The TV show I think about every time I look at my children

Washington Post

18-07-2025

When the Emmy nominations came out this week, some of my favorite TV shows were deservedly honored: 'The Pitt,' 'Severance,' 'The Studio,' all excellent shows intelligently made by seasoned, accomplished professionals that I nevertheless mostly watch while folding laundry and occasionally checking the score of the St. Louis Cardinals game on my phone.
But of all the Emmy-nominated shows this year, one — and only one — grabbed me by the lapels and shook me, forced me to put my phone and laundry in the next room, commanded my undivided attention. I think its heights reach the grandest level of the most ambitious cinema and stands as an exemplar of the finest that television, or art, has to offer. It is a show that — like the greatest and most challenging films, and like so little of TV — dares you to look away while knowing you won't be able to. I think it's the best thing that has been on television in a decade.
'Adolescence' has been nominated for 13 Emmys this year, including outstanding limited or anthology series, a best actor nod for Stephen Graham and a best supporting actor spot for 15-year-old Owen Cooper, making him the youngest ever nominee for the award.
When I'd first heard about 'Adolescence,' most of my friends talked about it like it was some sort of endurance test. Which is why it was surprising, when I began watching the first episode, that it, briefly, felt like a slightly snarky, clever Quentin Tarantino-esque genre cop thriller: Two English detectives, sitting in their car, bantering about indigestion and apples as they wait for a raid to begin.
Then we learn: They're raiding the home of a 13-year-old boy named Jamie, played by Cooper. He lives in working-class West Yorkshire, England, with his parents and sister, a seemingly normal, happy family. When the detectives burst in, they treat the situation delicately, sensitively, but with cold professionalism: There has been a murder, and they are here to arrest the person who did it.
That person turns out to be the adolescent Jamie, accused of killing a female classmate, and the rest of the episode sets the tone for the four-episode series: It is sober, rigorous, straightforward and mesmerizing.
Jamie's father, Eddie, is played by series co-creator Graham, previously known mostly for playing tough guys in Guy Ritchie and Martin Scorsese movies. Eddie is a dedicated father who finds the notion that his son could be capable of such savagery so absurd that he spends the entire episode agreeing to everything the police request just so he can get this whole supposed misunderstanding over with. His world — and the world of any parent watching, jaw-dropped — ends up shattered. Everything he ever thought he knew, everything he had ever cared about and loved, it all explodes in a devastating second. It is as emotionally overwhelming as any moment I've ever seen in a TV show. And there are still three episodes to go.
'Adolescence' is a show with a lot on its mind: the criminal justice system; crumbling education infrastructure; the nature of grief and loss; and, most of all, what 'manosphere' influencers such as Andrew Tate and the isolating, radicalizing nature of social media are doing to our children. Yet it makes sure to keep all of that as subtext. What 'Adolescence' is really about is people trying to remain upright in the wake of unspeakable tragedy.
Each episode is captured in a single uncut take. But the technique is so seamless and quiet that your average viewer, not so obsessed with cuts and camera tricks, might not even notice.
Even so, it gives 'Adolescence' an almost preternatural urgency, as if it were not written and performed by actors at all, but instead somehow happening in real time, for the first time, right there in front of you as you watch it. And it feels like you are experiencing it along with the characters; it feels like it is happening to you. It all leads — and I want to be as careful of spoilers as possible; even though millions have already watched it on Netflix, if you're not yet one of them, you deserve the privilege of discovery yourself — to a final moment of such raw, almost primal, emotion that I find myself thinking about it every time I look at my children: You want to protect that beautiful person you have devoted your entire life to, and yet you know that you can't — that their life is theirs, and it's a life you can never truly know.
'Adolescence' is so vividly present that it can feel like a found object, something that is not a reflection but an actual hyperrealistic slice of the world we live in — the world we have made. I've not quite been the same since I watched it, and I bet you won't be either. It feels like a foundational document of our time.