Thirteen-year-old Jamie gets arrested and accused of the murder of a teenage girl who goes to his school. That is the premise of the new Netflix drama series Adolescence from U.K. producer Warp Films, based in Sheffield and London. Co-created by and starring Stephen Graham as Jamie’s father, along with Ashley Walters (Top Boy), Erin Doherty (The Crown), Christine Tremarco (The Responder), and others, the show was filmed in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, England and launched on the global streamer on Thursday.
Reunion, a revenge thriller set in the deaf community in Sheffield, stars Matthew Gurney, Lara Peake, Anne-Marie Duff, Eddie Marsan and Rose Ayling-Ellis and will launch on the BBC this year. The bilingual series, featuring both British Sign Language (BSL) and spoken English, similarly pushes the envelope with a deaf protagonist who tries to unravel the truth behind the events that led him to prison.
“We’ve always tried to be bold and innovative and push boundaries,” Adolescence executive producer and Warp Films founder and CEO Mark Herbert tells THR. Past cases in point: Yardie, the 2018 British crime drama film that was Idris Elba’s feature directorial debut; The Last Panthers, the fictional series inspired by notorious Balkan jewel thieves the Pink Panthers; Yann Demange’s 2014 film ’71, set amid the Troubles in Northern Ireland; and the Juno Temple-starring series Little Birds, based on the writings of Anaïs Nin.
And bold and innovative certainly describes Adolescence, which presents every episode in one long, uninterrupted take. “The one-shot technique is obviously fascinating and an absolutely incredible challenge on the production side,” says Emily Feller, Adolescence executive producer and chief creative officer at Warp Films. “But it brings this incredible intensity.”
Warp Films founder and CEO Mark Herbert
Courtesy of Warp Films
Intensity is also what you may think of if you ever visit Park Hill, a Brutalist, concrete housing estate in Sheffield where Herbert has shot parts of Reunion. And it is to some degree a visualization of what makes Warp, well … Warp. “It symbolizes a lot of what Warp stands for,” Herbert explains. “It’s real, it’s brutal, but it’s beautiful. It’s complicated. There’s a grittiness to it, but it’s also got a massive amount of heart.”
Which, Herbert adds, are the qualities Warp tries to bring to its productions: “We try to have stories that are broad and international, but that have got a real heart to them, and there’s a realness about them.”
Feller was also attracted by that, among other things, when she joined the company a little more than two years ago: “What’s brilliant about Adolescence and Reunion is that it feels like we can find those really interesting genre shows, but they’ve got that Warp element — whether it’s the landscape and brutalism of the buildings or it’s got that sort of anarchic, rebellious, different feel to it. It just feels like a really exciting time for us looking ahead.”
Warp Films chief creative officer Emily Feller
Courtesy of Warp Films
The creative team behind Adolescence made the decision to mix filming on real locations and in the studio, meaning production designer Adam Tomlinson and his team had a key role in creating a police station. From there, the production process boiled down to each episode getting a three-week block after 12 weeks of prep.
“Each episode was three weeks: one week rehearsal with the cast, which was about honing and tweaking so that you’re almost editing as you’re going along,” says Herbert. “And then the second week was a full technical rehearsal. So that was cameras and the crew, and halfway through the shoot, they would bring the extras in. Queuing in the extras was a military operation. It was incredibly detailed. And then we shot for one week. We tried to put in a system of two takes a day, because we have kids as well, which makes things even more complicated.”
Needless to say, creating the one-take world of Adolescence was very different from other TV productions. “It really was about just constantly reviewing the process and going, ‘That needs to be quicker. We need to get them from this room to that room more quickly’,” Herbert explains. “You have to be there every day for this shoot because we needed to constantly try to tweak this. And the crew were just incredible. It was so prep heavy, but then the flip side of that is there was no edit.”
Netflix was also excited about the envelope-pushing series. “What was so fantastic about this experience was how engaged we were with Netflix,” shares Feller. “They were so encouraging, so trusting and so positive about the experience, but they were completely engaged and would come and watch some of the tech rehearsals. Their support really helped and made it all possible.”
Christine Tremarco and Stephen Graham in ‘Adolescence.’
Courtesy of Ben Blackall/Netflix
What reaction does Herbert hope audiences have when watching the series? “It’s the idea that you’re making something that is thought-provoking and that is going to make people turn to the person they’ve watched it with and ask, ‘what would [we] have done in that situation?’”
Fans of Warp series can look for more to come in the future. “We’ve got a development deal with Matriarch Productions, Stephen Graham’s and Hannah Walters’ company,” says Herbert. “And we’ve got a few projects in development with them with different broadcasters, which is exciting. But we’ve got a few things that we can’t talk about yet.”
