TV of 2025

[knives]

While Caped Crusader has some modern animation problems particularly with facial expressions it also has some of Timm’s best writing and production. The Firebug episode, which I just finished, really feels like an alternate reality TAS where they could let loose and show the psychological depths and cruelty such a setting must have. Also, weirdly, the Selina Kyle here has more in common with Burton’s vision of the character then the one mandated with similarities. She’s a vision of Bruce without a sense of responsibility. It’s great.

The acting is also incredible. Bender’s voice literally makes my skin crawl after years of laughing from it.

[jazzo]

Yeah, it’s pretty good stuff. I think having Ed Brubaker sit as showrunner was a very smart move.

[brundlefly]

Trailer for Dying for Sex, from Elizabeth Meriwether (New Girl). With Michelle Williams, Sissy Spacek, Jenny Slate, Rob Delaney.

And Tina Fey has remade Alan Alda's The Four Seasons into a Netflix series. With Fey, Colman Domingo ,Will Forte, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Steve Carell.

[The Curious Sofa]

Adolescence on Netfilix is the sort of show that would have been on the BBC or Channel 4 a few years ago, and it is astonishingly good. It works with a format I am not generally a fan of, each episode is a single camera take. Unlike many such experiments there is no slack, no extraneous running around to get from one point to the next, every second counts and it really adds to the urgency of the drama. The show works perfectly at 4 episodes, moving from procedural to something far richer, more disturbing and ultimately really quite moving. I wanted it to go on much longer.

Child actor Owen Cooper is a real find. Even though he is a year or two older than the character he plays, he looks so incredibly young, reminding you of what a 13 year old actually looks like, compared to all the 20something actors who play teenagers on screen. This adds greatly to the impact of one of the episodes in the second half. The whole cast is incredible, but a special mention to Erin Doherty, who only appears in one episode, a two-hander and Christine Tremarco and Amelie Pease, who come into focus in the final episode, and heartbreakingly so, as the suspect's mother and sister.

After the first episode, which gives a blow-by-blow account of what it's like to be arrested as a juvenile murder suspect, the other three episodes focus on hours that could almost be chosen at random. There are no major revelations that would drive a murder mystery, it is the details

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(that surveillance technician who thinks he is being helpful but is interfering with the psychologist's process)

and the emotional states of the characters that count, and as such becomes utterly compelling. This really blew me away in the last two episodes

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with the psychologist in episode 3, trying to keep her professional composure in trying circumstances and the family in the final episode, doiung their best to get through the recent trauma, by just trying to have one good day.

[alacal2]

Couldn't agree more. Adolescence is sensational televsision. No answers but lots of very troubling questions.

[Sloper]

I had mixed feelings about Adolescence. Technically it’s very impressive, and the one-take approach is thematically appropriate in some ways – making us feel that we are in a situation we can’t escape, showing us the inexorable cause-and-effect process whereby one action or event leads to a whole network of other actions and events. But as with other long takes in recent films and TV shows, I often felt there were moments that would have benefitted from editing. If it’s done well, editing makes a story more immersive, whereas long takes can seem artificial, both because you find yourself wondering how they manoeuvred the camera into these new positions (or onto a drone or whatever), and because the single take exposes the actors in a way that some members of this cast really suffer from. Editing can smooth over those awkward pauses and make characters’ reactions seem more spontaneous, less like the actors are hyper-focused on remembering their lines and hitting their marks in a meticulously choreographed piece of live theatre. Especially in Episode 2, the most logistically ambitious one, this show felt very theatrical, with all the artifice that you accept in a stage-play but that works against the point that (I think) Adolescence is trying to make.

Still, overall I did find the show powerful and moving, especially in Episodes 1, 3, and 4, and some of the central performances are fantastic. The bigger problem has been well outlined by Kate Manne, and has to do with the way the show handles its central theme. I was truly surprised that Episode 2 didn’t focus on Katie’s point of view, in a flashback to the night before Episode 1. The exclusion of her perspective is mentioned briefly, in an exchange so awkward and crowbarred-in that I almost expected the actors to glance nervously at the camera. But an episode about Katie would have added so much to the telling of this story, and I don't think we would have missed the one set in the school.

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One thing Kate Manne doesn’t mention, understandably because the show itself glosses over this, is that Katie was being cyber-bullied: a boy she liked had pressured her into letting him take naked pictures of her, and he then shared these widely with other boys at school. Katie’s so-called ‘bullying’ of Jamie is part of her reaction to the bullying she suffers, an attempt to claw back some social status by weaponising incel terminology against another boy who tries to take advantage of her. Viewers of this show, if they didn’t know much about the manosphere to begin with, might be forgiven for assuming that this terminology (80/20 etc.) is primarily used by angry women to taunt men.

I’m not saying we needed a history lesson about the origins of online misogyny, but the essential point could have been made vividly and economically by showing Katie, on the last night of her life, trying to distract herself from online harassment by making online jokes about incels, then by having IRL fun with her friends, then being harassed IRL by Jamie and his friends, culminating in the scene in the car park. Maybe a night-time shoot would have been too ambitious (does this need to happen at night?) but I can’t imagine it would have been more difficult than filming in a school with moving crowds of children. We could have seen Katie’s friendship with Jade and understood why they were so important to each other, instead of vaguely hearing about this from Jade and then ignoring her. We wouldn't have needed the police officer to say 'what a shame we're not focusing on Katie' or the therapist to say 'you realise whatever claims you make about her, she's gone and will never come back,' because we would have been shown rather than told these things - we would know Katie, we would feel the significance of her murder, and we would appreciate the impact of her absence in the other three episodes.

Most importantly, we could have found out how Jamie looked and sounded from Katie’s and Jade’s perspectives – having seen him as a confused, sympathetic, and pitiful child in Episode 1 (which, as Manne says, is an important way to see him) we could also have seen him as the terrifying figure he must have become for Katie in that last hour. This would add extra layers to the therapist’s view of Jamie in Episode 3, as she encounters this innocent child / rage-filled murderer, and to the family’s view of Jamie and themselves in Episode 4, as they struggle to re-orient their lives in terms of their own domestic dynamics and their place in society.

[colinr0380]

I don't have Netflix so I'm out of the bubble on this, but Adolescence has been getting a surprising right wing champion in the form of Carl Benjamin, who makes an fascinating case for the show being less about the current media talking points, but more about (accidentally?) critiquing the failings of societal institutions in a damning manner.

(Just going off of the description in that video, it also sounds as if it is containing some similar themes to those going on in Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day too)

[The Curious Sofa]

One thing that's great about Adolescence is that it isn't about just one thing and how non-didactic it is about the issues it raises.