Using one-shots, ‘Adolescence’ effectively portrays a powerful story

“Adolescence,” a U.K. limited series premiering Thursday on Netflix, isn’t what the title might lead you to expect, and to the extent that it is about adolescence, it’s far from the sort of frisky coming-of-age story TV more usually throws up. Growing up in a world ruled by social media and social Darwinism — and an older generation’s cluelessness as to what that entails — does, however, form a background to the narrative, such as it is, along with exchanges on the meaning of masculinity and the distorting power of teenage self-image. Though it was inspired by a spate of real-world knife attacks — the sort of material that might invite sensationalism or prompt a heavy-handed lecture — “Adolescence” avoids both.

Told in four chronologically discrete episodes, the series concerns 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper, in an astonishing debut), arrested on suspicion of murdering a girl from his class. In the first, he’s taken noisily from his home by an armored SWAT team, trailed to the station by father Eddie (Stephen Graham, also a co-creator), mother Manda (Christine Tremarco) and sister Lisa (Amelie Pease), and interrogated, with Eddie by his side as an “appropriate adult.” The second episode, set two days later, finds detectives Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) at Eddie’s school, interviewing students and teachers. The third, set several months later, is a conversation between Jamie, in custody, and a psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty); and the fourth, set months after that, follows the family through a rough day, Jamie still incarcerated but not yet come to trial. (He’s heard only on the phone.)

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Each episode consists of a single shot; one assumes it’s postproduction invisible weaving, because having to retake a scene that goes bad at the 44th minute of a 45-minute episode won’t work for the budget and certainly not for the actors, but the footage never smacks of digital trickery. The “oner,” as a long tracking shot is sometimes called, has a distinguished history: There are the celebrated opening sequences of Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil” and Robert Altman’s “The Player” (which itself celebrated “Touch of Evil”); the so-called “Copa shot” in “Goodfellas.” But Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 “Rope,” which aesthetically split the difference between theater and soundstage, is a whole film in one shot (clunky devices mask the points when the film magazine needed to be changed), as was Alejandro González Iñárritu’s slicker “Birdman” 66 years later.

In Episode 3, Erin Doherty plays psychologist Briony Ariston, who interviews Jamie (Owen Cooper) while in custody.

(Ben Blackall / Netflix)

It’s a gimmick, or a tool, or an approach that perhaps works best when you’re not aware of it, because it can split your attention, and your admiration, between what’s happening and how it’s been made and take you out of the piece. I didn’t notice at all that “Review,” the celebrated penultimate episode of the first season of “The Bear,” was a single shot; I only felt the chaos and crowdedness. With “Adolescence,” the tactic didn’t sink in immediately; the police raid that opens the series is a natural for this sort of treatment. But then it continued, traveling to the purgatorial police station, making its way into the institutional warren that represents a new reality for these characters, and the plan became clear, and interesting.

It underscores the story in effective ways — when an image never cuts, the viewer, like the characters, is trapped in their world. In the fourth episode, set among the Miller family in their community, it’s as if they’re trying to escape the series’ surveillance. And the choreography of camera and bodies, should you care to contemplate it, is remarkable, navigating crowds and corridors and public places with impossible grace. Long, uninterrupted scenes also allow a superb cast to dive into character and the moment, a luxury piecemeal film production doesn’t afford. At times, this can become a little theatrical — Graham wrote the series with playwright and screenwriter Jack Thorne (“Toxic Town”) — as in the third-episode, mostly a two-hander featuring Jamie and the psychologist. But more often it supports rather than subverts the reality.

Though it involves a crime and the justice system, including a raid, interrogation, shoe-leather investigation and a chase scene — and there is some room to wonder whether we’re being given a complete picture — “Adolescence” isn’t in any usual sense a police or legal procedural. It has something to do with process; we get a glimpse of how a person is taken into the system and what happens there in a way that highlights its banality and the strong feelings it is designed to contain. But it’s primarily about family, and self-reflection, and especially fathers and sons (Det. Bascombe has one too, who goes to Eddie’s school), and if the series doesn’t wind down to a traditional conclusion, it achieves a novelistic power in the end.