by Riley Glover

It’s difficult to look at a travesty happening before your eyes. We talk frequently about how easily we can look up and get obsessed with extreme acts of violence even before the rise of the internet, but that’s not what’s being talked about. The real travesty is to look not just at the impact of such violence but also at the aftermath and see the effect. The crying, the trauma, the anger, the backlash, and – most distressingly – the ways such acts of death can affect people.

“Adolescence” isn’t an easy work to watch, despite the central murder at the heart of the story only seen once – watched through the eyes of a crappy camera, making it distanced enough to not feel as real as some should think the murder of a teen girl should feel. Despite all lines pointing right back to 13-year-old Jamie Miller being guilty, the boy is set free. We understand before the halfway point that Jamie did the killing, but thinking of this killing as a mystery needing quick answers misses the point.

See, all four episodes are done in one take, meaning once the episode starts, we never blink away because of the lack of cuts, forcing us to watch four separate hours unpacking a murder in as real time as a film could allow. Yes, these four episodes are still written with the elegance of great plays using kitchen sink realism to make sure such long times are filled to the brim with meaning, but such considerations to logic get thrown out fast just due to how painful it was to watch. 

I’ll admit to using the speed-up option on Netflix for the first time ever to go through certain parts because they touched on a kind of pain so real the show seems to tease you into thinking they wouldn’t. They do not take the easy way by spoon-feeding emotions to you with a cliche the same way a cut could break away the most intense emotions. It never does. Real pain like this shouldn’t be easy to watch.

Through its one take, British TV social drama construction, it’s difficult not to think of “Elephant,” a notorious short film shown on BBC2 back in 1989 that depicts nothing but a collection of 18 murders based on real-life police reports, each one done as a complex long shot. Such a confounding display of misery was because, at the time, that pain was being ignored due to the violence being connected to the Northern Ireland conflict between Britain and Irish nationalists. People were ignoring the elephant in the room, and such ignorance was trampling people to death.

For “Adolescence,” the show is tapping into a similar pain we sometimes speak about as the rise of the manosphere and incel culture through figures like Andrew Tate, spreading to teen boys the idea that “they” are against you and that you must use pure violent strength to show your domination over others no matter what. 

People don’t always want to talk about these ideas as they connect with gender, power, isolation, children, and the internet in ways people don’t like to talk about. If that were the case, that would mean our society is so deeply broken in a way we don’t know how to fix by ourselves and may never understand. So, we let it fester in isolation not knowing what to do to fix this until I have to see a mother cry out of fear of her children being killed due to a similar kind of radicalized violence afflicting them.

“Adolescence” is a show that opens up pain not to cause misery, but to bring a conversation that can no longer be ignored. It connects people together in the belief that talking about these issues will allow us to open up and communicate about the issue rather than helping to create a culture of isolation, to really talk about the elephant in the room.