Adolescence kicks off when police come to arrest 13-year-old Jamie Miller for the murder of one of his classmates. Each episode follows the effects of the crime throughout the community: on police who have rarely witnessed something so tragic, on a student body whose school is affected by the news, on the accused boy who is detained for psychological evaluation, and on his family who is torn apart by the revelation.
One of the many wins for Adolescence was for writing, and I find it easy to see why. The story very quickly moves past the "did he do it?" tropes of the typical crime drama, expanding to show just how many people are affected by violence like this. I found episodes two and four to be especially powerful in this regard. The former episode is set at Jamie's school, and makes abundantly clear how much pressure teenagers deal with on a daily basis -- as the adults in their lives remain utterly, almost callously, oblivious. The latter episode shows how even more than a year later, Jamie's family has still barely begun to reckon with the emotional effects of his crime.
However, I've thus far not mentioned the series' big hook: each episode is filmed in a single take. In the film industry, most "oners" often involve some sort of technical trick to hide cuts and stitch multiple takes together in an illusion of continuity. No such fakery was employed here. Each episode is one truly uninterrupted hour, staged for one ever-present camera. Nearly every bit of press about Adolescence mentions this fact, and the creative team behind the show has spoken extensively about how they pulled it off and why they felt it was important to film this way: they claim the technique puts the viewer right inside the action. The implication is that there's some sort of "chocolate and peanut butter" kind of harmony here between powerful storytelling and powerful filmmaking. My own experience was starkly different, a jarring "chocolate and sushi" experience not only of two things not fitting together, but of one totally overwhelming the other.
The one-take staging of Adolescence is far too fancy. On multiple occasions, the camera gets in a car with characters as they move from one location to another. There are tricky moments where it gets passed through a window, races along with running characters, moves backward through complicated hallways and up staircases, and at one point even gets secretly mounted on a drone to allow for a sweeping "god's eye" shot. Different sequences in the series are set in a police precinct stuffed with dozens of workers, and at a crowded hardware store full of shoppers. Most mind-boggling of all is the school episode, with literally more than 300 students moving this way and that under the watchful eye of the camera.
At almost no point can you not be aware of what a massive, logistical nightmare all this was to execute. And invariably, the most challenging moments fall very late in each one-hour episode: a complicated camera move that has to work, or an actor called upon to deliver a deeply emotional moment as the camera closes in mere inches from their face. You can easily imagine how many times that 45 minutes of an episode was perfectly "in the can," only to be spoiled late in the game by something going wrong on a given take.
Don't get me wrong, all of this is a jaw-dropping marvel. You cannot help but be impressed how the show at every turn selects for the "hardest degree of difficulty"... and pulls it off. But none of that pulls me into the action. Quite the opposite -- it forcefully keeps me from engaging with the emotion of the story, pulling me out of the moment every time I'm forced to ask "how did they do that?"
I felt there was only one episode where the single-take technique actually worked: episode three, centered on a psychologist interviewing young Jamie. That episode takes place mostly in a single room, and is centered on the interaction between two people. It's a proper one-act play that just happens to be performed for the camera rather than on a stage, and truly hinges on two actors really responding to each other in the moment. (Unsurprisingly, both of those performers, Erin Doherty and young Owen Cooper, won Emmys for this work.)
In my mind, there at least two major reasons to watch Adolesence: for the unyielding and powerful look at the consequences of violence, or for the high-stakes acrobatics of the cinematography coupled with keen coordination and careful rehearsal. I might well be inclined to give either one of those things, in isolation, an A grade. But I felt the latter massively detracted from the former, leading to a whole that was not as good as the sum of its parts. I felt Adolescence was still good -- a B+ perhaps -- but I might not have been as reflexive to shower it with all the industry rewards it just collected.
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