This is not a review. There have already been plenty of those, most hailing Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham’s new Netflix drama series, Adolescence, as a modern television landmark. It has received a run of five-star recommendations from critics in the last week, with many praising the acting just as much as its bold journey into a dark and difficult subject for the screen: the alarming alienation of some of Britain’s male youths.

So far, only the odd amateur online reviewer has seemed unimpressed. A few of these sceptics have called it “slow” or pointless. They have clearly found it neither compelling nor surprising, defying a consensus among professional critics that this is the best piece of serious television seen in a long while.

The outlying doubters, I suspect, may simply be viewers who are already personally so aware in their daily lives of the savagery of school survival tactics, the brutality of social media and the violence of the street, that this TV series appears to be a rather ponderous slice of reality, instead of an upsetting revelation about what goes on inside the heads of some teenage boys. Perhaps young friends of theirs have been arrested for assault? Perhaps a family member? If so, they will have heard all about police raids and the inside of police cells. As a result, they won’t find the four episodes of Adolescence as gripping as the rest of us in the relatively sheltered boxset-bourgeoisie.

Adolescence review – the closest thing to TV perfection in decades

But wherever you come from as a viewer, this drama’s arrival on our screens is a moment that should not be ignored. It genuinely stands a chance of attaining the fabled status of Mr Bates vs the Post Office, the ITV drama screened last year that allowed the false accusations of fraud devastating lives around Britain to rise to the top of the political agenda.

Speculation about just how damaging smartphones and screen time are to the developing brain has been common for a while. But it might take this script written by Thorne and Graham, together with such a convincing portrayal of contemporary police officers, teachers, teenagers and parents, to allow the public to truly recognise the dangers threatening to overtake society.

The challenge is much more than a straightforward health and safety issue, such as persuading children to wear cycle helmets. As the mother of young men, I have seen how the technological developments of the last 20 years have combined with a general lack of attainable goals and supportive values to create what can look like a fairly barren moral landscape. In this environment, with the wrong set of circumstances and some extra bits of bad luck, any boy could seek reassurance from the grim logic of the misogynistic online culture for which Andrew Tate has now become the emblem.

As boys, my sons and their friends were quick to spot, and happily to reject, the appeal of these easy, aggressive answers. But they have watched others slide into deep holes. And it is not hard to see why. Teenage males are still expected to be strong and dynamic, but are also told that their exuberant energies are unwanted. They are often presented as a problem, rather than as untapped potential.

So, while there is an element of Adolescence that entertains us like a pure horror story, it should also be understood to have plenty of contact points with real things going on inside homes and school playgrounds around the country. Filmed in one take, its tense narrative has a momentum that builds, much like the director’s recent film Boiling Point, also starring Graham. In a few scenes, this turns it into a consciously histrionic tour de force, even when the acting is ­faultless. Thorne, in fact, admits that the production team and cast all approached the drama as if they were working on a stage show. “We all sort of treated it like it was theatre,” he has said, “like we were making something together and that it was just purely about performance.”

Let’s hope that this concerted sense of dramatic momentum can now produce a wider public acknowledgement that alienated young men are a big problem for us all.

Vanessa Thorpe is the Observer’s arts and media correspondent