New Tv series (REMEMBER: No Spoilers)

hoof_it_up_to_benty

BalladMan said:

Binged adolescence over the weekend.  As a father of boys aged 14 and 12 it hit home very hard.   Everything about it was superb, but feel they could have made more of it and explored some themes further. Excellent writing and the acting was unreal.  

That said, it’s great to see a piece of tv that is short, sharp and done without flab. 

I'm glad that it was four parts and thought the ending was really good. It could have been dragged out and that would have made it less powerful.

So many great performances from Stephen Graham over the years.

hoof_it_up_to_benty

I'd recommend a watch of 'The Virtues' on Channel 4 catch up assuming its still available if you're a Stephen Graham fan. Shown in 2019 and made with Shane Meadows - another amazing acting performance and powerful storyline.

Friend Or Defoe

McBobbin said:

Saw Graham recently in a film called Yardie talking in a Jamaican accent, he's great.looking forward to seeing Adolescence

I saw that too, reminded me of another great actor, Gary Oldman, in True Romance.

se9addick

McBobbin said:

Saw Graham recently in a film called Yardie talking in a Jamaican accent, he's great.looking forward to seeing Adolescence

I think he has a Jamaican grandparent. 

He’s played it all - an English neo-Nazi, Italian-American gangster and a Jamaican nightclub owner! Such a talented actor. 

ValleyGary

Thought adolescence was good but by no means ground breaking. Acting and filming was spot on but found the storyline like I’ve seen it all before. 

Claiming the best British TV ever is crazy to me, it’s not even the best thing Ashley Walters has done!

Chris_from_Sidcup

After reading the posts on here i've just binge watched Adolescence, incredible viewing. the 1st and 3rd episodes were brilliant.

Stephen Graham is as amazing as ever, but the kid in it is going to go far. Brilliant acting from anyone, never mind a kid in his first acting kid. And i've just read for his second role he's now doing a film with Margot Robbie!

DaveMehmet

ValleyGary said:

 

Claiming the best British TV ever is crazy to me, it’s not even then best thing Ashley Walters has done!

Yeah, it’s no 21 seconds is it?

Covered End

I just watched Adolescence and as a Stephen Graham fan I didn't think it was as great as all the reviews on here.
I've seen him in better.
I thought the third episode was the best and the "kid's" acting was very good.
Overall it's worth a watch, but I think won't be as memorable further down the line like some of his other material.

Friend Or Defoe

ValleyGary said:

Thought adolescence was good but by no means ground breaking. Acting and filming was spot on but found the storyline like I’ve seen it all before. 

Claiming the best British TV ever is crazy to me, it’s not even the best thing Ashley Walters has done!

Each episode was filmed in a single shot which is ground breaking. Other than that it was a great watch but won't be the best thing i'll see this year.

DaveMehmet

Covered End said:

I just watched Adolescence and as a Stephen Graham fan I didn't think it was as great as all the reviews on here.
I've seen him in better.
I thought the third episode was the best and the "kid's" acting was very good.
Overall it's worth a watch, but I think won't be as memorable further down the line like some of his other material.

Just finished it and think exactly the same. SG and the kid both gave fantastic performances but thought it tailed off a bit and disappointed. 

Carter

Some of the acting was first class, the camera work was really intriguing but it was horrible to watch. All the kids bar the DI's son were arseholes of the highest order and reaffirmed my view that I would manwhack a kid if ever the universe set me as a school teacher 

I also thought it had a bit of an agenda behind telling a good story. Which isn't without merit and is the writers prerogative to set an agenda if they want but like with the Acolyte I felt that was taking precedent over good story-telling. I thought the Acolyte was really good in the end but this just made me feel horrible afterwards. So much so that I switched drive to survive on instead with Christian Horner front and centre and ginger spice doing her best nutter eyes 

hoof_it_up_to_benty

Carter said:

Some of the acting was first class, the camera work was really intriguing but it was horrible to watch. All the kids bar the DI's son were arseholes of the highest order and reaffirmed my view that I would manwhack a kid if ever the universe set me as a school teacher 

I also thought it had a bit of an agenda behind telling a good story. Which isn't without merit and is the writers prerogative to set an agenda if they want but like with the Acolyte I felt that was taking precedent over good story-telling. I thought the Acolyte was really good in the end but this just made me feel horrible afterwards. So much so that I switched drive to survive on instead with Christian Horner front and centre and ginger spice doing her best nutter eyes 

If it starts a dialogue then that's a good thing and it's important to address the crisis with young men. No TV is perfect but it was a compelling and believable watch.

