Netflix‘s newest binge-worthy series, Adolescence, made its debut on the streaming platform Thursday, and viewers and critics are already singing its praises. The show, which stars Stephen Graham, Owen Cooper, Ashley Walters and Erin Doherty, follows a family in northern England embroiled in tragedy and the detectives who are determined to find out what happened, as Elle UK reported.
Each episode is shot in one uninterrupted take, and as the truth of what happened begins to unfold, it keeps audiences at the edge of their seats. Read on for a breakdown of the show and the real-life events that inspired Netflix’s thrilling new series.
What is ‘Adolescence’ on Netflix about?
Adolescence tells the story of a family whose lives are thrown into chaos after 13-year-old Jamie Miller, portrayed by Cooper, is accused (and arrested for) the murder of a teenage girl who goes to his school.
“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’s Tudum. “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.”
The four-part series is co-created and written by Graham, who plays Jamie’s father Eddie in the show, and Jack Thorne, and it’s directed by Philip Barantini.
Barantini used a one-shot style similar to that used in Adolescence in 2021’s Boiling Point, which starred Graham.
Is Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’ based on a true story?
Yes and no. The show isn’t based on one incident, but rather several accounts of knife crime in the U.K.
Graham told Tudum that there was one incident in particular during which “a young boy [allegedly] stabbed a girl,” which haunted Graham and inspired the series.
“It shocked me,” he told the outlet. “I was thinking, ‘What’s going on? What’s happening in society where a boy stabs a girl to death? What’s the inciting incident here?’ And then it happened again, and it happened again, and it happened again. I really just wanted to shine a light on it, and ask, ‘Why is this happening today? What’s going on? How have we come to this?’ ”
Thorne added that the incident pushed he, Graham and Barantini to analyze male rage and look inside themselves and the men in their lives. He described “questioning with some intensity” their identities and their relationships with their masculinity.
“That is a journey I’ve never gone on as a writer before, and it scared me and excited me because it felt like we had something to say,” he told the outlet.
Did Jamie actually commit the murder in ‘Adolescence’?
Spoilers ahead.
Adolescence tells viewers in its first episode who killed Kate, the teenage girl Jamie is accused of killing. Detectives show Jamie CCTV footage of him stabbing Kate seven times in a parking lot in the last 10 minutes of the first episode. Graham told Tudum that the footage’s gory nature was intentional.
“We wanted the audience to feel the same feelings that Eddie feels when he looks at it and realizes what Jamie did,” he told Tudum.
Revealing Kate’s killer in Episode 1 is something the show’s creators always intended to do.
Thorne told Tudum, “We wanted to give the audience certainty and then go, ‘Now where do we go and how will this work?’ That was really exciting.”
Inspiration from ‘Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill’
He also discussed Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill, a book written by Gitta Sereny that recounts the life and murders of Mary Bell, an 11-year-old British girl who was convicted of killing two children in 1968. Thorne was captivated by her story from the first page, even though he knew the whole time that Bell was the murderer.
“Telling a drama that’s a why-done-it, rather than a whodunnit, hopefully engages people in different questions,” he told Tudum. “Questions like, ‘What’s going on within our teenage boys?’ Phil, Stephen and I are looking at masculinity — thinking about ourselves as men, the kinds of fathers, partners and friends we are, and questioning with some intensity who we are as people.”
Throughout the series, Jamie struggles with his culpability, fixating on what Eddie’s perception of the incident is. In the end, Jamie pleads guilty to the crime and, mirroring the show’s opening, Eddie cries in Jamie’s bedroom and he and the Miller family are left to live with their guilty, grief and confusion.
“We knew that we wanted to end it in that room. We wanted the journey to finish where it began,” Graham told Tudum. “As Eddie apologizes to Jamie’s teddy bear — an emotional stand-in for the boy himself — we’re reminded that this is the room where Jamie learned all the online propaganda that led him to kill Katie. “This is where the person who Jamie became was created.”
Adolescence is now streaming on Netflix.
