To think Adolescence was a little overblown with sketchy acting?

[Radish81]

I was interested in it and “enjoyed it”

but I thought it was a bit overblown and some of the acting…. Well, a bit shit really.

i feel like the only person on the planet to think this!

I thought most of it was outstanding. There were a few moments which had me thinking ‘that wouldn’t happen in real life’, but then it wasn’t real life, was it?

Once Jamie decided he was changing his plea to guilty, I'm not sure there was any unfinished business. The final episode gave us a foretaste of how life will go on for the family without Jamie - the dad's unpredictable aggression, the enabling by the wife and daughter, the nosey neighbours, visits to see Jamie. Yes, there could have been a further episode showing the daughter leaving home and visits to Jamie, one dealing with Jamie's sentencing, one tying up the loose ends about Ryan and the location of the knife, one about continuing repercussions at the school, but they wouldn't have added much to the toxic masculinity theme. Still, there's plenty for a second series...

Was it?😂

Stephen Graham is a bit one dimensional, he looks pained or angry and sniffs a lot in pretty much everything I've seen him in. It worked in This Is England tbf.

It’s as the female police officer said in ep 2, it’s all about men and boys like Jamie.

The victims barely get a look in.

No wonder society talks about, it centres men.

brilliant in the virtues

I have a 14 year old and not a chance he’d be out at 10.30!!!

There’s another thread in AIBU about the psychologist’s report in Adolescence. It’s quite lengthy and with excellent discussions. It might not change your mind about the acting but I think it provides a lot of insight.

I completely agree, I found it awful.

It's a shame because episode one was great (aside from the dubious acting in parts) and it could have been a brilliant series.

Felt like a first draft.

Having either the girl's perspective as flashbacks or the girl's parents' perspective showing the other side would have helped a lot I think.

I far more enjoyed this with Martin Clunes. More formulaic in a way, but the young actors in it were superb and it had some hard-hitting themes about the pressures young people can find themselves under.
It is more around county lines, but there are some themes which cross over.
Also, if I hear one more person telling me Stephen Graham is the best British actor of all time…
He’s not the best actor from Liverpool in his own generation. David Morrissey is.
As for British, if you’ve seen Gary Oldman in action, then you’ve seen a genius.
Graham is a decent actor, to be fair and his wife seems very talented at driving projects, too.
I actually prefer it when he plays someone completely removed. He was great as Al Capone. But he’s not the best actor we have ever produced.

I thought the acting was good but some of the scenes in the third and fourth episode were too long, boring.

It was too real life for me, I wanted more background and more plot and character development to be convinced that he was actually pushed to kill her, it was all a bit vague and glossed over for me to be honest. Far too much of things that didn't matter being dragged out to give it that real time element, like the list of things to get paint off the van.

Well it's done it's job. It's got people talking. I've not seen it but I saw him interviewed on The tonight show with Jimmy Fallon.

Each episode is filmed in 1 take which is some achievement. The why these things are happening is the reason behind it. Yes it's been hyped but there's a massive problem with teenage boys in this country at the moment. It's obviously not all teenage boys but too many girls are dying.

Talking about what? Nothing that wasn’t already being talked out…. At length

I literally cannot understand why anyone would call this show boring. There are simply too many issues it brings up.

Unless people don’t enjoy thinking and just want something presented to them with a neat little bow.

It was very uncomfortable television in so
many ways.

Oh this made me smile

if you don’t like it, you must somehow be inferior to me because I enjoyed it

you “thinking”? I wonder what that looks like

I've not seen it but every tv show recently seems to drag like a snakes backside. I think it's because Amazon and Netflix can put so much money into a tv series that producers and writers think they need 6 episodes when 4 would do. Plus they aren't constrained by the limit of time a feature film can run.
I tried to watch Vikings , Hunters and the Wheel of Time on Amazon over the last year. It was like waiting for paint to dry

It was good, and the one take element was really impressive. I thought the acting was good too, there was a lot of nuance in emotions without words.

But the story was lacking. It was both one episode too long and one episode too short. It barely touched on the toxic masculinity that was supposedly at the core of it all - it would have been good to dive into what that actually looks like at high school rather than just eluding to what happened.

Definitely over hyped though.

But it brought nothing new to the table to think about. I know Andrew Tate and toxic masculinity are an issue, and an ever bigger issue for teen boys and girls. I know teenagers get stabbed by their peers. I know it happens to parents doing their best. I know it must be devastating.

What thoughts was this supposed to provoke? I was actually hoping it would be MORE thought provoking than it was, but I’ve come away with exactly the same views that I went into it with.

I think it has got males talking about this issue much more, whereas it is usually women worrying about it. That has got to be a good thing. Making parents think about it more

I sometimes work backshift and there are definitely children that age (and possibly slightly younger) hanging around the bus station at that time.

I think it’s easier to have a hit programme on streaming if your timing is good and there’s little or no competition . Streaming is good for hits that people talk about for a couple of weeks until the next big thing comes along.

I haven’t watched it and don’t intend to as it’s not the kind of storyline I want to watch. But the reviews and comments from people who have watched it seem to be very marmite. They either loved it or hated it, so you’re inline with general opinion!

I thought that the murder was a bit unrealistic. It's still incredibly rare that a 13 year old from a two involved, loving, working, home owning parent family would stab someone to death in the UK, and if they did there would be signs relating to extreme behaviours, such as hurting animals or hitting his mother or sister, ruling the house. If he'd been going off the rails a bit, maybe. They could have looked at how families can't get help (like the Rudakabana family, multiple calls to the police and no effective action taken and a child clearly descending over years into mental illness, radicalization and hatred).

I feel like if they had gone for threats or stalking or online hounding of a girl and delved more into his attitude to women and where specifically that came from it would have been more realistic. Or made him 16, or given a relevant history.

I have heard not one single dissenting voice to the “this is the best thing ever!!!””

Really? I take it you’ve not been on MN the past week then because in every single one of the 50 billion threads about the programme, several people have said they didn’t rate it.