When I first heard about Netflix’s Adolescence, I assumed it would be yet another pulpy thriller – one filled with twists and turns from the get-go. Stephen Graham’s new miniseries, however, is so much more than that, and holds a magnifying glass up to one of modern society’s ugliest epidemics as a 13-year-old boy is arrested at the crack of dawn by armed police and wrenched from his family home.

He stands accused of violently murdering one of his classmates, with the police all but convinced of his guilt. But Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) seems more child than teen, screaming for his beloved dad as he’s read his rights and bundled into a police car. How on earth could this outwardly normal little boy – the one who sleeps in a room painted with stars and space paraphernalia, who still calls for his dad when he’s scared – have ever done this terrible thing? What really happened? Could anyone have prevented it? And how on earth are his parents supposed to make it through all of this unscathed?

“We could have made a drama about gangs and knife crime or about a kid whose mother is an alcoholic or whose father is a violent abuser,” Graham told Netflix. 

“Instead, we wanted you to look at this family and think, ‘My god. This could be happening to us!’ And what’s happening here is an ordinary family’s worst nightmare.”

Watch the trailer for Adolescence now:

Filmed in a single, unflinching shot, the camera never once leaves the action. In that series premiere, we watch as a tearful and trembling Jamie is taken to the station for processing, and we’re there alongside him as he is simultaneously offered a bowl of cornflakes and legal counsel. Our POV switches continuously between that of the frightened teen, his shellshocked parents, Eddie (Graham) and Manda (Christine Tremarco), and the police officers DI Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and DS Misha Frank (Faye Marsay), for whom the Millers’ extraordinary nightmare is… well, just another day at the office, so to speak.

All four episodes continue this theme, allowing us to join Bascombe and Frank on a visit to Jamie’s school in a bid to unearth more details about the case from his classmates. We sit in, too, on a session between the boy and his court-appointed therapist, Dr Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty) – a genuinely unsettling encounter that deserves to be showered with awards. And then, of course, there’s the finale, which explores how Jamie’s looming trial date is impacting the day-to-day lives of his shattered family.

It makes for a terribly addictive blend of breathsucking tension, suffocating dread and genuinely stunning meditations on human nature. It’s almost more horror than thriller – one that unfolds in real-time and doesn’t shy away from showing us both the brutality of a terrible situation and the minutiae of everyday life: the dirty washing, literally and metaphorically. Because here’s the thing: Jamie is, to all intents and purposes, a pretty typical kid. He’s doing well at school, he has a handful of mates, he has a mum and dad who love him to bits. Sure, he’s been a bit quieter and more withdrawn since starting high school. Sure, he stays up late on his computer some nights. What teen hasn’t, right? 

And yet, slowly, the conversations around Jamie begin to shift as the series progresses. We learn, for instance, that he was following a number of lingerie models on Instagram. That he didn’t count any of his female classmates among his friends. That he had watched (and shared) pornographic content. That it had shaped, too, his opinions of what children his age should do together if they start dating. That the person he stands accused of murdering was the same girl who had, weeks earlier, turned down Jamie when he asked her out. That the quiet son of Eddie and Manda Miller had been branded by one of his classmates, whether unfairly or not, as an incel.

There’s no denying that this is an all too timely topic; with 3,000 offenses recorded each day and one in every 12 women victims each year, violence against women and girls is a deepening epidemic in the UK. And a survey by Vodafone has revealed that 69% of 11–14 year-old boys in the UK have been exposed to misogynistic content online. It’s often tricky, though, to confront people with these statistics in a way that truly underlines how horrifying they are. Netflix’s Adolescence does it incredibly deftly, offering up just enough details for us to draw our own conclusions about Jamie’s apparent radicalisation.

At the same time, the series offers up another dark dilemma: would it be worse to learn your child is a murderer or to have them become a victim? It’s a controversial and unspoken thought that I suspect many parents turn over in their minds whenever any story like this hits the news cycle – one which I suspect has no real answer. Both options result in a child being lost; both might leave you wondering if there was more you could have done to save them from their fate. Both, too, might leave your happiest memories overshadowed by one terrible event.

Perhaps, though, the guilt would be far more painful if you knew your kid – the one that you had loved from the moment you first clapped eyes on them – had been radicalised without you ever noticing. Had done something so heinous that it made you wonder how you could ever look at them again. Had grown up, under your careful watch, into someone you barely recognise. It’s little wonder that the Millers refuse to even so much as entertain the idea that their son has killed another person in cold blood; the alternative is unthinkable.

All in all, Adolescence is a truly striking triple threat: a technically brilliant series filled to the brim with powerhouse performances, with the kind of heart pounding story that keeps us engrossed from start to finish. It’s no exaggeration to say that I bit my nails down to the quick while watching it, and I stayed up long after the credits rolled on the final episode, unable to stop thinking about everything that had transpired on the screen before me, and unable to stop thinking about my own little girls sleeping soundly upstairs. Here’s hoping it makes a difference, eh?

All four episodes of Adolescence are on Netflix from 13 March.

Images: Netflix