The Netflix drama “Adolescence” requires its audience to linger — to sink into the mundane.
Each of its four hourlong episodes was shot in one continuous take, allowing its harrowing story — centered on a 13-year-old boy accused of killing a classmate — to unfold in real time. As the visual point of view shifts, its audience is invited to eavesdrop on interactions that are extraneous to the plot, as characters loiter in hallways and cars, and make small talk with strangers.
“Adolescence” is unusual because, as a character study without a propulsive plot, it requires its audience be OK with being in the moment. It stands in contrast to most modern television shows, which are increasingly geared toward a smartphone-addicted viewership of people who scroll while watching (think fast-moving shows like “Reacher”).
It also stands in contrast to how we live our lives, with shortening attention spans, increasing isolation and an inability to sit still. “Adolescence” challenges us to be OK with small talk and boredom, even if our impulse is to disappear into our screens.
“We’re becoming conditioned for these fast filtered interactions that involve constant stimulation,” said Fallon Goodman, the director of the Emotion and Resilience Laboratory at George Washington University. “So the consequences of that are shorter attention spans, making us more impatient with the natural flow of an in-person interaction.”
Early in the fourth and final episode of “Adolescence,” Eddie (Stephen Graham, also a creator of the series), drives to a hardware store with his wife, Manda (Christine Tremarco), and daughter, Lisa (Amelie Pease), to buy paint. The ride lasts eight minutes — an eternity in television time. Viewers ride along, too, watching as the family tries to maintain the illusion of normality, even as the couple’s young son, Jamie (Owen Cooper), is sitting in jail. As Eddie puts it, they are “solving the problem of today.” They discuss their love of the band a-ha and how Eddie and Manda met, and they make plans to celebrate Eddie’s birthday.
The sequence does not affect the central story line in a meaningful way, and one can imagine a less ambitious show condensing this scene, focused strictly on character work, to a minute or two, or cutting it entirely. But from the passenger seat, viewers learn Eddie and Manda are in therapy and observe the heaviness under which the family is living, despite their smiles as “Take On Me” plays in the background.
In real life, engaging in banal exchanges — with friends, family and strangers alike — is becoming a lost art, in part because of screens. According to a study published in the journal SSM Population Health, the average time spent alone increased to 333 minutes a day in 2020 from 285 minutes in 2003. The average time spent engaging socially with friends decreased to 20 minutes a day from 60 minutes over the same period. The pandemic only hastened this trend.
Audiences have been interested in the mundane before. “Seinfeld,” after all, was famously “about nothing.” And apparent dullness can make for surprisingly captivating television, as Norwegians discovered in 2009. Norway’s public television station, NRK, broadcast footage of a nearly seven-hour trip from Bergen to Oslo, taken from a camera mounted on the front of a train. It became a hit, and inspired a genre called “Slow TV.”
As Thomas Hellum, a producer of slow television programming, put it to CBS News in 2017: “Much of life itself is boring. But in-between, there are some exciting moments.”
“Adolescence” is not by any means what the Norwegians would call slow television. Things happen. There are the standard-fare police interrogations and dramatic confrontations. But much of the show is about the day-to-day.
Other artistic offerings in recent years have leaned into humdrum interactions as a way of developing characters. The playwright Shayok Misha Chowdhury did so in his play “Public Obscenities,” which was a Pulitzer finalist last year. More than three hours long, it oscillates between Bengali and English and tracks a doctoral student’s return to his family home in Kolkata, India, with his Black boyfriend. It is more meditative than propulsive, even for a stage play.
Chowdhury said in an interview that it was “an interesting challenge for me to try and illuminate all the tiny dramas that bubble up from within the most mundane conversations.”
“In theater we talk so much about what people want and objective,” he said. “To me, all of that stuff is embedded if we listen really carefully to the conversations that we have on a daily basis.”
By lingering in uneventful moments, “Adolescence” and “Public Obscenities” say something about the ways our increasingly digital lives have made that more difficult. One of the story lines in “Public Obscenities” involves an older Bengali man, the main character’s uncle, losing himself in an online affair. “Adolescence” explores the corrosive nature of social media on children.
Like “Public Obscenities,” the David Adjmi play “Stereophonic” is roughly three hours long and takes a similar approach to stillness. “Stereophonic,” which won the Tony Award for best play last year, was inspired by the sessions for the hit Fleetwood Mac album “Rumours.” It follows a band recording an album, and there isn’t much more to the plot than that.
But it does transport the audience back to a time when there were no screens — when, to pass the time in enclosed spaces, people had to chat or just sit in silence with one another. (Or ingest substances. This was 1970s rock ’n’ roll, after all.)
Adjmi said there can be an “expression of intimacy” between people even when discussing topics that may seem trivial.
“It’s important to know who people are when they’re not performing for you and when they are not being self-conscious,” Adjmi said from London during a break from rehearsals for the show’s West End debut. “There is a kind of knowledge that we can derive from these seemingly insignificant details. What’s the phrase? ‘God is in the details’? I think that’s true and the details can look like dust in the air.”
“Adolescence,” “Public Obscenities” and “Stereophonic” make the argument, on some level, to look up rather than down, to try to make conversation even when there might not be anything to talk about. You never know what you might learn, and whom you might meet.
Small talk can seem meandering, slow or pointless, said Dr. Goodman, the G.W.U. psychology professor. “What we miss,” she added, “is that the moments of social connection often occur in the spaces in between conversations.”
Sopan Deb is a Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.
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