Adolescence

Government buildings have a miasma of conspiracy and dark dealings around them. You get this feeling when you walk around areas like Bunge House or City Hall, places you only ever saw on the 7 o’clock news as a child, and never for reasons that made you feel hopeful. These buildings aren’t welcoming. Their walls, though repainted every few years in dull creams or authoritative greys, still hold the tired groans of backroom deals and misplaced trust. They are not spaces you walk through lightly. And yet, there I was with an official task in one of these very offices. And I felt... tainted. Like I had somehow stepped into a role in one of those stories my younger self watched with wide-eyed suspicion. Suddenly, I wasn’t just reading about government secrets. I was brushing past them in the hallways. Breathing the same recycled air as the men and women who push unsigned documents across tables in hushed tones.

That sense of eerie contamination didn’t just linger in my mind. It followed me, days later, when I had to accompany a friend to a police station near my place. Another swindling. Another city-born scamster promising a good apartment near you, or offering quick returns on investments you’ve never heard about. Or some audacious girl using a well-rehearsed sob story to collect sympathy and M-Pesa boosts. Nairobi is always a city of curated lies and desperate believers. At this point, getting conned here is more of a rite of passage than a shock. And yet, standing in that station—the dim lighting flickering above us like a faulty conscience—I felt the weight of a thousand broken trust stories hanging in the air.

The station was grim. They all are. A cracked desk held up a pile of old newspapers, cups stained with years of bad tea, and a radio playing something metallic and disjointed. A Kikuyu folk song I believe. There was an officer scribbling something in a logbook, clearly uninterested. And as my friend nervously explained how his money had disappeared into another’s M-Pesa wallet, I found myself drifting. My eyes wandered out the wide entrance door and landed on a baddie walking barefoot across the gravelly station compound. Baddies are always in all the wrong places..hehe.

She looked like she’d just been released from a wild Friday night that had gone a few chapters too far. A beautiful girl, for sure—her face, though tired, carried that Nairobi gloss of rebellion and late-night drama. Once you stay in Nairobi for a while they all start to look the same, with new exceptions every other week. This one’s wig sat slightly off-center, like it had tried and failed to keep up with her night in the cell. She carried her stiletto heels in a brown bag like they were evidence of crimes she wasn’t ready to admit. Her mini dress was barely clinging to her dignity, and was ruffled and revealing just enough to get whispers rolling at the back of my head. A bruise peeked from behind her knee, not the kind that looked like it came from dancing. Her friend, who walked beside her silently, had that energy of someone who had been through this before—one arm gently supporting her, the other holding her handbag. The two of them looked like a walking movie scene. No words, just body language telling you about a party, a fight, a cell, and a promise never to do this again. And yet, we all know such promises are made for breaking.

While I was still in my gaze the visuals in front of me collided with what I had just watched a few weeks before: Adolescence, the Netflix series that still hasn’t left my bones. It’s getting more difficult to get a good, gripping series on Netflix nowadays. But this one ticked most, if not all, of my boxes.

PS: If you haven’t watched Adolescence yet and want to, feel free to skip this post. I can’t hold in my excitement to talk about it anymore.

The imagery, the characters, the sheer emotional tension. Jamie—a 13-year-old boy with a mind sharper than most grown men I know—had just been arrested. A child. Not for petty theft. Not for joyriding or truancy. But murder. Murder. A child being arrested for murder sends something cold through you. Its the kind of story that reshapes your view of childhood and innocence altogether. When a child is accused of taking a life, brutally, intentionally, it doesn’t just shock you. It unsettles your entire framework of what children are capable of when left unguided. It rattles your belief in community. In parenting. In systems.

“It takes a village to raise a child,” they say. And yet, some villages seem to turn children into ticking time bombs. This series Adolescence doesn’t hold your hand as it tells this story. It shoves you face-first into the broken homes, the silent failures, the loneliness and peer pressure that wraps around kids when no one is paying attention.

I sat in that police station thinking about how Jamie sat in a similar space, accused, confused, guarded. Flanked by his father who he tried so hard not to disappoint. And it made me reflect on our police here too—our detectives, if I can even call them that.

I think cops, at least the ones I see in shows like Line of Duty or Cross, do actual investigative work. The Kenyan version? Not so much. Here, most detectives, DCI, seem like they’re just trying to run out the clock on their shift. They rarely dig. They guess. Or worse, they assume. But being a detective, it seems like no easy task, really. One wrong decision and the whole case crumbles. One wrong lead followed and the kidnapper escapes. One overlooked clue and now the grieving family blames you for not bringing their son or daughter home. Meanwhile, drugs flow into the streets. The serial killer smells the panic. He watches and waits. And when he knows the police fumbled, he licks the inside of his mouth, tasting future blood. He’s already planning his next. Because now, time is on his side.

