It’s every parent’s worst nightmare — a teenage child doesn’t come home, and their body is found hours later. These are the harrowing but all too familiar circumstances that set up Adolescence, Netflix’s new four-part miniseries. The story, however, begins elsewhere with a scene plucked straight from another parental panic — riot police take a battering ram to the door of an everyday family home to arrest the owner’s 13-year-old son.
Adolescence immediately plunges into the harrowing events following the arrest of teenage Jamie Miller who is accused of murdering his classmate, Katie Leonard. The series, which is streaming now, has been lauded for its use of single-shot episodes that unfurl in real time, hurling the audience into the events with at-times uncomfortable intimacy.
