Netflix’s Adolescence already looks like it will be the best TV drama of 2025. The real-time series, shot in one take per episode and starring Stephen Graham, is a harrowing portrait of a family torn apart when their 13-year-old son is accused of murder. If you’ve just finished it, you’ll probably want to take a moment to recover - after that, though, here are 10 TV shows you should check out next, plus our full guide on where to stream them.
Boiling Point
Adolescence reunites actor (and in the case of Adolescence, co-creator and co-writer) Stephen Graham with director Philip Barantini. The pair made their name with the 2021 film Boiling Point, an enormously tense and stressful drama that was set in a restaurant kitchen and was, like each episode of Adolescence, filmed entirely in one unbroken take. Boiling Point then transferred to TV, ditching the one-take format - although it does occasionally nod to the film with a long, unbroken scene - and widening the cast beyond Graham’s character, but keeping the intensity and authenticity of a drama following people who are constantly on edge.
The Virtues
Stephen Graham’s TV CV is long and distinguished, but rarely has he been required to display the raw emotion felt by his character Eddie in Adolescence, particularly in the final episode. One exception is The Virtues, an astonishing drama series by writer/director Shane Meadows. Graham plays Joseph, an alcoholic who suffers a personal crisis and travels from England to Ireland, the country where he grew up. Gradually it emerges that Joseph was abused as a child, a subject handled with tremendous skill and sensitivity by Meadows and his co-writer Jack Thorne, who also co-wrote Adolescence. The final episode, where all Joseph’s repressed memories come tumbling out, is a phenomenal, unforgettable piece of work.
Toxic Town
Adolescence is not the first TV hit this year for prolific writer Jack Thorne. Heck, it’s not even his first Netflix hit of the year - he also wrote this gentler but still pretty fiery true-life drama about a group of ordinary mothers fighting for justice. The scandal it dramatises is the Corby toxic waster case: in the mid-1980s in Northamptonshire, a disused steelworks is redeveloped, but the works release harmful dust that comes into contact with local people. When Corby women start giving birth to unusual numbers of children with disabilities, one of them - played here by Jodie Whittaker - refuses to be silenced, and a long, ultimately inspiring battle begins.
The Bear
You should watch all of The Bear because it’s one of the best dramas of the past few years, but for our current purposes, the episode you want is Review, the seventh episode of season one. The staff of the restaurant that forms the main location of the drama face an even more stressful shift than usual, as they prepare for a busy service: it starts with a mistake that leads to hundreds of pre-orders being taken accidentally, and ends with someone being stabbed. Heightening the energy of the episode is the fact that almost all of it is shot in a single take, a decision taken late in the production process by showrunner Christopher Storer when he saw how suited the script was to being presented unedited.
Top Boy
Ashley Walters, who in Adolescence plays Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe, the police detective investigating a murder, is best known for embodying a character on the other side of the law: in Top Boy he’s Dushane, a drug dealer who goes to increasingly brutal lengths to try to maintain his position as a kingpin on the drugs scene in Hackney, east London. It’s about gang violence and organised criminality rather than the toxic online culture that fuels Adolescence, but Top Boy has similar warnings about the world British teenagers are growing up in, and how they sometimes can’t be stopped from going down very dark paths.
A Thousand Blows
Erin Doherty and Stephen Graham don’t appear together in Adolescence: she is child psychologist Briony, who spends the whole of episode three interviewing accused teenager Jamie (Owen Cooper) within a youth psychiatric facility, in the absence of Jamie’s dad Eddie (Graham). Doherty and Graham are, however, also both in A Thousand Blows. Set in 1880s London in and around the underground boxing scene, the drama features Doherty as Mary, leader of all-female crime syndicate the Forty Elephants; Graham is fearsome boxer Henry “Sugar” Goodson. A further tie-in: three episodes of A Thousand Blows are directed by Adolescence co-star Ashley Walters.
The Responder
If you’ve seen this fine BBC cop drama, featuring Martin Freeman as Chris Carson, a Liverpool police officer who operates using his own unique version of law and procedure, you’ll remember a disturbing subplot involving Carson’s patrol partner, Rachel (Adelayo Adedayo), and her terrifying, controlling boyfriend, Steve. That’s Philip Barantini, the director of Adolescence and the man responsible for the Netflix show’s astonishing one-take format. Barantini has an acting career running parallel to his directing, also appearing in Time, Humans and Chernobyl, although you’d expect him to stay behind the camera more often now. Indeed, he directed the gripping season-one finale of The Responder.
True Detective
At six minutes in length, the unbroken take in season one, episode four of True Detective is trivial by the standards of Adolescence, which extends its unbroken shots for the whole of each episode. But when it dropped in February 2014, director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s one-taker was a big deal, and it is still mightily impressive. Rogue cop Rust (Matthew McConaughey) makes the rash decision to rob a meth-dealing biker gang - when he’s rumbled halfway through and has to shoot his way to safety, the camera follows him without blinking, including the moment where he climbs up and over a chainlink fence.
Swiped: The School That Banned Smartphones
There’s a lot more to Adolescence than the idea that kids being on their phones all day leads to bad results, but that is a major factor in its devastating story. If you’re a spooked parent or perhaps even a worried kid and you want to know more, give this 2024 documentary a go. Emma and Matt Willis observe - and participate in - an experiment at an Essex school where phones are taken away from the children for three weeks. The change is an immediate success, with mental health and family harmony improving markedly once smartphones stop getting in everyone’s way. It’s food for thought.
Under the Bridge
Another sobering drama about the very dark acts teenagers are capable of, this US series is based on real events. Adapted from the book by Rebecca Godfrey, it stars Riley Keough as Godfrey, who goes back to her home town in sleepy Saanich, British Columbia, Canada, to write a book about troubled young girls in the area. She arrives just as one local teen, Reena (Vritika Gupta), vanishes. When a missing-girl case turns into a murder case and it’s unclear which of Reena’s peers is to blame, Godfrey becomes deeply involved in a malaise that runs deeper than just the odd bad kid.
Where to Watch Shows like Adolescence Streaming Online
Check out our guide below on where to watch all the shows like Adolescence streaming in the United Kingdom!
