TV-Series Review: Adolescence (2025) - UK
Tagline: A Harrowing Masterpiece of Modern Tragedy
Rating 9/10
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
2025 Review Count - 61
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There are rare moments in television when a series transcends its medium, becoming not just entertainment but a mirror held unflinchingly to society. “Adolescence”, the four-part drama co-created by Jack Thorne (“His Dark Materials”) and Stephen Graham (“Boiling Point”), is such a work—a searing, unrelenting exploration of guilt, masculinity, and the digital rot poisoning a generation. It is not merely great television; it is essential viewing.
The story begins with a visceral punch: 14-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper, in a debut performance of staggering rawness) is arrested for the murder of his classmate, Katie. What unfolds is not a whodunit—the evidence against Jamie is swiftly laid bare—but a “why”-dunit. Thorne’s script, taut and unsparing, dissects the toxic undercurrents of online radicalization, where misogyny metastasizes in the shadows of forums and emoji-laden Instagram posts. The series refuses to sensationalize, opting instead for a forensic examination of how a boy becomes a killer, and how society fails to notice until it’s too late.
Each episode is filmed in a single take—a technical marvel that amplifies the suffocating intimacy of the drama. The camera lingers like a silent witness, trapping us in interrogation rooms, claustrophobic therapy sessions, and the crumbling Miller household. Directors’ choices here are deliberate: there is no escape from Jamie’s unraveling, no cutaways to soften the blow. The effect is immersive and agonizing, a relentless gaze into the abyss.
The performances are uniformly extraordinary. Stephen Graham, as Jamie’s father Eddie, delivers a career-defining turn. His journey from bewildered denial to shattered resignation is a masterclass in understated grief. Yet it is Owen Cooper who astonishes. Only 15 during filming, Cooper embodies Jamie with a chilling duality: part lost child, part incel-in-waiting. In the series’ most electrifying episode—a near hour-long therapy session with Erin Doherty’s razor-sharp psychologist Briony—Cooper holds his own against Doherty’s ferocious intellect. Their verbal sparring is a dance of evasion and revelation, culminating in a confession that feels less like a climax than a damning indictment of the world that molded him.
Ashley Walters, as the dogged DI Bascombe, anchors the procedural elements with weary gravitas. A scene where his son decodes the “emoji language” of Jamie’s social media posts—exposing the normalization of Andrew Tate-esque rhetoric—is a gut-punch reminder of how adults remain tourists in teenagers’ digital hellscape.
The series stumbles only slightly in its final act, which trades the white-knuckle tension of earlier episodes for a quieter, more fragmented portrait of familial collapse. Yet even here, “Adolescence” resists tidy resolutions. There are no abusive parents to blame, no pat psychological explanations. Instead, Thorne forces us to confront a more unsettling truth: that Jamie is both monster and victim, forged by a culture that teaches boys to equate masculinity with domination and silence.
“Adolescence” takes this mandate to heart, challenging viewers to empathize not just with Katie’s obliterated future, but with the systems that birthed her killer. It is a brutal, beautiful paradox—a story that devastates even as it illuminates.
Today, it earns a 9/10—not for perfection, but for its courage to ask questions that have no answers, and to linger in the darkness where most fear to tread. (Neo, 2025)
“Adolescence” is now streaming on Netflix.