‘Adolescence’ Wins Emmy for Outstanding Limited Series

The Netflix miniseries beats "The Penguin," "Black Mirror," and "Dying For Sex" to win the Emmy award for Outstanding Limited Series/Movie.

“Adolescence,” Netflix‘s four-part miniseries exploring the fallout from a teen boy’s murder of one of his classmates in the North of England, has won the Emmy for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series. The mature, harrowing look at the family, school, and community affected by the murder through a set of four continuous-take episodes was produced by Mark Herbert, Emily Feller, Hannah Walters, Stephen Graham, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Nina Wolarsky, Jack Thorne, Philip Barantini, Carina Sposato, Niall Shamma, Peter Balm, and Jo Johnson.

Among that list, of course, the chief co-conspirators are actor, co-writer, and executive producer Stephen Graham and executive producer and co-writer Jack Thorne. Graham brought the concept for the series to Thorne as something that could work as a one-take show — something the pair had already worked with “Adolescence” director Philip Barantini on the film “Boiling Point” — and Thorne fleshed out the scripts to be a set of interconnected, grounded antidotes to more salacious True Crime stories and fuller story than the empty calories of a Whodunit or Howcatchem.

Speaking to IndieWire on an episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast, Graham said that the idea to interrogate how incel culture online leads to violence in the real world was inherently a collaborative one. It took a village to fail Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper); it would also take one to tell that story with unflinching honesty. That village has already been rewarded with 13 Emmy nominations, and wins for Outstanding Limited Series Cinematography for its dauntless DP Matthew Lewis; as well as Outstanding Casting for a Limited Series/Anthology for its tireless casting director Shaheen Baig, who found actors young and old able to hang with the show’s relentless visual style.

“ I always use the analogy of being a football team — sorry, a soccer team. You bring people in who are wonderful within their positions because you know the qualities that they will bring, and then it’s [about] creating a space and allowing them to be able to do what they do,” Graham said.

“Adolescence” FC has won its Outstanding Limited Series Emmy, as well as seven other awards, beating the more heavily nominated “The Penguin” (which earned 24 nominations total) and the critically beloved FX dark comedy “Dying For Sex,” as well as Netflix’s own Season 7 of “Black Mirror” and the IRA historical drama, “Say Nothing.” Graham accepted on behalf of the show, highlighting the ways in which everyone on the production was on equal footing, from the producers to the people cleaning the trailers, and that a spirit of equality and love leads to the best work. “Just look after each other,” Graham said, which is as good a sentiment to take from “Adolescence” as any.