When you become a parent, you enter a new world of worries. Is my baby being too quiet? Are they breathing? Is my kid talking when they should, walking when they should, reading when they should? Do they have enough friends? Are they a good friend? A good student? A good global citizen?
What you hope you never, ever, ever have to worry about is the subject of Netflix’s new series, Adolescence. The four-part British crime drama tells the (fictional) story of Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old suburban boy who’s ripped from bed in the morning, accused of murdering a classmate. Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham — who also plays Jamie’s dad, Eddie — the show is an emotional gut punch, aided by the fact that each episode is shot in real time in one take.
When the premiere opens, it’s with idle cop chitchat. It’s about their kids and their lives, and it makes things extra jarring when, a minute or so later, we follow them as they burst into the Miller family home. It’s 6 a.m., and they’ve taken the family by surprise. Jamie’s so shocked he pees his pants while his teen sister cowers in the bathroom doorway. Mom and Dad are more confused than anything, wondering why their barely teenage son, a kid who still has a space-themed bedroom, is being charged with murder.
And for a while, as a viewer, you wonder that too. Owen Cooper, who plays Jamie, is perfectly cast. With a smattering of freckles across a face that you know has never seen the sharp side of a razor, Cooper looks barely old enough to have armpit hair. He’s stuck somewhere between childhood and adulthood; if you let yourself, you can remember how weird that time felt. The heightened emotions and the sullen chatter. The slouching and the shame you might get if you cried as Jamie does in the police van on the way to the station.
How could this boy commit murder? And if he did, does he really deserve this very adult treatment? This questioning by these very adult, very business-y cops? This cell just across from some very belligerent grown-ass man? There must have been a reason, or maybe the cops got it wrong. Maybe this is a story about how some kid gets railroaded.
Except, as we learn when Jamie sits for an interview, fresh off a medical exam and meeting with his lawyer and “appropriate adult” father, he seems to have very much committed the crime he’s accused of, following and then stabbing a classmate named Katie with a kitchen knife. He’s insistent that he didn’t do it, but the cops have photos and CCTV video of the whole incident, which stemmed from a confrontation in a parking garage, a shove and then a sneak attack. It’s horrific, and, somehow, it’s Jamie. The sweet boy we knew, who’s wearing a sweatshirt that’s much too big and who just learned about the Industrial Revolution, has killed some other parent’s sweet, sweet kid.
We’re not sure why yet — even Jamie doesn’t seem like he knows, considering he’s still denying the whole thing or at least asserting that he “didn’t do anything wrong” — but it’s clear that’s to come. Jamie’s dad crumbles like we do, his world and his family destroyed by his own kid, who has just made a life-ruining mistake.
It’s tough to want to push forward from here, except in search of the “why.” But Adolescence is so well-made and compelling that it’s hard not to go on. There probably won’t be good answers, ultimately, but there will be good TV, and maybe that’s enough for now.
• The cops in Adolescence keep their lives so insanely compartmentalized that it’s downright disturbing. They’re borderline aggressive and awful to Jamie, which seems harsh, but then you realize that they were also the ones who had to break the news to Katie’s parents. The cops know the destruction Jamie wrought, whether intentionally or not, and I have to think that if I were them, I’d be pretty damn pissed off too.
• Eddie says he thinks he’s a good dad but the lack of physical contact between him and Jamie gives me pause. I’m sure that it’s a sort of “you’re a man” type thing, but when your son is clearly shaken to the core, you’d think you could give him a hug. Appreciate him yelling for Jamie to “eat [his] cornies,” but I would have liked a little softness even more.
• Prior to Adolescence, the last show I reviewed for Vulture was Missing You, which also came out on Netflix, stars Ashley Walters, and is insanely depressing. I must be a glutton for punishment.
