Adolescence, the Miniseries

I finished the last of the four episodes of the limited series Adolescence last night. I have to call it an emotionally wrenching experience. Each episode covered a different aspect of a terrible crime. The first was the arrest and incarceration of the 13-year-old boy accused of stabbing to death a female classmate of his.

For the most part, episode one might be thought of as a police procedural. The arrest, the placement in a holding cell, the early interviews, all of it pretty jarring. This is a 13-year-old boy, after all. He seems bewildered and overwhelmed by what is happening to him. There is no sign at all that this might be anticipated by someone who actually committed the crime. And, of course, throughout he denies doing it both to the police and to his father, who is present during the interviews.

The police seem convinced that they have the right person. As a viewer, I felt less certain. A part of me hoped that this innocent-looking, somewhat immature kid was being wrongly accused. His father believes him, but the police are certain, and they have some good evidence in the form of a video that captured the event. However, from the standpoint of the child, it all seems pretty brutal, the processing of a 13-year-old as though he were an adult.

The second episode is, for me, even more shocking. In this episode, the police inspector and sergeant visit the school to talk to the classmates and friends of the two kids involved. Any idea I had about British schools being better than American schools was dispelled. (It has been thirteen years since I retired. A lot of stuff has obviously gone down in that period.) However, it was bewildering to me to see how deteriorated secondary schools had become in terms of their discipline. This is a school in which students are required to wear uniforms, a thing that has been discussed a lot among educators in the US over the years. Whatever benefit that may have induced is minimal. Much more impactful is the presence and usage of smartphones, which nearly every kid seems to have, and social media appears to be among the precipitating causes of the crime. Beyond that, there are bullying events, overt disrespect shown to teachers, amazing disrespect shown towards the two police officers, and what can only be seen as a complete breakdown in civility.

As I said, I was shocked by watching this episode. I had seen things heading in this direction years ago, but found it hard to believe that it would actually happen without an equal, opposing response from school authorities. I guess I was a bit optimistic, maybe profoundly so. To call it a zoo would be to insult zoos. At least in a zoo, the animals are under control. In this building chaos and anarchy reigned.

The third episode takes place a month or more later, as the young man is interviewed by a court-appointed psychologist. The entire episode is taken up with this interaction, which is supposed to supply the court with an assessment of the young man’s mental state and the appropriateness of any future punishment. It provides a lot of real evidence to the audience that there is much more to this kid than was at first apparent. Through much of the interview, he appears calm, frightened, overwhelmed, taciturn. Then sprinkled throughout, he has eruptions of rage. His commission of the crime now seems a far greater possibility. He continues to express his innocence of the crime, seeming to think that he will be released. When he is essentially disabused of this idea, he has the greatest explosion.

I have to say here that after watching this episode, I had to check to find out if the series was a documentary or a drama. The acting was that convincing. Whoever this young actor is, he has one hell of a future ahead of him — he was amazing. The woman who played the psychologist was equally superb. Her reactions both during and after the interview are remarkable for their realism.

The final episode covers the family, the father, the mother, and the older sister. It is the most emotionally devastating of the four episodes. In it we see the full effect, longer term, of this crime on the family. It takes place several months later, though it includes a short interlude of a phone call by the son from where he is being held, ostensibly to wish his father happy birthday. During that call, we get one final blow.

The series won an Emmy. It probably deserved Emmys in several categories. Certainly, from the standpoint of the performances alone, it was incredibly good. As I mentioned above, I had to check to make sure it wasn’t a documentary. The only major problem is that, for an American, the thick British accents make a good deal of the dialogue simply opaque. I can honestly say that I probably understood less than 25% of what was being said, and I watch a lot of British series. However, it was not necessary to understand the words to know exactly what was happening.

The cinematography was also powerful. Most of the filming was done with handheld cameras. The cameraman is simply following the actors. This added to that feeling that what you were watching was actually happening as it was being filmed.

I suppose I should have put a spoiler warning at the start of this, but I don’t think that knowing these details will in any way diminish the effects of this series. It is incredibly powerful. It is, perhaps, the most realistic perspective on adolescent behavior I have ever seen. It excuses nothing and leaves nothing out. No rose colored glasses here.

Jonah Goldberg says that in every generation an invasion of barbarians occurs, and that it is the job of the older generation to civilize those invaders. He is, of course, talking about the children. It may well be that the current invasion is the worst yet. Or perhaps their predecessors have been the least prepared to deal with them. Whatever the case may be, it is not just in the US that this is happening, and it could well spell the end of Western Civilization in the same way the barbarians of Germania invaded Italy and Rome, destroying the Roman Empire and beginning the Dark Ages.