval battle. He makes you feel testy and nervous, as if he’s about to screw something up, for all his loyalty and stolidness.

Ashley Walters, who plays DI Luke Bascombe, the man in charge of the investigation, has never been better. His character operates in the uncommon space between the horror of what’s happening and the day-to-day, switching from gravity to a kind of casual insouciance, and back again, with all the ease of a light switch. But this, of course, is the space we must inhabit ourselves for as long as we are watching.

Thorne clearly hopes to stir sympathy in us; he wants us to resist the notion of evil and monsters and all that. But he doesn’t need us to be soft. Someone has been murdered, and the eyes and the heart must grasp the entirety of this, too. Even if his series can’t make sense of children killing children, it may force you to wonder, next time you face the evening news, just what happened before they were stupid and angry enough to leave the house armed with a knife.