Netflix’s Recent Crime Drama ‘Adolescence’ Will Rattle and Rivet You. Here’s How Its Makers Pulled It Off

Episode one captures the police station’s shifting scenes, from detailed fingerprinting to a revelatory interrogation, using only the second take. Episode two moves to Jamie’s school, depicted in a 13th-take one-shot that reveals not fear, but the futility of an overwhelmed educational system—from classrooms to schoolyards—with exhausted teachers and disengaged teens. “I’m not saying the school systems are knackered,” Graham says. “I’m not saying it’s broken. I’m just saying if we look at it properly, you can tell some teachers want to be there. You can tell some teachers don’t really want to be there.”

Episode three, which uses take 11, is in some ways the series’ most harrowing. It jumps to Jamie’s session with psychologist Briony, played with steely precision by Erin Doherty (The Crown, A Thousand Blows), who walks a razor-thin line between warmth and authority, resulting in a tightly coiled conversation in which control is everything. The one-shot here is suffocatingly fraught, immersing us in the tensely calibrated exchange like we’re a fly on the shoulder. “With the third episode, I always wanted it to be an amazing two-handed or lovely conversation,” Graham says. He got it, though it’s more heartbreaking and scary than it is lovely.

Episode four, employing take 16, returns to the hollowed-out family bracing for Jamie’s trial, the camera pressing in close as the parents confront a difficult question: Were they good enough? It’s a shattering moment, and Tremarco’s and Graham’s work here is devastating as they confront depths most people spend their lives avoiding.

The series refuses tidy explanations for how a boy like Jamie could end up in the situation he’s in—a choice Graham says was intentional: “Dad’s never raised his hand to his child. Dad’s not overly violent or aggressive to Mum. Mum’s not a drinker…. I wanted to alleviate all of that and say, What if it’s not that?”

Adolescence leaves us with a question it doesn’t even pretend it can answer—and it’s a troubling one. “We really wanted to look at the fact of: Why do these things happen?” Graham says. “I’m not saying we have the answers; we don’t at all. But what me and Jack really wanted to do was hold that mirror up to society and say, Just have a look at this, because it is happening. It has happened.”

Fans who’ve seen the trailer are shocked at seeing Graham in a more sensitive role but intrigued by the premise. “I like the idea of Stephen Graham, the most Manly Man Who Mans Onscreen right now, taking on the topic of boys being taken in by the manosphere,” one Reddit commenter wrote. “Maybe he’ll move some needles.”

Graham laughs at the “manly man” label but insists Adolescence wasn’t born from an agenda, just a reaction to the knife-crime epidemic in the UK, where 83% of teen homicides in 2023–24 involved a blade. “I wanted it to be about a young boy being blamed for a murder of a young girl,” he says. “I had no idea about the whole manosphere and stuff like that. I didn’t know what it was until Jack [Thorne] told me all about it, and I was just blown away.”

The show threads incel culture into the broader panic over male rage, digital isolation, and desires warped by algorithms. It nails both adult theorizing and the stark disconnect any parent of a teen knows too well. “What I was really trying to search for was the reality of that kind of a very hardworking father who’s tried to have some sort of relationship with his son, but at the moment it’s fractured,” Graham says. “Because it’s a very difficult age, isn’t it?”

The teen performances at Jamie’s school capture that arduous age remarkably—the mix of bravado, cruelty, and vulnerability, the way they switch from agreeable to impenetrable with ease, exposing just how clueless even well-meaning adults are. This is never clearer than when Detective Bascombe’s own son, Adam (Amari Jayden Bacchus), attempts to decode emoji for him, and Bascombe fumbles it so awkwardly that you nearly drown in secondhand embarrassment.

Courtesy of Netflix.

And then there’s newborn Owen Cooper, who must play a raw nerve careening between charm, vulnerability, and anger—in his first acting credit no less. He does it so adeptly in episode three that it evokes Edward Norton’s career-making moment in Primal Fear. “You did remind me of him,” Graham says to Cooper after he’s joined us on Zoom. “Watch it with your mum and dad!”

Cooper, who’s turned 15 since he made Adolescence, shot episode three first due to Graham’s schedule and arrived the day of rehearsal ready to go without a script, surprising himself. “I didn’t think I’d be able to do that,” he says. “But me and Erin [Doherty] just bounced off each other throughout the episode.”

Casting an actor to play Jamie was a challenge, with the character demanding substantial emotional swings as well as authenticity. “We didn’t want a child who’d been through the theater school route,” Graham says. “We wanted to find someone who was really kind of fresh and organic and very real.”

Courtesy of Netflix

After narrowing it down to four boys out of more than 500, Graham held a workshop with the finalists. For Graham, finding Cooper “was an instant thing,” he says. “There was just a piece of magic within. I don’t mean this to sound trite, but you try and catch lightning in a bottle. We were just in the moment of something, and he looked at me in a certain way…. And what I saw in Owen was the exact same thing I saw in Jodie Comer when Jodie was 17.” The two worked together on the 2012 series Good Cop. “I saw the same kind of ability, the same kind of natural talent, and just a real presence,” Graham says, comparing Cooper to Comer. “He just blew my mind.”