Growing pains

Rarely can there have been a TV series so deserving of sweeping the board at the Emmys than Netflix's Adolescence. The awards - for the actors (Stephen Graham, Owen Cooper and Erin Doherty), the writing (Graham in collaboration with Jack Thorne), the direction (Philip Barantini) and the whole shebang - were more than merited.

Graham excelling as a troubled soul in a grimly gritty drama series is of course nothing new - see the This Is England trilogy, Boiling Point, Time and The Virtues. But Adolescence was a first foray into TV acting for his rookie co-star Cooper, who was only 14 at the time of filming but delivered an astonishing performance as the wayward teenage boy whose misogynistic crime sets the plot in motion. Petrified by fear when arrested in the first episode, he reappears in the third (a phenomenally tense hour in an interview room with Doherty's child psychologist) full of bravado - his mask of nonchalance slipping briefly, unable to contain his inner rage.

Aside from it being Cooper's debut, the other main talking point was the decision to film each of the four episodes in a single shot. There have been suggestions that, while technically impressive (especially the choreography required in the school setting of the second episode), it's gimmicky and show-offish. I'd disagree - as in Boiling Point, the technique serves a very particular purpose, ratcheting up the intensity by never allowing the characters to relax or the audience to blink.

As a parent, Adolescence was an extremely tough watch - tougher even than Season 4 of The Wire. Knowing that you can have so little influence in the face of other factors in terms of guiding your own child's behaviour and protecting them from harm is, frankly, terrifying - especially when you have a son about to begin navigating the choppy waters of teenagerhood.

This is partly why I wasn't so sure about the clamour to screen the series in schools - it's hardly an unambiguous cautionary tale. Not only does it focus on the family of the perpetrator rather than on the family of the victim, but it also offers no easy narratives or simple solutions. In The Virtues, Thorne and Graham at least gave some explanation for the lead character's psychological damage; in Adolescence, the situation is more nuanced and complex, with Graham's character's inability to accept or comprehend his son's subtle radicalisation and actions and his consequent feelings of helplessness likely to haunt the audience too.

But then that complexity is the reality, and it's the mark of a high-quality series that it treats its viewers as grown-ups, avoiding facile conclusions. TV can't be expected to have all the answers. What Adolescence has helped to do is to expose the nature and scale of the problem and get us asking the right questions.