‘Adolescence’ Is the Bigges t and Best Show of the Year

This Week

You have to watch Adolescence.

You also have to watch The Pitt.

This is a Gwyneth stan newsletter.

The only reason to care about Cats.

I believe in magic.

TV’s Best New Show

If at around 10:30 pm on Wednesday night you heard a sound that you might describe as “a goat being castrated” and wondered, “What the hell is that?” then I owe you an apology. I had just finished the last scene of Adolescence and was so overcome by a tsunami of sadness that my vocal chords transformed into a foghorn and I involuntarily let out a sob that sounded like the Aflac duck quacking with a sinus flu.

The final moment of the hit Netflix series Adolescence—I won’t spoil it here, but if you see me in person, immediately set aside 90 minutes to 4 hours for us to sit and talk about it—is a rare, earned emotional unleashing. I’d call it breathtaking, but apparently I had enough breath to let out my honking wail. The series had so powerfully portrayed the humanity behind a tragic story, especially the way one event impacts how people operate on a second-by-second basis, that the last scene of the series was fantastically both an epic hurricane of catharsis and also positively mundane.

We’re all buzzing about the incest vibes of The White Lotus and still coming down from our Gabby Windey and Dylan Efron crushes from the last season of The Traitors, so we haven’t been parched at the water cooler when it comes to shows we’re all collectively obsessed with. But it’s rare for a true drama series to punctuate the zeitgeist in the way that Adolescence has in the last week. The best, and probably most accurate, comparison is Baby Reindeer last year.

The four-episode series, if you haven’t surmised from my histrionic rambling about crying, is a dark one. It is about a 13-year-old boy named Jamie who is charged with the murder-by-stabbing of a female classmate. After the premiere about the arrest and questioning of Jamie, subsequent episodes follow detectives attempting to find answers about his motive at his school, a psychologist trying to understand his red-pilled mindset, and his family dealing with life wearing a Scarlet Letter as the kin of an accused killer.

It’s been the Number 1 show on Netflix's most watched list all week. We live in an age where streaming services burp and fart out their own, publicity-minded metrics about viewership of their projects. That said, it’s an interesting tidbit that Adolescence’s Netflix-reported 24.3 million views in its first four days of availability was only just shy of that for the Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt-led orgy of CGI nonsense that is the critically panned action movie The Electric State, which had 25.2 million views.

The Electric State cost $320 million dollars to make and received so many rotten tomatoes that it could jar marinara sauces from now until 2030. Adolescence, produced for a fraction of that budget, has received the kind of reviews that happen only once a year in TV—and audiences immediately turned out for it, even without any huge stars in the cast. It turns out that people really just want to watch things that are good.

There’s no visual effects the likes of The Electric State to be found in Adolescence, but there is some impressive cinematic wizardry. Each episode, which all fall just shy of an hour, was filmed in what’s called a “one shot,” as in the camera never cuts—it follows the action and the actors in one continuous take.

One Shots are cool because they take a wild amount of finesse and technological prowess to pull off, but also because when a viewer realizes what’s happening, that the jumps and angles and cuts we’re conditioned to see on screen aren’t occurring, they’re intrinsically blown away—and, because of that, drawn in.

Some people may have been clued into this about Adolescence before watching and some may have discovered what was happening while streaming the show. Either experience elicits the same reaction of wonder: How did they do that? Whoa, this car scene has been happening in real time! I can’t believe the actors could do this all without mistakes! This is incredible.

The thing about Adolescence is that it’s not a gimmick. The whole One Shot flair is both astonishing and necessary, and it’s rare to get to say that about peacocking filmmaking tricks.

In order for the story to work, for the performances to resonate, and for the emotion to really, truly burrow into you, Adolescence needed to immerse you in this world. Everyone in the show is receiving information on the fly and reacting to it in course; because of the way it was filmed, so too are we. We’re gathering information, confused about innocence or guilt, wrecked about what certain revelations mean, and scrambling to make emotional sense of it all—just like the characters in the show. I’ve never had an experience like that watching. It was exhilarating—hence my guttural reaction to its conclusion.

It’s a treat to get to whole-heartedly endorse a TV show. And I’ve even left out the best part—you can binge the whole thing in less than four hours. Who has time these days? If you haven’t yet, watch Adolescence, and then let’s chat about it. I’ll know where to find you; I’ll hear the foghorn sob when you’re done.

Today’s Top Entertainment News

You Need to Be Watching The Pitt

I had a fun chat with a coworker at my office’s coffee station this week that felt like I was in a time warp. We were gabbing about how much good TV there is right now. That alone would be a trippy throwback—in person at an office, talking about TV?!—but there was an added element: We were raving about Noah Wyle playing a doctor in an unmissable medical drama series.

