Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’ gets 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, reviews call it ‘TV perfection’

Netflix’s “Adolescence” is getting rave reviews.

The new crime drama mini-series, released Thursday on Netflix, has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes based on the scores of seven critics, with more praise likely to come.

Directed by Philip Barantini and starring Owen Cooper, Stephen Graham, Christine Tremarco, Ashley Walters and Erin Doherty, with Graham and Jack Thorne co-writing, its synopsis reads: “A family’s world turns upside down when 13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested for murdering a schoolmate. The charges against their son force them to confront every parent’s worst nightmare.”

The concept isn’t new – “Defending Jacob” on Apple TV+ also follows a child accused of a serious crime – but this show is being praised for its performances, writing and themes, with The Guardian saying the “devastating questions it asks, will linger with you.”

Variety calls the “gutting, raw and stunningly acted” series “dark and brilliantly written.” The Hollywood Reporter praises the actors’ performances, “especially Graham, who has never been better,” while The New York Times writes that the acting is “superb, with varsity weeping and real sense of heft and verisimilitude.”

Rolling Stone praises the show’s cinematography – it uses a one-shot filming technique – saying, “because there are no cuts, there is no escape from the raw, difficult emotions of any given moment.” THR called the camerawork “audacious,” though, thankfully, not “visceral.”

The show offers a social critique of toxic masculinity in the social media age, especially in context of the teenage experience, from a nuanced and complex take, critics say.

“‘Adolescence’ asks who and what we are teaching boys and how we expect them to navigate this increasingly toxic and impossible world when our concept of masculinity still seems to depend on boys and men doing so alone,” writes Guardian critic Lucy Mangan.

“This show unpacks the complexities of humanity and manhood and how the rise of the manosphere has so eerily and quickly permeated itself into the lives of young people through social media,” writes Variety’s Aramide Tinubu. “‘Adolescence’ highlights how we’ve failed ourselves and will continually fail the generations coming behind us.”

However, The New York Times suggests its story could be overwhelming for some viewers.

“For better or worse, ‘Adolescence’ evokes in the viewer the feelings of its characters: overstimulation, confusion, an increasingly powerful desire to tell everyone to sit down and be quiet for five dang seconds,” writes the Times critic Margaret Lyons.

Overall, however, critics consider the short series a must-see.

Rolling Stone raves it is “an early contender for the best thing — you will see on the small screen this year.” And the Guardian called the series “the closest thing to TV perfection in decades” and a “deeply moving, deeply harrowing experience.”