McBobbin

Enjoyed Adolescence. Think the genesis of it was Stephen Graham wanted to do a series about knife crime, and all filmed in one shot, like boiling point. They then got the idea about incel culture so it spread from that. Liked the fact that each episode told a different story and it was well acted, just think that they might have been a bit limited by the narrow focus and need for a single take when they could have expanded a lot more on the kids and really developed that side of things. 

Carter

There is definitely a point to make that generationally I have skipped straight over the Andrew Tate/incel and all the other new  words and culture. 

I've listened to the younger lot at work talk about some of this stuff and found myself googling what they said afterwards. Gaslighting, incel (thats a result of that generation believing social media, we have solved teen pregnancy as youngsters don't fuck each other anymore but have no issue wearing a loose perm, a sex offenders moustache and expect to get laid, they've given up before they've started), terf, and any number of other new adjectives or nouns.  

A have a mate, dirty Ben, he is involuntarily celibate because he is weird, stays indoors doing I don't want to know what on a laptop, when he goes out he generally freaks women out but he got tail back in the day by the way of 18-30 holidays and cattle market nightclubs. God knows how but he did. Its probably why he retreats into a virtual world. 

The kids character was horrible, thoroughly unpleasant. 

I agree with you that tv creating dialogue isn't a bad thing but that is the dialogue beyond "don't copy Andrew Tate, he's a fucking idiot" and screaming about control or "wheres your Bentley" is a fag paper away from throwing toys out of a pram. 

Stop it, life isn't fair, women are not property and the struggle is real, be heartened by the fact that amazingly women like having sex too so unless you truly are beyind redemption like dirty Ben you will get some action then learn to process the feelings and emotions associated with that. 

And don't aspire to be an influencer, the wealthiest people I know have their names on the side of vans and mostly they aren't insufferable c***s

carly burn

Finished Adolescence last night. A good watch.
It flowed nicely into the excellent BBC Gareth Southgate lecture that I watched by chance straight after that was essentially about the same thing and some reasoning behind it.
Would actually say it's worth watching both in that order 

Macronate

Probably been mentioned on here before but watched the first four episodes of Snatch this week.

Have no idea what to make of it so far.

SuedeAdidas

New Gangs of London downloaded and ready to go…..

Rizzo

Chris_from_Sidcup said:

After reading the posts on here i've just binge watched Adolescence, incredible viewing. the 1st and 3rd episodes were brilliant.

Stephen Graham is as amazing as ever, but the kid in it is going to go far. Brilliant acting from anyone, never mind a kid in his first acting kid. And i've just read for his second role he's now doing a film with Margot Robbie!

Teenage boy working with Margot Robbie? Nice work if you can get it! Hope they have a plentiful supply of kleenex on set. 

ForeverAddickted

Brilliant end to Season Two of Severance

Adam Scott... Just outstanding!!

Dugdaleclass

More teenagers feature in the latest Channel 4 series - School Swap. Some of these swap docs are naff but this one is actually interesting and entertaining. Taking a bunch of south London kids to the back end of no where in the American (very white, bible bashing) South seems a bit weird yet somehow they are fitting in and even flourishing - although they also have to know how to handle the various fire arms shoved into their hands. The Americans meanwhile are adapting to the Brixton street life - except one lad who is straight out of The Walking Dead and never happier than when blasting away at living things. Fortunately he is a natural on TV and visibly relaxed when taken away from the bustle of London and shown some countryside  - "I like Kent". Things got even better for him when his foster family took him clay pigeon shooting! 

se9addick

Dugdaleclass said:

More teenagers feature in the latest Channel 4 series - School Swap. Some of these swap docs are naff but this one is actually interesting and entertaining. Taking a bunch of south London kids to the back end of no where in the American (very white, bible bashing) South seems a bit weird yet somehow they are fitting in and even flourishing - although they also have to know how to handle the various fire arms shoved into their hands. The Americans meanwhile are adapting to the Brixton street life - except one lad who is straight out of The Walking Dead and never happier than when blasting away at living things. Fortunately he is a natural on TV and visibly relaxed when taken away from the bustle of London and shown some countryside  - "I like Kent". Things got even better for him when his foster family took him clay pigeon shooting! 

