Netflix is currently ranking the British miniseries “Adolescence” as its most-watched television show among Americans. The streaming service shrouds the methods by which it reaches these metrics in a lot of mumbo-jumbo. But this drama, about a thirteen-year-old boy who is suspected of killing a girl at his school, is, by my observations, creeping toward critical and fan consensus. Are Americans stunned by “Adolescence” because of the culture shock it offers? Over here, the drama about a white pubescent child and his purported mortal sin would unfold as a true-crime detective plot. How was the girl murdered? Did the boy really kill her? Exeunt. Once you finish the first episode, the whodunnit element of “Adolescence” has been dealt with. The question it poses, and refuses to resolve, is why.

Still, “Adolescence” has a relentless visual movement. The creators, Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, never forget that they have a theatrical duty to fulfill, in tandem with their moral ambitions; one intensifies the other. Each episode of the miniseries—there are four, each one about an hour long—is shot in one take. I’m not going to blather on about how impressive the technique is, as is mandated of critics when a team makes such an ambitious decision. The vaunted single take is, more often than not, actually a falsity, fabricated by clever edits or preening, doing nothing alchemical to the script at hand. But “Adolescence” does not fall prey to the lure of gimmickry; the show legitimately could not have been shot any other way. The camera is treated as a condemned instrument.

Many will report the first episode of the show to be unbearable. An English town—in West Yorkshire—at dawn. We begin in a police vehicle, as two officers, Luke Mascombe (Ashley Walters) and Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) strap up. Mascombe receives a call from his son, who is trying to get out of school; full of obvious pride, Mascombe tells Frank that his son makes his overtures to him and not to his mother because he is the soft one. “Adolescence” is trained on the distances between father and son, how biological and domestic proximity can keep one from knowing the other.

Battering down the door of an unassuming middle-class home, the officers, who are in riot gear, claim reason to search the house, which belongs to a family of four. The father, Eddie Miller (played by the series co-creator Graham, a veteran English actor), is incensed and confused. He is barrel-chested, a real presence, and so we suspect that the officers are after him. But their target turns out to be a boy named Jamie, played by Owen Cooper, who was fourteen during filming. It is Cooper’s screen début. The young actor has a disconcerting awareness of the roiling potential of his changing body. Cooper is not mimicking an adult writer’s idea of pubescence; he is embodying it. In fact, in this moment of chaos and fear, he seems like a pre-teen. Mascombe informs him that he is being arrested. Jamie wets himself. The officers allow Eddie, indignant and disempowered by the search, to come in to help his son. Then they explain that they’re bringing Jamie in for questioning: he is suspected of murdering his classmate Katie.

Mascombe takes Jamie into the station. Jamie’s mother, Manda Miller (played by Christine Tremarco, fabulous as a woman trying to keep a broken unit together), stays behind with his sister Lisa, and Eddie heads to the station in his own car.. The journey is shot in real time, and we, like the characters, fill our heads with theories and recriminations along the way. We feel as Eddie feels: this is a case of misidentification. This boy is not capable of killing anyone.

The script has a granular interest in the peculiarities of English double-speak. The politesse, the “love” at the end of harried and desperate inquiries. “Look at your dad. Pop yourself up here,” a nurse tells Jamie, at the station, as she draws blood from the boy for DNA testing. The scene—it continues with Jamie being strip-searched and photographed, as the camera turns away from him so that we only see the flash of the police camera—pretends to realism. This story is pulled less from the headlines than from a culture’s sickened heart.

Mascombe, who is Black, leads the questioning. We do not see action and battering in the interrogation room. Mascombe pulls focus, suddenly swelling with authority, as Eddie, sitting beside Jamie, retreats into a crossed-arm posture of bafflement. Eddie had not known that his son had been out with friends the evening before; Eddie had not known that his son had been following Katie; Eddie had not known that his son had discarded his trainers, nor that he had procured a knife. Jamie and Mascombe are locked in a conversation that Eddie can’t join. Another man may know his child better than him, and what could be worse for a repressed, overworked father? The officers play a video of an encounter between Jamie and Katie. Its meaning should be plain as day. But the father tries to will himself not to see what he has seen.

