Jack Tame: Netflix' Adolescence is devastatingly perfect

The time was 3.34am on a Wednesday morning and I lay there wideawake.

I pressed the screen on my phone to check the time any messages, I wondered? I flipped my pillow, shifted my weight and tried to sleep.

The obvious cause of my insomnia was the five-week-old grunting and squirming in his sleep sack, a few feet away from me. But it wasn’t the humidity, or the Police helicopter making one of its swoops over the neighbourhood, and this insomnia wasn't caused by a baby.

It was caused by Adolescence.

My wife and I had watched the final episode, episode four, a few hours earlier. The episode finished, like most of them, in devastating fashion. I sat there, turning over the story in my mind.

If you haven’t yet caught the Adolescence buzz, the show has had more hype in the couple of weeks since it came to Netflix than almost any other show in recent times. It’s broken all sorts of records. After just eleven days, it broke the record for the highest-number of Netflix streams in a two week period. Tens of millions of views Worldwide... with millions more everyday. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Tame podcast
from News Talks at Me.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
The time was three point thirty four am on a
Wednesday morning, and I lay there, wide awake. I pressed
the screen on my phone, you know, like you do,
just to kind of check the time. Any messages, I wondered.
I flipped my pillow, I shifted my weight, and I
tried to sleep. The obvious cause of my insomnia was

(00:34):
the five week old grunting and squirming in his sleepsack
a few feet away from me. But it wasn't the
humidity or the police helicopter making one of its swoops
over the neighborhood. And this insomnia wasn't caused by a baby.
It was caused by adolescents. My wife and I had

(00:55):
watched the final episode, Episode four, a few hours earlier.
The episode finished, like most of them, in devastating fashion,
and I just lay there, just turning over the store
in my mind. If you haven't yet caught The Adolescence Buzz,
the show I think has had more hype in the
couple of weeks since it came to Netflix than almost

(01:17):
any other show in recent times. It's broken all sorts
of records. After just eleven days, it broke the record
for the highest number of Netflix streams in a two
week period, tens of millions of views worldwide, with millions
more every day. And in a sense, it's a pretty
simple concept, right. Adolescence is a four episode series set

(01:39):
in the UK about a knife crime. A young woman
has been stabbed to death. Every episode has an incredibly
ambitious production quality in that it's done in all one shot,
so the whole thing forty five minutes or an hour
long in the case for a couple of episodes, one take,

(02:00):
and in the words of the creator, Stephen Graham, it's
less of a who done it? Than a why done it?
As someone who's worked in TV for nigh on twenty
years now, I feel like I've got a pretty good
sense of just how hard it is to make a
one shot show. Technically speaking, it is just ridiculously complicated.

(02:22):
I just don't think most people appreciate how hard it
is to light a single scene, let alone scene after
scene after scene, going from indoors to outdoors, to classrooms
to hallways to drone shots one hundred meters off the ground.
In some cases. Sound recording is such a pain, and
what if an actor screws up a line twenty minutes

(02:43):
in Will You Start Again? That's what I read a
piece which explained that many of the crew and adolescents
who were working on the production team had to dress
as extras during the show's production so that if they
were caught in the back of shot, it would hopefully
make sense. It's funny. When I told a friend about
the show, I said, oh, yeah, it's all done in

(03:03):
one shot. He said, well, what's the point. Sounds like
a bit of a gimmick. Personally speaking, though, I just
found that filming it in one shot never gave me
the chance to subconsciously look away or to catch my breath.
There was no chance to check my phone. The story
didn't pause because the people didn't pause. The scene didn't

(03:24):
end until the episode ended. And what scenes. Ah, the
speed of episode one. I just love how it had
all of the kind of banal but nonetheless fascinating procedural stuff,
the process, the chaos of episode two at the school

(03:44):
it was. It was like a stunning vision of a
totally dysfunctional space, a totally dysfunctional school, the teachers yelling
to try and control the kids, the teachers who didn't care.
Episode three, My god, what a brave call, what a
bold call. Just two people in what was basically an

(04:05):
empty room. There was no thing of kind of visual interest,
just two actors in conversation, the volatility, the brinksmanship, the unraveling.
And then episode four, all that was lost, the desperation,
the performances, and adolescents, especially Steven Graham. I just thought,

(04:29):
we're astonishing. I immediately became that person annoyingly texting all
of his friends and family and group chats and asking
who'd seen it. And it's funny because you know, we
think of movies as being art, you know, film cinema.
It's kind of high art, right, and well it can be.

(04:52):
I just think we probably don't think of TV as
being art in quite the same way, or at least
as often as we do with films. But how do
you define good art? Surely it's a creative work that
makes people feel, that affects them, that sticks with them,
that has them tossing and turning in bed at three

(05:12):
point thirty two am on a Wednesday morning, replaying scenes
in their head. It has been a long long time
since a TV show affected me like adolescents. As a story,
it was devastating. As a TV drama, it was close
to perfect.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame. Listen live
to news Talks a'd B from nine am Saturday, or
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