Netflix’s gripping new series Adolescence will be remembered as one of this year’s best and most talked about TV dramas. Luke Buckmaster unpacks its bold “one-shot” approach.
Netflix’s gripping four-part series Adolescence is a real watercooler production. Critics are draining the dictonary’s supply of superlatives and audiences are responding to its key themes: hot-button issues such as the impact of social media on youth and toxic, Andrew Tate-esque notions of the “manosphere.” Tonally this UK-produced show, from co-creators Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, combines heartrending family drama with police procedural-esque elements, revolving plotwise around the arrest of a 13-year-old boy, Jamie (Owen Cooper), for the murder of a classmate.
Director Philip Barantini deploys a “one-shot” or “single-take” approach, every episode consisting of a single unbroken image from beginning to end. With so much to think about in the aforementioned themes, the show’s bold visuality tends to be mentioned only briefly in reviews and other commentaries. Here I’ve explored it in detail, unpacking three key reasons why it works so well—and how it impacts the nature and staging of the drama.
Single takes both liberate and challenges actors
In some ways the one-shot approach makes life more difficult for actors, who must stretch out their performances and remain in the zone. Though this also has benefits: they have more room to live, breathe and really feel the character, rather than turning their emotions on and off like a tap. It’s a different style of acting, closer to theatre than conventional television. Performance-wise, the stakes are high: if an actor flubs a line 30 minutes in, the whole thing starts again.
The cast of Adolescence are exceptional across the board, but MVP status should surely be awarded to Owen Cooper—partly in recognition that his portrayal of Jamie is, astonishingly, his first on-screen performance. The police interrogation scene in episode one, which tensely leads up to the presentation of shocking evidence, is faultlessly performed, as is a scene in the third between Jamie and a psychologist (Erin Doherty). Or should I say the scene, given it almost entirely takes place in a single room.
It’s not the way Cooper holds the scene that really impresses, but the way he changes it: how his performance moves, curves and oscillates, bending from light to dark, from casual chit-chat to chilling outbursts.
Single takes make the dull interesting
In film and television, one of the core purposes of cutting is to reduce time. We see a person at the bottom of a flight of stairs, for instance, then—cut!—they’re at the top. The stale middle bit has been removed, adhering to Alfred Hitchock’s theory that “drama is life, with the dull bits cut out.”
Without the ability to crunch time, single-take productions encourage storytellers to avoid these moments or imbue their transitory nature with something else. Something to make the dull bits interesting.
The stairway-equivalent moment in Adolescence is Jamie’s trip to the police station, which probably wouldn’t have been included had the show deployed standard editing techniques. It’s a tense, protracted moment: in the back of the car, he sobs and protests his innocence, while a detective (Ashley Walters) advises him on his rights. The audience don’t know what to think given where this scene in positioned timewise, taking place before any real consideration of his guilt or innocence.
Single takes encourage a deep sense of location
Ordinarily, changing locations is easy: a director simply cuts from one environment to another. In single-take productions, the camera and the person operating it must physically move into another space. Thus directors like Barantini (who has form when it comes to single-take stories, helming the excellent 2021 film Boiling Point) tend to physically explore their settings extensively, understanding that visual energy comes entirely from movement of the frame.
In terms of sheer logistics, the most challenging episode in Adolescence was probably the second, cinematographer Matthew Lewis telling Variety that it was an “absolute nightmare.” The camera navigates through an extras-packed high school, sometimes slowly and sometimes very quickly, eventually culminating with a shot that literally lifts off the ground—the camera fitted to a drone and flying away.
When you recall this series, your mind will most gravitate towards human details and remember the people first. But you’ll also think of where they are; the space around them. Discussions about the ingredients for interesting drama often overlook the interplay between narrative and environment. Productions like Adolescence remind us that stories belong to places, and places tell stories.
