| Worth seeing: | for the first episode, in which Stephen Graham's mild-mannered plumber has his life turned upside down when his 13 year old son is arrested at gunpoint and charged with murder |
| Featuring: | Stephen Graham, Amari Bacchus, Amelie Pease, Ashley Walters, Christine Tremarco, Erin Doherty, Fatima Bojang, Faye Marsay, Jo Hartley, Kaine Davis, Mark Stanley, Neil Bell, Owen Cooper, Robbie O'Neill |
| Key crew: | Philip Barantini, Jo Johnson, Leo Martin, Jack Thorne |
| Channel: | Netflix |
| Length: | 52 minutes |
| Episodes: | 4 |
| Broadcast date: | 13th March 2025 |
| Country: | UK |
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
The Miller family get an unwelcome wake-up call one day – as armed police bash the front door down, push past Dad Eddie (Stephen Graham) and arrest 13 year old Jamie (Owen Cooper) in his bedroom. “It must be a mistake,” Eddie and his wife Manda (Christine Tremarco) insist, but no – the police are definitely after Owen – for the murder of a classmate.
The murder investigation is being led by DI Bascombe (Ashley Walters), who visits Jamie’s school to see whether any of the other children might have information about what happened and why.
A psychotherapist (Erin Doherty) interviews Jamie at his detention centre to inform the court whether he understands the gravity of the situation he is in and to try to find out what might have driven the events on that fateful night.
And some months later, Eddie’s birthday celebrations are marred by the continued barracking the family is getting from local youths, while he and Manda try to work out whether Jamie’s situation could have been prevented if they’d been better parents.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
In four takes – over four episodes – writer Jack Thorne, director Philip Barantini, cinematographer Matthew Lewis and their cast deliver a drama that has shaken up the political establishment, much as ITV’s Mr Bates and the Post Office did last year.
With the backing of the prime minister himself, every school in the UK will be able to show their pupils the Netflix mini-series free of charge, to try to keep a curb on social media misuse and radicalised misogyny.
Except that doesn’t actually seem to be what this is about. Without wanting to give away the clues that emerge during the police investigation at Jamie’s school and the discussion with his psychotherapist, this seems to be a drama about something else entirely.
There are elements of the misuse of mobile phones – alongside generational differences about how social media is used – but the way the story unfolds has more to do with old-fashioned emotional rejection and bullying – still not an excuse for what happened, of course, but equally – not something that banning mobile phones in schools would particularly prevent. And if we’re talking about the shocking response to bullying of an insecure teenager, maybe the lesson taught in schools should be about anger management, rather than toxic masculinity and the misuse of social media. In any event, it’s a thought-provoking drama that makes you think about how to navigate the challenges of modern parenthood – and childhood.
The timeline feels a little confused, with the psychotherapy session taking place 7 months after the death, to provide the judge with a pre-sentence report, but it turns out that in the final episode, 13 months after the opening of the show, the trial still hasn’t begun.
It feels a little uneven, with the first episode being one of the strongest, most shocking examples of British TV drama in years – but the second episode feels a little arch and overblown – while the third is largely a one-to-one drama and the final episode feels almost removed from the story completely, as it considers more how the family is coping without Jamie at home, as Eddie and Manda consider their parenting skills.
It makes you wonder who the writers believe the central character of this drama is; apart from a cameo at the end of episode 2, Eddie appears in only 2 episodes, apart from a brief phone-call, Jamie himself features in only 2 episodes, DI Bascombe also appears in only 2 episodes – so it doesn’t seem to be about the father, or the son, or the investigation.
What stands out about this drama is its mise-en-scene, as Barantini – best known for his film Boiling Point and the TV series of the same name – uses the same “single take” format for each episode, which is a remarkable exercise in acting, memorising lines and choreography. But sometimes, being tied to this format means that information has to emerge in a way that doesn’t particularly fit – a key element of the narrative is revealed to the police officer during a particularly clunky scene at the school, we have to imagine that after a series of sessions with the psychotherapist, all the important details emerge in the final few minutes of the final meeting, and because each episode has to stick with the same characters – or people who are only a few minutes away – we never even get to meet the victim or her family.
One of the biggest criticisms of radical misogyny is that it objectifies women as worthless – but while this shows us how difficult it is for a family to cope with having a son accused of murder, there’s no sense of the far greater difficulty of suffering the loss of a loved one – even as it rails against what one character describes as the “manosphere,” the woman, it seems, it worthless. And while it criticises teachers who just sit their students down in front of a video, the production team campaigned for it to be shown to students as a teaching resource, so that teachers could just sit their students down in front of a video.