The New Yorker:

The creators of the British miniseries think of the contemporary English boy as a fragile creature, abandoned by society.

By Doreen St. Félix

Netflix is currently ranking the British miniseries “Adolescence” as its most-watched television show among Americans. The streaming service shrouds the methods by which it reaches these metrics in a lot of mumbo-jumbo. But this drama, about a thirteen-year-old boy who is suspected of killing a girl at his school, is, by my observations, creeping toward critical and fan consensus. Are Americans stunned by “Adolescence” because of the culture shock it offers? Over here, the drama about a white pubescent child and his purported mortal sin would unfold as a true-crime detective plot. How was the girl murdered? Did the boy really kill her? Exeunt. Once you finish the first episode, the whodunnit element of “Adolescence” has been dealt with. The question it poses, and refuses to resolve, is why.

Still, “Adolescence” has a relentless visual movement. The creators, Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, never forget that they have a theatrical duty to fulfill, in tandem with their moral ambitions; one intensifies the other. Each episode of the miniseries—there are four, each one about an hour long—is shot in one take. I’m not going to blather on about how impressive the technique is, as is mandated of critics when a team makes such an ambitious decision. The vaunted single take is, more often than not, actually a falsity, fabricated by clever edits or preening, doing nothing alchemical to the script at hand. But “Adolescence” does not fall prey to the lure of gimmickry; the show legitimately could not have been shot any other way. The camera is treated as a condemned instrument.

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