The time was 3.34am on a Wednesday morning and I lay there wideawake.

I pressed the screen on my phone to check the time any messages, I wondered? I flipped my pillow, shifted my weight and tried to sleep.

The obvious cause of my insomnia was the five-week-old grunting and squirming in his sleep sack, a few feet away from me. But it wasn’t the humidity, or the Police helicopter making one of its swoops over the neighbourhood, and this insomnia wasn't caused by a baby.

It was caused by Adolescence.

My wife and I had watched the final episode, episode four, a few hours earlier. The episode finished, like most of them, in devastating fashion. I sat there, turning over the story in my mind.

If you haven’t yet caught the Adolescence buzz, the show has had more hype in the couple of weeks since it came to Netflix than almost any other show in recent times. It’s broken all sorts of records. After just eleven days, it broke the record for the highest-number of Netflix streams in a two week period. Tens of millions of views Worldwide... with millions more everyday. 

In a sense, Adolescence is a simple concept. It’s a four-episode series set in the U.K about a knife crime.  A young woman has been stabbed to death. Every episode Hasan incredibly ambitious production quality in that it's all one shot. The whole thing. 45 minutes or an hour. One take. And in the words of the creator Stephen Graham, it’s less of a Who-dunn it than a Why-dunnit?

As someone who’s worked in the telly for twenty years, I feel I have a pretty good sense of how hard it into make a one-shot show. Technically speaking, it is ridiculously complicated. I don’t think most people appreciate how hard it is to light a single scene. But then going from indoors to outdoors to classrooms to hallways to drone shots, a hundred metres off the ground. Sound recording is such a pain. And what if an actor screws up a line 20 minutes in? You start again, that's what.

I read a piece which explained many of the crew dressed as extras for the show’s production, so if they were caught in the back of shot it would hopefully make sense.

A friend reckoned the single-continuous shot thing might be a bit of a gimmick. What’s the point? He asked. Personally speaking, I just found it never gave me a chance to subconsciously look away, or to catch my breath. No chance to check my phone. The story didn’t pause because the people didn't pause, the scene didn’t end until the episode ended.

And what scenes. Sheesh. The speed of Episode One. I just love how it had all of the banal procedural stuff, the process. The chaos of Episode Two at the school. It was a stunning vision of a totally dysfunctional space, the teachers yelling to try and control the kids. The teachers who just didn't care. Episode Three? What a brave, bold call. Just two people in an empty room nothing of visual interesting. Just two actors in conversation; the volatility, the brinksmanship, the unravelling. And episode Four, all that was lost. The desperation.

The performances in Adolescence, especially Stephen Graham, were astonishing. I immediately became that person annoyingly texting all of his friends and group chats and asking who had seen it.

We think of movies as being art. Well, film, cinema!

We probably don’t think of TV as being art in quite the someway. Or at least as often. But how do you define good art? Surely it’s a creative work that makes people feel.. that affects them that sticks with them that has them tossing and turning in bed at 3.34am in the morning, replaying scenes in their head.

It's been a long, long time since a TV show affected me like Adolescence.

As a story, it was devastating. But as a TV drama, it was close to perfect.

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