Adolescence Review

The one shot conceit could have been a stunt and is not, because the camera's refusal to cut is the argument: nobody in this story gets to look away, edit themselves or skip the parts that hurt. The first hour, a dawn arrest that moves from a suburban bedroom through a custody suite to a solicitor's interview in real time, is technically astonishing and emotionally unbearable. The third episode is the best of them, a single conversation between a psychologist and the boy in a bare room, in which Owen Cooper switches between child and something colder so fast that you understand the whole subject at once.

Erin Doherty is his equal in that room. Stephen Graham's father, and the final hour spent watching him try to buy paint on his birthday, turns the show into a study of a man auditing his own life. The weakest section is the school in the second episode, where the satire of an underfunded institution is broader than the surrounding restraint. Otherwise close to perfect.