To be a detective, I imagine, takes more than just a badge. It requires razor-sharp judgment almost every single day. And the ironic thing about good judgement is that it comes from years of bad judgment. Screwing up. Learning. Recovering. That’s what separates the great detectives from the ones who just show up to look good.

Speaking of judgment, one of the most gut-wrenching scenes in Adolescence was Jamie’s therapy session with Briony Ariston, the psychiatrist. It’s one of those rare scenes that doesn’t just entertain—it exposes. It peels away everything until you’re left raw. I have rewatched it over and over again because it is a brilliant piece, shot in one.single.take. Unbelievable!

A couple of months after Jamie’s alleged crime, he sits across from Briony like a boy possessed. One minute, he’s yelling in her ear with a fury far beyond his years. The next, he’s biting into the sandwich Briony brought him. The shift in tone is terrifying. It makes you feel like you’re in the presence of something unstable, unpredictable, for 40+ straight minutes. No cuts. No bloopers or coughs. Just “Action!” and roll red.

Then the next minute Jamie softens—asks Briony if she loves him. That kind of validation, turns out, is what Jamie craved that led to him doing something insane. Between them, this exchange that has been playing in my head like an eerie lullaby, plays out like this:

B: “Katie wrote this on your Facebook feed.”

J: “Facebook??”

B: “Instagram.”

J: “Are you alright? You look a bit red. Did I scare you when I shouted?”

B: “She wrote this on your Instagr..”

J (Interrupting Briony): “I mean, I’m only 13! I don’t think I look that scary.”

B: “Could you tell me what these emojis ar..”

J: “How embarrassing is that? Getting scared of a 13-year-old.”

Silence.

J: “Wow.”

Silence.

When Briony finally leaves the room after their session, her eyes are red, her face wet. It’s the kind of scene that looks like it broke her. And maybe it did. Maybe in that moment, the character cracked—because the actress behind her let the emotions through the barrier of performance.

It’s a masterclass in tension and release. Scenes like this make the hairs on my arms tingle. Because they aren't just scenes. They're crafted emotional warfare. And all of this is happening in a single take. No cuts. No “Take two.” Everyone involved must nail it the first time. That’s not acting. That’s high-wire performance art.

And Owen Cooper, the actor behind Jamie. What a kid! A first-time actor. A first-time actor! Let that sink in. His performance was so layered, so detailed, that I kept pausing the show just to Google him. I was convinced he must be one of those theatre kids who’ve been doing Shakespeare since age six. Naah. This was his debut. And he crushed it. His guilt was palpable. His moments of charm with Briony were disarming. And that final episode, when he finally changes his plea to guilty. My stomach dropped. He had me second-guessing the entire time if he killed the girl or not. Maybe he didn’t do it. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe there’s more to it. But no. He did it. Because he liked her. And she didn’t like him back. The most cliché of relationship drama, yet it is happening all around us. And that moment of rejection triggered something dark in him, something primal, and he wanted to feel powerful. In control. A deception that social media deceives young 13-year-old boys that they have to be in “control” of the girls at their school. That quiet admission of guilt from Jamie hit harder than any gory scene ever could.

I’ve always respected actors who don’t just act—but become. Cillian Murphy as Tommy Shelby is the perfect example. It was not acting, it was sorcery. The way he carried his war trauma like it’s stitched into his dark trench coats. And now this kid Jamie—Owen—he’s right up there. I believed every twitch of his face, every hesitation in his voice. I admired his ability to pull us in and hold us hostage to his inner conflict.

But above all, what stood out for me in Adolescence was the bold choice of the one-shot format. Forty-plus minutes. No cuts. Every scene choreographed to perfection. That kind of filmmaking demands a level of discipline, timing, and artistry that’s almost non-existent in mainstream TV. It’s high risk. And high reward. You miss a line, you start over. Someone coughs? You reset. A phone rings in the background? Do it again. But when it works? It works and feels like magic.

And that’s why I’ll always prefer British shows to American ones. British dramas don’t try to make you like them. They tell the story. Raw, awkward, painful. American movies are too obsessed with being the hero. Too many guns. Too much gloss. And don’t even get me started on how every country outside America is portrayed as dusty, dangerous, and brown. It’s lazy, egotistical, and getting boring. British shows, on the other hand, respect my intelligence. They know good acting beats a good explosion. They trust silence, they trust the tension, the truth. That’s why when I finish a British series, I end up on YouTube for two hours, watching behind-the-scenes clips, interviews, and learning different British accents because I’m that obsessed.

Let Hollywood keep their shiny heroes. I’ll stick with scouse accents, uncut scenes, and broken boys with secrets. Because that’s where the real stories live.

Adolescence left me breathless. Left me researching Owen Cooper. Left me sitting in a police station watching life unfold in a way that felt eerily scripted. And left me thinking: who else is walking around with a Jamie hidden inside?

✍🏽Reagan.