The comparisons between the new Max series The Pitt and Wyle’s alma mater series ER are done and lazy—but not so done and lazy that I wouldn’t joke about it in the lede of this piece. What cannot be talked about and stressed enough, however, is just how excellent The Pitt is, and how everyone should be watching it. (Gauging by the uncharacteristically earnest odes to the show I see on my social media timeline each Thursday night when new episodes drop, it seems that a lot of people have already caught on.)

This Thursday, The Pitt launched—I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say—a three-episode arc that ranks among the most astonishing runs of television I’ve seen in a long time. The series, if you’re not familiar, takes place in a Pittsburgh emergency room, with each episode chronicling one hour of the employees’ shift. It’s hour 11 of a 12-hour shift when the ER is alerted that there was a mass shooting at a local concert festival and, as the closest trauma center, dozens—if not hundreds—of casualties were headed their way for treatment.

Nothing about the episode is message-y about issues like gun violence, but there is something inherently powerful about the simultaneously unflinching and matter-of-fact way The Pitt depicts the event through the prism of how victims are treated for the injuries. It’s a perspective that I’ve never seen, and I was quite moved by it.

Making just as much of an impression on me was something that shouldn’t be a novelty, but was: I found myself quite emotional watching the procedure of it all. The episode shows essential workers well-trained for a disaster scenario like this one, doing an exceptional job at the tasks they were prepared to do. Competence in the face of extreme situations had started to seem like a fantasy these recent weeks. I’m grateful for The Pitt for confirming it as a reality.

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Queen of Disassociation

I love Gwyneth Paltrow. I don’t know if that’s polarizing. I don’t care if we’re supposed to hate Nepo Babies or rich white women who treat astronomically priced wellness nonsense as a basic human need.

In every interview I read or see with her, she comes off as extremely intelligent, seriously invested in her company and projects, and has a really fun streak of sarcastic and self-deprecating humor. I want to wear matching cream-colored cashmere sweaters, sip bone broth, smoke our one allotted cigarette a week, and shoot the s--t with her. That’s especially true after this Vanity Fair cover story interview and accompanying career retrospective video that came out this week.

I can’t get over her complete unawareness and ambivalence every time she’s asked about appearing in Marvel movies. In the video clip, the interviewer tells her she’s been in seven Marvel films, and Paltrow reacts with utter bafflement: “That can’t be right.”

She owns it, too, which I love, retelling the story about how she had no idea she was in one of the Spider-Man films. To wit, when asked if she’ll be in the next big Marvel film to shoot, Captain America: Brave New World, her face adopts an expression as if someone just spoke a language to her that she doesn’t understand: “What is that?”

I crave this level of dissociation from my professional life. Icon of boundaries.

Worst Jellicle Ball Ever

Donald Trump outed himself as a theater queen—albeit one with horrible taste—this week during his loathsome takeover of the Kennedy Center. During his meeting, he revealed himself to be a fan of the famously abhorred musical Cats.

There is nothing to celebrate about anything going on with the Kennedy Center right now, but Trump’s endorsement did give me reason to revisit one of my favorite Sex and the City scenes, which I quote every time someone brings up Cats—and only 5 percent of the time does anyone have any idea what I’m talking about.

In Season 5, Episode 8, “I Love a Charade,” Nathan Lane’s Bobby Fine and Julie Halston’s Bitsy Von Muffling meet Carrie and her friends, Charlotte casually says that she liked Cats, and is bullied for the next 90 seconds over it. “I was just so thrilled somebody actually liked Cats,” Bitsy says, and then I said for the last 20 years every time someone brought up Cats, and have done a dozen times this week because of this Trump story.

Magic Is Real

I saw David Blaine do a card trick this week at a press event for his new National Geographic/Disney+ series Do Not Attempt, and it was so cool that suddenly I believe magic is real and take back anything I have ever said that was cynical or skeptical about it. It was that good. (The other things he does in the series are significantly wilder than a card trick. But I’m a basic person and the card trick blew my mind.)

More From The Daily Beast’s Obsessed

Misericordia: Terrible name. Great movie. (Now in theaters)

Bob Trevino Likes It: Based on a surprising, touching true story. (Now in theaters)

The Studio: Seth Rogen brings you the funniest TV show of the year. (Wed. on Apple TV+)

Snow White: I genuinely don’t know a single person excited for this. (Now in theaters)

Good American Family: Not every crazy true-crime story needs to become a TV show. (Now on Hulu)

The Alto Knights: Two Robert De Niros, two bad performances. (Now in theaters)

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