By Miriam R. Kramer

Adolescence, a limited television series about a thirteen-year-old boy accused of stabbing a female classmate to death, has light-sped its way to the top of this year’s quality offerings on Netflix, electrifying global audiences. Created by actor Stephen Graham and screenwriter Jack Thorne, with direction by Philip Barantini, the series puts the crime in context with the boy’s family, school, and local community in an unidentified Yorkshire town, along with a hyperconnected globe. As a result, Adolescence has become a global cultural flashpoint for discussions about violence, family, and community that move far beyond what Graham calls its “colloquial” setting in Northern England.

Graham’s concept arrived as an epiphany after he read several separate accounts of teenage boys committing knife crimes against girls and women in the United Kingdom. In Adolescence, Jamie Miller, a boy on the cusp of adulthood, is hauled into a local police station after his dead classmate, Katie Leonard, is found with multiple knife wounds in a local parking lot. Dazed, his tight-knit working class family, headed by Graham playing his father, Eddie, follows him into the maw of the criminal justice system as police process him.

In part because of the one-take cinematography and direction, each episode in the series is raw, immediate, and powerful—a visual tour de force that never lets go. Episode One begins with a detective inspector and detective sergeant discussing mundane details about their days, with the DI talking about how his son wants to call in sick to school. Then the camera pans out as they jump into action and join a Police Support Unit, the equivalent of a SWAT team, ramming down a door at 6:15 am and arresting a skinny, cowering thirteen-year-old on suspicion of murder.

Director Barantini and his Director of Photography, Matthew Lewis, convey the dizzying frenetic energy of the ripples on the pond from the arrest with one continuous camera shot over each episode of the show. In Episode One, the camera follows first one conversation and then another between sets of people walking in different directions as the suspected criminal is processed under fluorescent lights. Frail-looking and vulnerable next to his family and court-appointed lawyer, Jamie denies any responsibility. As he cries, he looks to his father, allowed to stay in examination rooms with him, for reassurance. The family is dazed by the speed and efficiency at which he is charged with the crime and presented with the evidence of his responsibility for it.

In Adolescence, it takes a globally connected village to raise Jamie to become the epicenter of this crisis. Co-creator Graham wanted to explore the world of cyber-bullying, in which social media helps bring a child up as much as its parents. Kids have always bullied other kids in school, but the situation has become worse since they have been able to do it anonymously from their computers or phones while detaching themselves emotionally from even those living in the same household. Online everyone can become a perpetrator. Even the female victim and other classmates of both sexes have found it easy to bully Jamie from behind a screen, stoking his simmering rage and belief that he is ugly and worthless.

Jamie falls prey to cultural influencers in the manosphere, considering himself a part of incel culture, in which insecure, entitled young men with warped perceptions of themselves and society begin to believe that females are to blame for their involuntary celibacy. The manosphere, a collection of websites, blogs, and other forums where communities promote misogyny, believes that society is biased against men and that feminists promote hatred of men. Self-described incels in particular cite an easily digested figure that eighty percent of women want only twenty percent of all men. Seeing them as scarce resources, young men are persuaded to look at young women as prizes to be manipulated and popularity with women as the goal. Acceptance of these ideas is described as “taking the red pill,” a cultural reference to waking up to reality in the film The Matrix.

In Episode Two, the police visit Jamie’s school, which one likens to a holding pen. Adolescence has always been a hard road for most of us, and it has become even more brutal with the isolation and warped perceptions created in the hours kids spend on social media. The detective inspector only makes a breakthrough in finding Jamie’s twisted motive when his own son, bullied and withdrawn, interprets the teen-specific emojis and phrases that Katie herself used to bully Jamie. This policeman himself is the father of a bullied son, and has as far to go in understanding him as Eddie Miller does his accused son.

Violence at school simmers in the wake of Katie’s murder, with even her best girlfriend, Jade, physically attacking Jamie’s friend and co-conspirator as she grieves the friend she felt was the only one to understand her. Her loneliness is palpable. This episode ends beautifully with Jade, played by Fatima Bojang, walking away from school  as the drone filming the episode flies across town to descend upon Jamie’s father, Eddie, joining others in laying a bouquet of flowers on the spot where Katie died.

Episodes Three and Four are equally as successful, with one focusing on Jamie’s intense, hostile interactions with a therapist and the last on his grieving, broken family. The members of Jamie’s family love each other and him dearly. His parents try to understand how he broke into pieces and how they can keep themselves and their daughter from being torn apart as well.

One of my first reactions after finishing Episode One was to imagine that in this country, where laws are lax and more guns exist than people, Jamie would have used a firearm and shot more than one classmate before turning his weapon on himself. I also thought back to the time almost eleven years ago that I was transfixed by the story of Elliot Rodger, a filmmaker’s son and self-described incel who wrote a manifesto and released it online before shooting six people and injuring fourteen others. It was the first time I had heard of incel subculture.

When I read Rodgers’ true-crime writing in 2014 I was startled and dismayed to hear echoes to comments I had heard from a former friend—yet another filmmaker—who gradually came to support aspects of the men’s rights movement as he found women mostly unattainable and took criticism of misogyny personally. That man, a bright, talented, and sometimes kind individual, never espoused violence in my earshot. I have no idea how he has handled these thoughts and frustrations since then. Now I wonder what his unvarnished reactions would be to this series. As a Washington, DC–area resident, he could easily read this review as well.

There are so many ways to praise Adolescence I cannot begin to cover them. A second viewing showed me how carefully the filmmakers planned every moment, every echo, every irony. While the one-take filming using both traditional techniques and drone footage for each episode is electrifying, it never glamorizes violence. There is an elegiac, mournful tone to the content that blends beautifully with its compelling, fast-moving filming and acting. The writing is exquisite.

The superb Owen Cooper, playing the role of Jamie, was discovered from a pool of five hundred young actors. Intimate family scenes between him and Stephen Graham as Eddie are a masterclass, as are the ones in Episode Four between Graham, Christine Tremarco as his wife, Manda, and Amélie Pease as his daughter, Lisa. For that matter, all the actors in this production shine, including Ashley Walters as Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe and Faye Marsay as Detective Sergeant Misha Frank.

Adolescence deserves any and every filmmaking award it wins in the future. It is already creating the conversations its creators desired. Its humanity, love, hope, and understanding burn bright, illuminating the backdrop of the warped sensibilities and terrible isolation that fuel such crimes in our communities.