Recap of Episode 1 of ‘Adolescence’: My Son, My Son, What Have You Done?

There was a comment online implying that by removing the jungle footage from the current season of The White Lotus, it could be condensed into half an episode of engaging TV. But isn’t the jungle footage captivating TV itself? Criticizing the scenes of water, foliage, statues, and animals in between White Lotus episodes is like dismissing the nonessential elements of art. The unnecessary aspects are what define art! If you wish to know the summary of any show, you can easily find it on Wikipedia or even get a rough AI summary using Google. If that’s all you seek, go for it.

The first episode of Adolescence is straightforward. One morning, a squad of heavily armed cops, led by two calm detectives, raids the home of 13-year-old Jamie Miller (played by Owen Cooper in his remarkable debut role as an actor on TV) and arrests him for murder. He is taken to the station, processed, and questioned, mostly in the presence of his caring father, Eddie from Liverpool. Eddie, portrayed by Stephen Graham, known for his role in A Thousand Blows, is also the co-creator and co-writer of the show alongside Jack Thorne. Throughout the ordeal, Jamie vehemently asserts his innocence, and we have little reason to doubt him apart from the circumstances of his arrest.

Soon, the detectives, Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Misha Frank (Faye Marsay), reveal the decisive evidence. After an intense hour watching the frightened child cry and plead from the back seat of the car, refusing to face the camera or admit guilt to his father, they unveil security footage showing Jamie brutally murdering Katie. It becomes clear that he committed the crime. The story concludes.

The end if that’s all you care about, anyway. But what Thorne, Graham, and their chief collaborator, director Philip Barantini, have created in Adolescence can’t be captured in the Cliff’s Notes.

The big gimmick, which is obvious by now if you’ve watched the episode, is that it’s presented as one long take, with no cuts between shots or scenes at any time. This choice may seem odd, even ostentatious. This isn’t some Alfonso Cuarón situation where we’re meant to gaze in awe at the chaos his technological marvel of a camera manages to capture with minute after minute of unbroken footage. This is just a police raid, a drive to the station, and several strolls through its hallways. Airing it as a oner doesn’t have any obvious benefits from a spectacle standpoint; many critically acclaimed procedural crime dramas — The Night Of springs to mind as the most obvious antecedent here — are filmed in the standard way and no one complains.

But they probably should, because with increasingly rare exceptions, procedurals — crime, legal, medical — are boring as fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. (Was that enough ‘u’s? Not in my book!) Law & Order mastered the format literally 35 years ago. You can probably block out the shots required to show a suspect being brought in for questioning and processing in your mind’s eye — the exact rhythm of it, the placement of the camera and the actors, the sound effects and the cop voices, you name it. It’s child’s play, and not in the fun way.

What long takes offer a show like this is a vital ingredient: tedium. I’m dead serious, too. Think of any time you’ve been parked in some institutional space or another — a school, a court, a hospital — knowing your life is about to change forever but unable to fast-forward to the moment that change actually occurs. It’s maddeningly boring, a boredom made all the worse by your body’s flight-or-fight activation. It’s almost unbearable.

So it is here. When Bascombe and Frank make unpleasant small talk about Bascombe’s digestive issues prior to the raid, we’re there for every second of it. We’re there for every second of terror as the rest of the family stands or lies around with cops’ guns pointed at them as Jamie is arrested. We’re there in the police van as Jamie is driven to the station, sobbing. We’re there as he’s made to answer various questions and endure various inspections. We’re there with his family in the waiting room. We follow cops and lawyers around not just when they’re actually doing something, but when they’re making their long walks through this unpleasant place to wherever they need to go to do those things. 

Even before we’re shown that security camera footage, even before the long closing shot that shows Eddie recoiling from his son’s touch before turning on him, demanding to know why he did it, then hugging him, we’re being made to sit with it, to sit with it all. The confusion, the frustration, the unexpected moments of kindness, the obsequious fawning of the family for being shown even the slightest consideration — when Barlow informs Eddie that the cops likely have very strong evidence on his son, Eddie ends the conversation with a crushingly informal thanks of “ta” — it all feels more real because we’ve watched it all unfold in real time, without a moment’s respite, even during the stuff normal films and shows would trim for being unnecessary. Again, the unnecessary is the essence of art. (By some definitions, art is inherently unnecessary, or else it would be some other thing.)

It’s the tedium that makes the gut punches hit home. You have to have gone through as close to what Eddie Miller goes through as possible — all his frantic flailing to keep up with the machinery of justice currently grinding up his son — for his terror to land when he tells Barlow “I just don’t wanna get it wrong for my lad, you know what I mean?” You have to have gone through what he went through for the lingering closeup on his face while his son is strip searched and photographed nude to be as devastating as it is. (Years ago, a large and vocal subset of viewers got angry at Game of Thrones for using this exact same maneuver to depict the rape of a female character by showing a male character’s horrified reaction; those viewers were morons.) You have to have gone through what he went through for that final revelation to hurt you on anything even approximating the level Eddie has been hurt.

You need to feel like you’ve been dragged to hell and back over the course of an hour for the horror of it all to hit home. From start to finish, that camera grabs you by the collar and pulls you wherever it wants to go, and like the Millers, you’ve got no choice but to go along for the ride.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.