The last time playwright Jack Thorne delved into the growing pains of a troubled young man was with his JK Rowling adaptation, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Adolescence (Netflix) is the far darker and often unbearably stark account of 13-year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper) who is arrested for the murder of a girl at his school.
The four-part series begins with a bang as a detective inspector (the excellent Ashley Walters) leads a dawn raid on a suburban house in Liverpool following the fatal stabbing of a female pupil from a local comprehensive. Jamie’s father, Eddie, played by Stephen Graham, immediately pleads for the innocence of his son.
Graham is an accomplished scenery chewer, and his over-egged performance is the one jarring note in the opening episode. Perhaps it’s just a cultural disconnect between Ireland and Britain, but if a swat team turned up looking to speak to one of my children, my first question would be what they’d got up to that had brought the authorities to our front door. And yet Graham’s Eddie somehow stays in teary denial until finally presented with irrefutable evidence of Jamie’s guilt.
In Thorne’s defence, Eddie and his reluctance to confront the truth speaks to the broader reality that none of us know what our teenagers are getting up to, particularly when they are armed with a smartphone. But that message is hampered by Graham’s overwrought acting and by the ultimately wearying device of using a single tracking shot across all four instalments.
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The second episode is set at Jamie’s school, and here again Adolescence doesn’t quite land. News of Katie’s murder has just broken yet, aside from the victim’s best friend, nobody seems too bothered. It’s true that kids can be glib – but if a schoolmate had been killed, the reaction would surely have been widespread shock.
Where Thorne is right on the money is in warning about the toxic impact of “influencers” such as Andrew Tate and the hatred of women they are stoking in teenage boys.
That is the ugly fact confronted in part three, where Jamie discusses his relationship with the murdered Katie with a psychologist (Erin Doherty). It’s a bravura two-hander, even if there are moments where Cooper is clearly delivering lines written by an adult trying to get inside the head of a 13-year-old.
The chilling message is that, though growing up has always been difficult, social media has made it more of a minefield. For all its flaws, Adolescence forces us to confront that bleak fact and, for that reason, will serve as nightmare fuel to the parents of teenagers – even those not burdened with Eddie’s breathtaking naivety.
