Adolescence has had a huge year at the Emmys winning a total of eight Emmys including Outstanding Drama Series.
The Netflix drama picked up the award for Outstanding special Or Anthology Series, beating Netflix’s Black Mirror and Monsters: The Lyle & Erik Menendez Story, FX’s Dying for Sex, and HBO Max’s The Penguin.
The show won six awards at the Primetime Emmys including wins for Owen Cooper, Erin Doherty, Stephen Graham, director Phil Barantini and for writing. It comes after the four-part series landed 13 Emmy nominations.
Graham spoke after the main drama win, saying “what we do is not a game of footy”.
“There are no winners and no losers. It’s all subjective. But what we managed to create was a beautiful family, and whether you were number one on the call sheet or number 101, we were treated equally, and everyone was respected. We’re all the same, and I think that’s how you get the best work, and that’s how you get the best out of your people. If you fill them with love and give them that opportunity. Whether or not you were an executive producer like the wonderful Jeremy [Kleiner] from Plan B, or you were the fella that was cleaning the toilets in our winnebago, we were all equal,” he said.
“Just look after each other and give your mates a cuddle or a kiss and tell them that you love them,” he added.
This is a category dominated in recent years by Netflix and HBO with the streamer’s last British phenomenon Baby Reindeer winning and Beef and The Queen’s Gambit winning also picking up the award, while HBO has won for shows including The White Lotus, Watchmen and Chernobyl.
Adolescence tells the story of 13-year-old schoolboy Jamie Miller, played by Owen Cooper, who is arrested after the murder of his classmate Katie Leonard. The show, however, is not a whodunnit, that becomes clear early on in Episode 1, but rather, it asks the question: why? It’s a question that his family — dad, Eddie Miller, played by Graham, mum Manda, played by Christine Tremarco, and sister Lisa, played by Amélie Pease — are asking, as are detective inspector Luke Bascombe, played by Ashley Walters, and others, including therapist Briony Ariston, played by Erin Doherty.
It also stars Faye Marsay as DS Misha Frank, Mark Stanley as Paul Barlow, Hannah Walters as Mrs. Bailey, Jo Hartley as Mrs. Fenumore, Fatima Bojang as Jade, Kaine Davis as Ryan Kowalska and Amari Bacchus as Adam Bascombe.
It was written by Jack Thorne and Graham with director Philip Barantini leading the show’s one-shot style.
It comes from Warp Films, the company behind This Is England, Matriarch Productions, the production company formed by Stephen Graham and Hannah Walters, and Brad Pitt’s Plan B. Exec producers include Pitt, Graham, Walters, Thorne, Barantini, Mark Herbert, Emily Feller, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner.
It became Netflix’s second most-watched English-language series of all time when it launched in March, behind only Wednesday.
The series was shot in South Yorkshire, and set near Warrington, between Liverpool and Manchester.
Each episode was made in three weeks; the first week was for rehearsals, the second week for the technical aspects and the third for filming. The plan for filming was to shoot two takes a day, allowing the team to have around 10 takes to ultimately choose from (although, as one would expect, this went up slightly with a few false starts).
It explores topics such as the rise of knife crime in Britain, the manosphere and fatherhood. It has an almost theatrical element as well. The third episode is almost entirely a conversation between Doherty’s forensic psychologist Briony Ariston, and Cooper’s Jamie, as she is preparing a pre-trial report on his mental capacity.
Two months after its launch, Graham joked to Deadline that the success of the show made it “dead hard getting round the Tesco these days”.
“We thought it would just be a lovely little colloquial British story. You can see it’s made with love, compassion and respect and we served our story properly and stayed true to the subject that we’re covering. But, sometimes, those kinds of dramas obviously just resonate,” Graham said. “I’ve always tried to pick stuff that I do on television which can create conversations. This one, particularly, was a beautiful little stone. We threw it in the middle of a lake, and it caused a tsunami.”
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