The most amazing/shocking thing for me is how addicted, particularly the British kids, are to their phones. 

lordromford

Caught up with Adolescence.

As others have said, I thought Stephen Graham was excellent and Owen Cooper looks a huge talent. I also thought Erin Doherty, who played the psychologist in Ep 3, was really good too. Her reactions to the boy and even the way she composed herself at the end were just superb.
I did really like the one shot format, and the real time element it brought to it. They wrote around this well.

I agree with many who thought Ep1 and Ep3 were the best. They were brilliantly acted, emotionally draining and harrowing in places. The finale was pretty good too and Graham carried it well.

That’s all the positive stuff, now for the negative:

The school episode was by far the weakest and, in my opinion, it brought nothing to the story. The main contribution of the episode was to reinforce lazy stereotypes and clichés. In fact, if I hadn’t seen some of the glowing reports about episode 3 on here, it would’ve caused me to not bother continuing. This was not helped by the tropey way they depicted a tough comprehensive, focusing (as tv dramas inevitably do) on bullies and arsehole kids not getting challenged and long-suffering good kids being overlooked and underprotected, all of this exacerbated by weak/shouty/ineffective/lazy teachers. In addition, school rules and child protection procedures not really being followed. All of this resulting in repeated occasions of me saying “Well, that wouldn’t happen.”

I felt this episode had the opportunity to really get into how kids (and teachers) in a school would actually react to a shocking event in their community such as this, but they gave it lip service and, for some reason, put too much focus on the copper and his son. I wanted to see more about the close friends of both Jamie and Katie, and how other random kids who weren’t just cartoonish naughty kids were dealing with it, but they dropped the ball on this. I’ve taught for many years and have experience of school being affected by tragic events and, believe me, schools don’t behave like the one in the show in the aftermath.

Overall a good show, but if they’d just removed episode 2, it would have been excellent.

Covered End

Agreed lordromford and as someone that has taught you should have a better perspective than most on what schools are like.
It was also episode 2 for me that I found hard to believe.
The way the kids were acting when one of their peers had been murdered just didn't seem credible to me.

lordromford

Covered End said:

Agreed lordromford and as someone that has taught you should have a better perspective than most on what schools are like.
It was also episode 2 for me that I found hard to believe.
The way the kids were acting when one of their peers had been murdered just didn't seem credible to me.

Spot on @Covered End

It’s a real shame because they could’ve explored how school kids would react in a thoughtful way that was more realistic, but for some reason they just chose not to. If they’d done it well it might’ve actually made people think about it a bit more.

SELR_addicks

Adolescence is probably the best bit of tv I've seen in a very long time. 

A lot of the themes are extremely important and need to be seen by a lot of parents of the current generation. 

1st, 3rd and 4th episodes were the best watch. Particular highlight to the 4th with the themes of absent parenting. 

SuedeAdidas

SuedeAdidas said:

New Gangs of London downloaded and ready to go…..

Meh…

Clem_Snide

Watched the new Last One Laughing UK on Prime last night. 4 of the six episodes are available.

Basically 10 comedians get put in a big brother style house for 6 hours and they aren't allowed to laugh.

Ridiculous premise, but I was in stitches at times. There is something intrinsically funny about people trying not to laugh and when you add the likes of Bob Mortimer, Joe Wilkinson etc into the mix (actively trying to make people laugh) it somehow works.

Leroy Ambrose

ForeverAddickted said:

Brilliant end to Season Two of Severance

Adam Scott... Just outstanding!!

Absolutely unfuckingbelievable television. I was stunned. Gwendoline Christie FTMFW as well

Rizzo

Finished watching Adolescence over the weekend. Was in bits at the final scene, brilliantly acted by Stephen Graham. 

Excellent mini-series. Possibly not quite as good as it was hyped up to be, but still very, very good. As father to a soon-to-be teenage boy, it scared the living shit out of me. 

valleynick66

I watched Adolescence and was underwhelmed following all the hype. 

Yes it was decent and worth a watch but I didn’t think it was groundbreaking or particularly special to the extent of automatically award winning etc. 

I’d be disappointed if there aren’t more noteworthy tv programmes come the awards at the end of the year. 

But as I say certainly worth a watch.