' ADOLESCENCE ' -NETFLIX- HONOURS : MINI-SERIES

Family Fragilities : Netflix's mini-series Adolescence transcends the barricades of intellectuality and craft and makes for the greatest work on TV in decades.

Adolescence, a four-episode Netflix drama about Jamie Miller [ Owen Cooper ], a bright 13-year-old from a normal everyday family, getting arrested for murder, might sound like regular-thriller hokum from the streaming giant but like the series premise, looks can be deceiving.

The nearly four-hour-long show is a study of agony, but it is not agony for agony's sake : fakeness, cliched turns of story and weepy melodrama are kept far away by a heart-palpitating sense of worry -that this could all be as real as real can be.

It is a story - rather an account, like a report one sees on the news, just more intimate - of a family's turmoil, whose existence is violently yanked out of whatever measure of normalcy they know.

Creators writers Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham [ the latter also acting as Jamie's father, Eddie ], along with director Philip Barantini and cinematographer Matthew Lewis weave complex human emotions between technical, artistic and managerial brilliance.

Yes, managerial, because every episode is designed as a complex single continuous shot that is filmed without creative cop-outs.

Let me elaborate : doing long continuous takes [ called '' oners'' - spoken as '' oner'' ] demands meticulous planning and a second-by-second precision from the cast, the production team and even the extras.

A slip of a line, stumble on reactions, a delay in the actors' sorting and shifting of emotions, and one has to redo the take from the start.

To make it more manageable, sections are divided, hidden by creative cuts. See the making of Sam Mendes' 1917 and Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 murder mystery Rope - the first film in history to tackle  oner with seamless perfection.

To sum, Adolescence accepts and transcends the barricades of intellectuality and craft, and instead focuses on the gut-wrenching simplicity of the ordeal, and how it all hits home and still makes for the greatest work on TV in decades.

The World Students Society thanks Farheen Jawaid.