This review comes with the proviso that I’ve only
seen Episode 1 of Adolescence. I will review it again after I see the
entire limited series which won’t take that long. But having just gotten
through the first episode I’m inclined to think that this may be the most overblown
limited series I’ve had the displeasure of watching since Fleishmann is in
Trouble in 2022. I’m going to watch the entire thing, of course, but only because
it is now one of the frontrunners for Best Limited Series and several other
awards at the Emmys in a few weeks’ time. Left to my own devices I would not go
back to it just having watched the first episode.
I’ll acknowledge part of the reason for my bias
may be because I’ve been rewatching Homicide the last several months and
just last month rewatched the landmark ‘Every Mother’s Son’ episode. That episode
dealt with a fourteen year old African-American shooting another 13 year old
African-American by accident and then calmly believing he wasn’t in trouble
because he didn’t mean to kill the kid. Homicide dealt with stories like
that at least once a season with and each time dealt with it far better and with
more emotion than I saw in the first episode of Adolescence.
And the thing is anyone who thinks the subject
matter of this series is groundbreaking clearly didn’t watch network television
during the 1990s. It wasn’t just Homicide that dealt with these kinds of
stark stories; Law & Order did it frequently during its run. In the
episode Killerz, for example, we find ourselves going into the mind of a ten
year old girl who battered a young boy with a rock and stuffed him in a pipe –
and showed no remorse afterwards. David E. Kelley would visit this subject throughout
his peak on network television as early as L.A. Law and was able to draw
great drama about this exact same subject with far less pretension. And we saw
this exact same scenario play out repeatedly from a different perspective on ER
at least three or four times a season – I once remember a storyline where Hathaway
learned how a seven year old boy killed another one over sneakers and made up a
story about it to the police with no remorse or guilt.
Now it’s possible we’ve backed away from this
kind of story in the era of Peak TV where children are, far more often, victims
of their parents kind of overreach rather than guilty of these kinds of crimes.
There were exception to be sure; OZ and The Wire dealt with it
every so often and I imagine procedurals like CSI and Law & Order:
SVU have been dealing with it but we’ve basically stopped dealing with that
during this century. But it is hard for me, having watched so many of these
stories in syndication find anything that’s unique or special about seeing a
thirteen-year old boy stabbing a thirteen year old girl to death and being put
through the judicial system. And I suspect, though I can’t say for sure, that
the only reason that so many sensible critics have been bending over backwards
to rave about Adolescence can only be due to the fact that they’ve
either never seen or have forgotten those kinds of procedurals.
So why are so many critics and awards shows going
out of their way to cheer a story like this? I can think of three reasons.
First, it’s British and as anyone who’s watched their work knows that the Brits
tend to do almost everything better than we do. I won’t dispute this fact: so
many of the best shows of this decade so far have been produced by the Brits,
from Slow Horses to The Crown to last year’s Baby Reindeer they
have a gift for making extraordinary television that has never gone away. But
in this case for all the very real gifts of Stephen Graham and so many of his
performers, I see nothing original or remarkable about the plot of Adolescence
that I haven’t seen done before on American television and done far better,
with a quicker pace and perhaps most critical, with less pretension.
This brings me to the second reason so many
people seem to love Adolescence: the way its shot. Each of the four
episodes is filmed in such a way as to make it appear that it is done in a
single take. I acknowledge the brilliance of that fact and that I have come to
respect it when it’s done for a good reason. When Sam Esmail does something
like that as he did in the third season of Mr. Robot it was just another
example of why he is one of the greatest creative forces in television today.
And I also saw it done to great effect in ‘The Hurt Man’ episode of Monsters.
But in both cases and others I remember, it was a one-off and the directors
moved on to a different style with other episodes.
More to the point: there’s no reason for Adolescence
to be filmed this way. I grant you watching the first ten minutes when Bascombe
is talking on the phone, goes into his squad car and then serves a warrant on
the house and following the squad as they raid the place is very powerful. You
get a sense of the chaos unfolding as the Miller family as they serve the
search warrant, barge into the Miller household and watch as a stunned Jamie
comes out of his bedroom having wet himself. As we follow the squad as they
raid the place and then drag young Jamie out of his home and into the car, it’s
very effective. It works as the music fades out and we see the stunned Jamie.
