The new Netflix miniseries Adolescence packs a lot into its four episodes. It is, depending on the chapter, a police procedural; a sociological examination of male rage, cyberbullying, and a failing British school system; a psychological thriller; and a tragedy about how in the 21st century, a child’s bedroom can be the most dangerous place in the world for them to be. 

Two elements tie all this ambition together. The first is that everything spins out of the same criminal investigation into whether 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) murdered a female classmate. The second is that every episode is filmed in a single shot — or, in filmmaking parlance, a oner. 

Oners used to be so difficult to pull off, and so rare, that only top directors like Alfred Hitchcock (Rope), Orson Welles (Touch of Evil) or Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas) even attempted them. But improvements in camera technology (and, more recently, drone technology) have made the process more common. Movies like Children of Men and Birdman have been presented entirely as oners, and TV shows ranging from True Detective to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to The Bear have memorably done long oners. Adolescence isn’t even the only oner-centric TV show of March, as Apple’s upcoming Seth Rogen showbiz satire The Studio features at least one in every episode, and has an all-oner episode called, simply, “The Oner.” 

So there’s a risk that the gimmick of Adolescence, written by Jack Thorne and its co-star, Stephen Graham, and directed by Philip Barantini, could come across as both routine and ostentatious — a “bit of flash,” as one of its teenage characters sneers when she feels an adult is showing off to her. But the device here is never less than astonishing — and, for that matter, essential to why the show works as powerfully as it does. 

Barantini, cinematographer Matthew Lewis, and the rest of the crew continually find ways to make the movement of the camera seamless, no matter what it’s filming or where it’s moving. (The producers have said these episodes were, in fact, filmed as one take, rather than multiple shots invisibly stitched together, the way something like 1917 was.) In one episode, a suspect flees cops Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) by jumping out a first-story window, and we just follow him out the window, through various school buildings, into oncoming traffic, and more. The opening episode begins with the cops entering the house where Jamie lives with his parents Eddie (Graham) and Manda (Christine Tremarco) and sister Lisa (Amelie Pease), then follows them all to a nearby police station; by the end of that hour, it feels like the camera has explored every room of the place.

Yet the single-take approach rarely calls attention to itself in Adolescence. It’s there to make the series’ sprawl of ideas all feel like part of the same story, no matter how different each episode might otherwise feel from one another. And it’s there to trap viewers inside the same nightmare that the Millers find themselves in as they begin to contemplate the idea that baby-faced Jamie might have committed a monstrous crime. 

Because there are no cuts, there is no escape from the raw, difficult emotions of any given moment. After Jamie is arrested, he’s required to strip naked so the police can process his clothes for DNA evidence. The camera doesn’t show this, but instead comes to rest on the face of his father, struggling to stay composed while other grown men make his pubescent son disrobe in front of them. Other adults in the room opt to avert their eyes as Jamie disrobes, but Eddie can’t turn away, out of a mix of protectiveness and horrified shock, in the same way that there’s no editor to protect the characters, the actors, or the audience from having to live in each terrible moment of the scene. 

Stephen Graham as Eddie Miller during his son Jamie’s strip-search. Courtesy of Netflix

The middle chapters present an amazing one-two punch of how varied the series’ approach is, even while dealing with this case and this way of filming it. The second episode takes place in and around Jamie’s school, where Bascombe and Frank have gone to search for a key piece of evidence in their case, but also because Bascombe — whose son coincidentally is a student there — is desperate to find an explanation for how such a terrible thing could have happened among these children. The hour unfolds through a big location, features dozens of extras, and its focus keeps shifting between the cops, the teachers, and various groups of students who are having wildly disparate responses to the murder, from overwhelming grief to juvenile amusement. It has fight scenes and the aforementioned foot chase, but also moments of quiet and acute pain. And it gets its point across about how unprepared the schools are to attend to the needs and problems of students at this moment in history, almost entirely through showing, rather than telling(*). It’s big and bold. 

(*) Though Frank does get to indelibly — and unfortunately accurately — describe the scent of every public school as, “like a mixture of vomit, cabbage, and masturbation.”

And then the third episode — among the most soul-shaking hours of television I can recall in quite some time — is its structural opposite: a compact duet between Jamie and court-appointed psychologist Briony (Erin Doherty) that takes place almost entirely in one room in the facility where Jamie is being held while awaiting trial. In this case, the oner isn’t used to capture just how many lives have been linked and impacted by this single act of violence, but to provide an unflinching look at the boy accused of committing it. Briony is there to assess how much Jamie understands about the nature and consequences of this crime — and, like Bascombe, to try to make sense of what seems so completely senseless. So the camera swirls around these two sparring partners as they take each other’s measure, and it doesn’t flinch as their conversation takes massive emotional swings.  

Doherty’s been acting for years, notably on The Crown, and Graham is among the U.K.’s busiest actors; the two of them are even currently appearing in another streaming drama, Hulu’s period boxing/crime story A Thousand Blows. So it’s not that surprising that they would be so effective with such tricky, heavy material — even if the intensity of it is a lot to ask of any performer, and even if Eddie, while given to explosions of temper, is on the whole a much more nuanced and vulnerable character than the swaggering thugs Graham is so often asked to play. But for Owen Cooper, in his first screen credit, to do all the things asked of him in this role, is staggering. While the camera stays on him, he can go from calm, even playful, to sad, or to utterly terrifying, within the span of seconds, and have it all feel completely natural and riveting. What a find.  

Even with these great performances, even with the technical brilliance on display, this is not an easy watch. The finale, where Eddie, Manda, and Lisa have to reckon with what the rest of their lives may be like, and with the ways they fear they failed Jamie, is almost unbearably sad at times. But in what Adolescence has to say, and in how eloquently and audaciously it says it, it’s also among the very best things — and an early contender for the best thing — you will see on the small screen this year. 

All four episodes of Adolescence begin streaming March 13 on Netflix. I’ve seen the whole thing.