Though we’re not even halfway through the 2025 TV schedule, Adolescence may very well end up being the best show of the year. The 2025 Netflix original series, which consists of four one-shot episodes centering on a 13-year-old boy charged with the brutal murder of a classmate, is a grueling, powerful, and emotional experience from start to finish. This is especially the show’s third episode, which has the highest ranking on IMDb of all the episodes of the series.
Adolescence was really impactful to me when I watched it right after it hit the 2025 Netflix schedule, and I was enthusiastic to sit down with series co-creator and writer Jack Thorne to talk about all manner of topics related the show. During our chat, the Enola Holmes 3 screenwriter told me how a note from Netflix led to a big change to the episode, and I think it made the drama about Owen Cooper’s Jamie Miller even stronger.
In the original version of the episode, Thorne and co-creator and star Stephen Graham wrote a long introduction for Jamie’s psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty), walking through a detention center before her meeting began. This, Thorne told me, led to a note from Netflix:
The note came from Netflix: ‘It's taking too long to get to Jamie.’ What you do in a conventional show is film it and then work out how you're gonna cut it down in the edit. But what we did was we cut the script to pieces and we had Briony run through all these sets because she was late in this new telling on the way to Jamie. So all that stuff, all those decisions were being made at the script stage, and this, and because everyone could see it was like a Pixar animation, because everyone could see what the show was.
Since Adolescence was filmed in the one-shot format where everything had to be done in a single take, Thorne and co-creator and fellow writer Stephen Graham (he also stars in the series), along with director Philip Barantini and the cast, had to have everything ironed out in rehearsal before shooting.
As Thorne told me, they couldn’t “go in and do ADR or edit it for pace.”
As we were making it, we were correcting the script to make it perfect, so that then when we went into shoot week, everyone was happy. And that was the story we told.
And the story Jack Thorne and company gave Netflix audiences with the penultimate episode worked out brilliantly. Though it would have been great to see Briony go about her day before meeting with Jamie for their final visit before trial, the end result was a great capsule episode that showcased Thorne’s talents as a playwright.
Interestingly enough, as Thorne told me during our sprawling conversation, this was the first episode shot for the series, meaning the raw and intense performance from the young Owen Cooper was the cast and crew’s first introduction to the actor who’s talented beyond his years.
All four episodes of Adolescence are streaming with a Netflix subscription right now. You might want to give them a watch sooner rather than later, as this is surely a show we’ll be talking about a great deal as we get closer to the Primetime Emmy Awards, one of several upcoming awards shows.
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