If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent most of the last few weeks telling everybody you’ve ever met to watch Adolescence. Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne’s smartly written and technologically exceptional drama series has threaded the tiniest of needles – it’s a vital and nuanced take on a very real social issue, but it’s also an enormous hit on Netflix with millions of viewers.
But if you have been talking about Adolescence as much as I have, you’ll likely have heard some complaints. And these aren’t the frothing rage-filled takes of those who hate the fact the show shone a spotlight on ordinary white men as perpetrators, these are more reasonable and understandable complaints to do with storytelling.
Mostly, they follow a handful of paths. “I didn’t like the final episode” is a common one, as is “Why did we never find out about the knife?” or “Why didn’t we see the trial?”. One viewer on social media wrote: “It feels like it's missing so much of the story.”
When I saw this backlash – if it can even be called that given how much love has been showered on the show – it reminded me of a quote I think about often, from Den of Geek’s review of the first series of ITV crime drama Broadchurch. In the final episode, after weeks of speculation and fan theories, Joe Miller – perhaps the most obvious suspect – was revealed to have killed little Danny Latimer.
In her review, critic Louise Mellor summed up the situation very neatly.
“If we’re feeling let-down, and I’m sure some are, we partly have ourselves to blame for wanting something cleverer. Over the past eight weeks, we’ve turned Broadchurch into something it wasn’t. Think back to episode one, and Beth Latimer being dragged screaming from the beach where her son’s body lay. I was too busy swallowing my heart down from my mouth to place bets or start hashtags. It didn’t feel like a game back then. As the weeks passed though, the roulette wheel of suspects began to click, skeletons came tumbling out of closets (silent, slow-motion Broadchurch-style skeletons), and we began to join in, as if Chibnall’s story was a choose-your-own-adventure instead of an emotional drama. It’s the town’s new slogan, Broadchurch: come for the pathos, stay for the whodunit.”
Erin Doherty and Owen Cooper in Adolescence on Netflix
(Credit: Netflix)
This argument could very easily be applied to Adolescence. The show was never about whether teenager Jamie (Owen Cooper) actually killed his classmate, or how he did it, or where he hid the murder weapon. Adolescence is about the devastating impact of violence on everybody it touches, as well as the dangerous wasteland of the internet – into which we are allowing impressionable young men to march without oversight. The reason we don’t get to hear about the knife or the trial is because those things don’t matter.
As TV viewers – especially British ones – we’re trained to understand the dynamics and conventions of the police procedural genre. We know that we’ll get a handful of twists as we follow the ebbs and flows of the investigation and we know that it will conclude with a dramatic solve or a bit of courtroom drama. Turn on ITV at about half nine on any given evening and you’ll stumble into one of these shows, starring precisely one fairly recognisable actor looking solemn in a big coat.
Adolescence isn’t one of those shows, so you shouldn’t expect it to play by the same rules as them. By the end of the first episode, there’s no crime to solve. Jamie did it. But the real statement of intent comes at the end of the second episode, after we’ve watched two cops work their way around Jamie’s school on the hunt for the knife used in the killing. Jamie’s classmate eventually admits that the knife was his – exactly the sort of cliffhanger moment we’re used to seeing in those procedural shows.
But then, Adolescence delivers its riposte. The camera leaps into the sky – via one of the most audacious uses of a drone shot I’ve ever seen – and swoops down to see Graham’s character visiting the scene of the crime to pay his respects. It’s a clear visual depiction of the story’s construction, zooming away from the police investigation and the evidence and the lawyers to focus on the people.
Episode three and episode four very much continue that. The third episode focuses on Jamie, sure, but it’s not about his guilt – it’s about what’s going on inside his head. The fourth instalment is even more internal, taking on a day in the life of Jamie’s family. If it feels like an anti-climax, that’s because it’s not a climax at all. That family will have dozens of days like that in the years to come.
In a lot of ways, this brand of storytelling is enabled and supported by the filming style. By telling just four hours of this story, with each of them unfolding in real time, it removes the temptation to fill in the gaps. This isn’t a show about one individual murder and the individual police investigation to put the killer behind bars; it’s about the culture of toxic masculinity – both implicit and explicit – that is pushing young men towards violence.
Just this morning, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch was asked about Adolescence on BBC Breakfast. She said she hadn’t watched it and batted away presenter Naga Munchetty when she pulled her up on it, saying: “I don’t have to watch Casualty to know what’s going on in the NHS.”
Like many of those bemoaning the final episode, Badenoch has completely missed the point of Adolescence. This isn’t a slice of escapism or pure entertainment, but an example of the ways in which art can genuinely create change in society. It’s a fictional story, but one in which the location of knives and the progress of court cases doesn’t matter – because the potent reality behind it is far more important.
Adolescence is streaming now on Netflix in the UK. Read more about Adolescence on Voice now.
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