Stephen Graham Faces A Parent’s Worst Nightmare In Trailer For One-Shot Netflix Drama Adolescence

Having stepped into the ring to deliver a knockout performance as bulked-up brawler Sugar Goodson in Disney+ period piece A Thousand Blows already this year, British acting heavyweight Stephen Graham is set to face an intense fight of an altogether different kind in upcoming Netflix drama Adolescence. Co-created and written by Graham and This Is England series writer Jack Thorne, Adolescence sees Graham reteam with Boiling Point director Philip Barantini and A Thousand Blows co-star Erin Doherty to tell a one-shot, real-time story about a family whose lives come undone when their teenage son is arrested on suspicion of murdering a girl at his school. Check out the nail-biting trailer below;

Christ! Barantini doesn't do these things by halves, does he? Dropping us straight in at the moment the police bang at Eddie (Graham) and Manda Miller's (Christine Tremarco) door to nick their 13-year-old son Jamie (Owen Cooper), it very quickly becomes apparent that this is no whodunit — it's a whydunit. Over a series of intense close-ups and fraught exchanges, which also introduce us to Ashley Walters' Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe and Jamie's clinical psychologist Briony Ariston (Doherty), we see Graham's Eddie struggling to keep a lid on his emotions as Jamie's troubling quickness to anger and misogynistic tendencies are unearthed. "We've done nothing wrong, have we?" asks Eddie at one point, a smash-cut from him shouting at his wife to his son shouting at his psychologist hinting at the kind of psychologically needling character study we are in for here. It's all seriously palm-sweating stuff, as we've come to expect from a Barantini and Graham joint.

Adolescence is set to hit Netflix on 13 March, and — out of an abundance of respect for Barantini's directorial trademark — we plan to one-shot all four episodes as soon as they drop. Who's with us?