Sitting at the top of our best streaming shows of the year so far and with a lofty 98 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, Adolescence is breakthrough telly: gripping, innovative, and with plenty to say about social issues, education, Andrew Tate and incel culture, cyber-bullying, the importance of male role models, and teen violence. If you haven’t seen it yet, tee it up asap.
The four-part Netflix drama – co-written by, and starring, Stephen Graham – follows in the aftermath of the brutal stabbing of a teenage schoolgirl in an unnamed town in the north of England. The chief suspect, boyish 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), is arrested and taken to the local police station. Episode 1 charts the early stages of the police investigation, taking in the booking process, a roughly handled strip search, the appointment of a solicitor (Mark Stanley), and preliminary questioning – as traumatised parents Eddie (Graham) and Manda (Christine Tremarco) stand helplessly by.
The second episode sees the investigating duo, DI Luke Bascombe (Top Boy’s Ashley Walters) and DS Misha Frank (Andor’s Faye Marsay), head to the local school to question Jamie and the victim, Katie Leonard’s fellow pupils.
The drama is never less than taut and gripping throughout, with the one-take filmmaking approach generating a harrowing sense of momentum. But how successful is the show as a police procedural? We asked former police constable, Steven Barclay, to explain what it gets right – and wrong.
The house raid
‘I liked that it shows that police officers are normal people, with DI Bascombe burping in the police car and then being a little bit real, because that’s what police officers are – they talk about their diets; they talk about family issues; they have kids at schools giving them grief like Bascombe’s son.
But if they found the body at 10.30pm why are they waiting until the morning to arrest him? That's one thing the police are really good at. They move fast. Is the raid realistic? I used to do raids like this and if we’d had firearms officers in this situation, we would have looked at each other and gone: “This is a 13-year-old boy, we don’t need two big lads with a shield.” Yes, a knife is a deadly weapon, but they have baton rounds (rubber bullets). You would have so many things to de-escalate in that situation.
Jamie pees his pants and I've had people wet themselves when we’ve been dealing with firearms incidents. But the search and evidence preservation was poor. The police use specialist search teams. You literally do training for it. You get paid extra money. You get brought in at 3am in the morning for murders. You don’t throw mail on the floor. You don’t pour shit on the bed like it was in the 1970s and rummage through it. It would all be documented with cameras. DC Bascombe has his camera off in the van and the solicitor would say: “Why’d you turn your camera off? What did you say to my client?” Nowadays, a police officer's word is good for nothing if it’s not recorded.’
The interrogation
‘It doesn’t make sense that they’d strip search Jamie after he’s been in a cell for 45 minutes. If you’re suspicious that he's hiding something, he’d have time to harm himself. The strip search itself would be done by a doctor and a nurse; you wouldn't have two burly ginger police officers like me standing there in uniform going: “Yeah, get your cock out mate.” He’s a 13-year-old child, and the solicitor would absolutely have made them stop.
With a 13-year-old suspect, there would be a specialist unit involved. They would have been talking to Jamie like a teenager, instead of playing bad cops. If you start being horrible to suspects, they clam up. Especially with a kid, you don't want him to get upset. I would literally say to them: “Mate, I've arrested you. I don't know what's happened and I know this is shit.” You want them to feel comfortable. I could never do their job, but the sexual offending team is nice to sex offenders for that same reason.
The school visit
‘I don't even think you need to have been in the police force to understand you wouldn't just get to police officers walking into classrooms like they do in episode 2. There'd be a long list of kids that they wanted to speak to – and it wouldn't be by request. They would not be walking into classrooms willy-nilly: "Hi everybody, something bad's happened.” It's a murder enquiry, you wouldn't go into classrooms and start chatting about it, because kids could say something and then it's evidential.
It would be so well planned with the school, with counsellors, with parents. The kid whose mum is at work and the teacher sits in on her interview, she's a major friend of Katie Leonard's. It's not going to be a casual chat where she can go whenever she wants.'
* Stephen’s name has been changed at his request
Where was Adolescence filmed? Behind the scenes on Netflix’s jaw-dropping knife crime drama.
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