The purview of “Adolescence” soon expands past the awful fact of the boy’s crime to address an awful world. The director, Philip Barantini, at the helm for all four episodes, suffocates both the characters and the audience with a long sequence at Jamie’s school, where the officers have come to question the boy’s classmates. The place is labyrinthine, teeming with chaotic scenes of teen-age cruelty. We meet a bully, Fredo. We watch one kid take a punch in the mouth in the yard. The adults—the teachers, the cops—are overwhelmed, ineffective, dazed. A fire alarm goes off, and although there are no flames the institution is the picture of volatility. Mascombe had entered the school confident that the students would provide him with the answers he sought; what he experiences is total hostility and disdain. Jamie, he learns, sat low in the hierarchy, friends with only two other boys who were similarly tagged as outcasts. Katie did not care for him; she may even have bullied him online. It is Mascombe’s own son, Adam, (Amari Jayden Bacchus), a recalcitrant kid, Fredo’s favorite target, who gets his father to understand his own ignorance. “It’s not going well because you’re not getting it,” Adam explains. “You’re not reading what they’re doing, what’s happening.” He shows his father a comment that Katie posted on Jamie’s Instagram. “Looks like she’s being nice?” Actually, the boy explains, the emojis she uses are coded ways of denigrating Jamie, of calling him an incel. “Adolescence” lives in the paranoid world that Andrew Tate made.

The most critically lauded episode of the series is the third. It occurs seven months after Jamie’s arrest. He is being held in a young-offenders institution. Its noise, boys screaming, could pass as typical roughhousing or as agony. A psychologist, Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty), passes through security to visit Jamie; she makes sure to bring him a hot chocolate with sprinkles. What unfolds is a two-person dialogue on the subject of fragile masculinity. The interaction between Briony and Jamie starts off amiably, with Jamie needling Briony for her posh affectations. He seems older than the frightened boy we’d seen before, now hardened. Briony then leads Jamie down a line of questioning that unnerves him. “Do you think girls are attracted to you?” she asks. He thinks that he is ugly. He looks for reassurance from the specialist, but her mandate is to understand him, not to mother him. He pleads, “Aren’t you supposed to say I’m not ugly?” Afterward, Briony can’t recover from her interaction with Jamie; she pants and clutches her chest as if she has seen Lucifer himself. It is the sort of zinger storytelling that stuns you and then leaves you empty. The dynamic struck me as earnest and artificial.

How does a child come to kill a child? In the U.S., and in most of cinema, the adolescent male killer comes to express his toxic loneliness and florid rage through shooting a gun. The Office for National Statistics reports that, in England and Wales, eighty-three per cent of teen-age homicide victims were stabbed to death between 2023 and 2024. The knife attack is foreign to Americans, who feel, watching “Adolescence,” a paradoxical alienation. This is not our boy, and yet we know him. The creators of “Adolescence” think of the contemporary English boy as a breakable creature, abandoned by society. No one has taught him how to manage his incipient sexuality; no one has taught him how to cope with rejection. Interestingly, the feeling of abandonment mirrors the animating force of the nastiest parts of the American manosphere: the belief that men got left behind.

Throughout the series, Eddie laments his parenting, and questions whether he’d unwittingly abdicated his responsibilities. The final scene, in Episode 4, which sees the Miller family feign a day of normalcy on the occasion of Eddie’s fiftieth birthday, ends with the weeping father crumpled in his son’s bed, begging his forgiveness. And yet this is not the “sins of the father” literary scenario of earlier centuries. Rather, this son is inheriting an earth his father does not know. “Adolescence” is made from the anguished vantage of Generation X, the literal and metaphorical parents of Generation Z. It has the inverse logic of a show like “Euphoria,” which triggered old-fashioned moral panic for its fetishizing of teen rebellion; “Adolescence” instead makes a fetish of the moral panic. The internet is not represented through spliced-in screens but, rather, as an emanating evil—a vapor—warping the world of naïve mothers and fathers. Warping Jamie, too, who has the face not of a teen but of a child. It is one of the more wounded shows I’ve seen. ♦