But after they get into the squad room and follow
him being processed, it starts to lose its power. I’ll grant you there’s
effectiveness as we follow Bascombe to the Miller parents, then watch him go up
to the squad room and start talking, then as he goes down to the solicitor. But
the longer the trick goes, the slower the action starts to seem and by the
halfway point of the episode, I felt like the pace was dragging. I can’t help
but think that if this had been done in a more traditional style of direction,
with more cuts and following one character, it might be more effective. As it
was by the time we watched them starting to take samples from Jamie, I was beginning
to check to see how much time was left in the episode – something I kept doing
the longer it went. This is not something that you do in a show that is
supposed to be riveting television. By the time they got to the interrogation
sequence which should have been the climax of the episode I found the entire
sequence anti-climatic and sapped of all dramatic power.
Why do Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne (the
showrunners of Adolescence) choose to this method to tell their story? Usually
when a TV or film is done in a certain stylistic way, critics tend to fall all
over themselves to recognize the style and tend to ignore that there isn’t much
there. I was reminded of this when I had the misfortune to watch most of the critically
acclaimed Nickel Boys on cable recently. I honestly have seen movies on MST3K
that were easier to follow and far less pretentious in the way they were
made. Any rational observer would look at this movie and call it for what it
was: preposterous, incomprehensible and doing a great disservice to the subject
matter. But I suspect it was because of the combination of the style and the
subject matter that caused so many critics to fall over themselves raving about
it and the Oscars to give it a Best Picture nod – one that ranks as one of
their worst choices in the last decade, if not overall.
Perhaps Graham and Thorne didn’t have enough
confidence in their plot to tell it in a traditional way. Perhaps they were
trying to turn into awards show bait and knew that this was an easy gimmick to
get my fellow critics to rave about it. (Spoiler: it’s worked). There’s
certainly nothing in the writing that is superior to the other major contenders
for Emmys in this category I’ve seen this year – The Penguin, Dying for Sex,
Monsters, Presumed Innocent, all told brilliant stories and had be riveted
from the first few minutes. And while it might be to early to judge; there’s
nothing in Stephen Graham’s work in the first episode that deserves to be
considered in the same breath as Colin Farrell, Cooper Koch or Jake Gyllenhaal.
(I’ll reserve judgement on Owen Cooper or Erin Doherty until the whole series
is done.)
Which brings me to the third reason it’s likely Adolescence
is being so highly regarded. It tells the story of a thirteen year old boy
who kills a classmate because he becomes obsessed with internet chatrooms and
therefore becomes an incel. Considering how much a part of the current topic of
conversation this is both in America and around the world, one could understand
why critics would call this series “brave’. And I’ll grant this is a subject
that deserves to be discussed and told in entertainment.
But once again the comparison to Nickel Boys and
indeed other ‘Oscar worthy’ films is a relevant one: I’ve lost count of how
many nominations and awards have gone to movies that are not so much
entertainments as ‘telling important stories’. But the line between ‘important’
and ‘conceited’ is a very thin one and particularly in the last decade
Hollywood has been willing to cross over that line and not even bother with the
entertainment part. This usually happens in Limited Series more than other
shows – I saw it happen with When They See Us and last year’s Under
The Bridge where awards were given to shows about important subject matters
more for effort rather than because they were any good. Adolescence seems
very much cut from the same cloth: a chance for Hollywood to pat itself on the
back for recognizing such enlightened thinking rather than give credit for
shows that are actually entertaining.
It's not like limited series like this don’t work
when done well: as I’ve written before I was a huge fan of American Crime when
it was on the air and there are certain aspects of it in Adolescence. But
the difference between those two shows was both pacing and looking outward to
see everybody effected by the crime that occurred. Adolescence’s perspective,
by contrast, seems to be designed to look inward. And it doesn’t help matters
that we spend the majority of the series with the killer and his family and
only one episode with the victim. How does that make this different or better
than Dahmer? I’ll grant the former is fictional and the latter true
crime but why would one be considered exploitive and the other a searing
portrait of humanity?
As I said, I will give a full review of Adolescence
after I see the entire series. I should say I’m glad there are only four
episodes so I can get through the whole thing quickly. I’m also not looking
forward to doing and want to check it off my list so I can get back to things
like the most recent seasons of Poker Face or The Pitt, which
actually sound like fun rather than the drag this really seems to be.
One last hypothetical before I leave though: if
you had seen this exact same storyline play out on an episode of SVU or NCIS,
minus the trappings but keeping with the same subject matter (for all I
know both series have dealt with it before this year) would you consider either
storyline worthy of awards or would you consider it exploitive and derivative
of a serious subject? Keep that in mind if you haven’t seen Adolescence yet.
My score (after episode 1) 2 stars.
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