Adolescence.

For three episodes, the new Netflix series Adolescence delivers some of the best television content I’ve ever seen, both in writing and in performances. Each episode is recorded as one continuous shot, and walks us through a different hour (roughly) in a different day across the case of a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a female classmate. That fourth episode, however, makes some curious editorial choices, shifting the focus to characters who probably don’t belong at the center of this kind of story, and even some strong acting can’t totally salvage the conclusion.

The first episode opens with two police officers, DI Bascombe (Ashley “Asher D” Walters) and DS Frank (Faye Marsay), as they prepare to storm a suburban house to arrest a suspect, 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper, in his first film role). We follow them in the police van to the station, through processing and the initial interrogation, and it’s only near the very end of the episode that we learn any details about the crime and why the police think he did it. The second episode, taking place two days later, focuses on the two cops and their investigation, particularly DI Bascombe’s interest in learning a motive. Because much of the theme of the series is the social difficulties that teenagers face as a result of social media, this turns out to be a significant episode for our understanding of Jamie’s potential motives and what his life was like before the murder.

The third episode is the big one, the one that’s going to win all the awards for writing and for its two actors, as nearly the entire hour takes place in a room at the juvenile detention center where Jamie is being held as he awaits trial. Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty) is an independent psychologist hired by his attorneys to provide a report on his state of mind and understanding of everything that’s happening; it’s not their first such appointment, so they can jump right into the conversation, and it becomes heated and intense as Jamey displays an inability to regulate his emotions that we haven’t seen previously. It’s a tour de force performance from Cooper, as the one-shot gimmick requires him to shapeshifter from petulant teenager into a demon who can’t contain his rage and frustration in a matter of seconds. It ends on an extremely powerful note, maybe the defining moment of the series.

That fourth episode, though, is a letdown, even though series co-creator Stephen Graham, who plays Jamie’s father Eddie, delivers a strong performance as this episode’s protagonist. The camera is on him, his wife, and their daughter for the entire hour, focusing on the aftereffects of Jamie’s arrest, which of course has upended their lives and made them pariahs in the neighborhood. There’s even a horrifying and too-accurate scene where a big-box hardware store employee recognizes Eddie and reveals that he thinks Jamie is innocent, citing a bunch of the counterfactual nonsense you might encounter in the Qanon-adjacent corners of the internet. It’s such a reflection of the world in which a third of the United States seems to be living, one totally disconnected from reality, willing to ignore the obvious facts in favor of lunatic conspiracy theories.

This episode makes a choice to center Jamie’s family, which continues a theme of the entire series, which is that the family of the victim, Katie, doesn’t exist. We never see Katie’s parents, or any grieving family members. The closest we get is her friend. This even echoes comments from DS Frank in episode 2 about how a murder like this tends to cast the spotlight on the killer, not the victim, only to have the victim and her family erased from the series, especially the last half. The entire focus in the final hour of Adolescence is on how hard this has all been on Jamie’s parents and his sister. And this has been done before: it’s the entire theme of We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsey’s excellent but almost unwatchable adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel about the mother of a boy who murders a bunch of his classmates at high school. That film is an incisive portrait of a woman tormented by guilt over her parenting, whether her decisions somehow led her son to commit this atrocity, whether she did enough to try to stop him when it was clear that something about him was off – and why her husband wouldn’t listen. Adolescence doesn’t grapple with its perpetrator’s parents at anywhere near the same depth, which is an acceptable choice if the script also chose to acknowledge that there is another family dealing with an even greater grief. Graham and his co-writer Jack Thorne chose instead to focus only on Jamie’s family, and that undercuts so much of what the series aimed to accomplish. There’s way too much good in the first three-quarters of the series for this particular choice to undo it; I just kept waiting for them to show Katie’s family, somehow, and the failure to do so took something away from the series for me.

(Apropos of nothing, I could have sworn Jemma Redgrave appeared in the initial scene of the raid on Jamie’s house, but she’s not credited anywhere. I’m curious if anyone else thought they spotted her.)