The One TV Performance From 2025 That Haunts Me: Stephen Graham in 'Adolescence'

Dear Readers,

Warm wishes this holiday season from just outside San Diego, where the rain has stopped, the sun is breaking through the clouds, and 2025 will soon give way to a new year of possibility.

Having a little distance from the year now has given me the time and space to reflect on an extraordinary stretch for TV and film. From the aching love of closeted hockey players in Heated Rivalry, to Jessie Buckley’s devastating turn in Hamnet, to the smaller, revealing moments—like the late-season dinner between three longtime friends on The White Lotus, played by Leslie Bibb, Michelle Monaghan, and Carrie Coon— performances like these are why I wanted to pause here before turning the page.

Before we move on, here’s a performance that resonated, even as another deservedly took the spotlight and took home an Emmy.

When Eddie Miller (Stephen Graham) lies down on his son’s bed, he does so gently, letting the tears flow. He grips the sheets, buries a muffled sob in a pillow, and reaches for a stuffed animal, adjusting it the way you would for a child who’s fallen asleep in the wrong position. Then he speaks to the empty room.

“I’m sorry, son,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper. “I should have done better.”

That scene stayed with me not because it demanded attention—Graham breathes, blinks, draws tears—but because of how carefully it lets grief break through. Just a broken father allowing himself to think the thought he’s been circling since the day police took his 13-year-old son away in handcuffs.

I’m 42. I don’t have children. But I felt Eddie’s terror in my chest. Here is a man caught in a heightened version of questions that likely haunt many parents: What if love wasn’t enough? What if something essential was missing and I didn’t notice until too late? What if we failed?

Graham’s performance makes that fear legible even to those of us who have never raised children. Because at its core, this isn’t just about parenting. It’s about responsibility itself and the ways we all wonder whether we’ve done enough for people who depended on us.

Adolescence arrived on Netflix in March, a four-episode British limited series filmed in unbroken takes. Thirteen-year-old Jamie Miller has been arrested for murder. The security footage is definitive. The show becomes more focused on what happens after and explores the emotional consequences on his family, including Jamie’s father Eddie, who must reconcile the boy he raised with the deadly act captured on camera.

Owen Cooper’s performance as Eddie’s son Jamie earned him an Emmy this September at 15. Cooper gives the role a frightening volatility—terrified child one moment, something darker, the next—without asking us to like him. Much of the conversation around Adolescence rightly focused on what Cooper achieved.

But the show’s emotional gravity rests elsewhere. It accumulates quietly in Eddie —in the way Graham’s face seems to age across four hours, in a posture that grows heavier, in silences that stretch. What Graham builds isn’t the kind of performance that announces itself; it’s the kind you don’t fully register until the finale.

When armed police flood the Miller home at dawn, Eddie is the first one downstairs. Graham plays him as a man whose first instinct is protection. He positions himself between his son and the officers. Later, at the police station, he advocates for Jamie with a persistence that reads as hope: the belief, reasonable and desperate, that being present ought to count for something.

Eddie is a good father in the most recognizable sense. He shows up; he comforts. He initially moves through the machinery of justice with a deference that suggests he still trusts it to see what he sees: a seemingly good kid. Graham lets us believe it, too.

Then the footage is shown. Jamie, unmistakably, driving a knife into his classmate Katie (Emilia Holliday). Again and again. Plain as day.

Graham allows Eddie a moment of physical recoil—a flinch, as though struck—before something else takes over. He demands to know why. Horror and love occupy the same frame. Neither cancels the other out.

In this moment, the question sharpens. Not whether a parent can love a child who’s done something monstrous. (Of course they can.) But whether that love means anything in the face of what’s been done. Whether it explains anything. Whether it absolves.

The second episode shifts to Jamie’s school, exploring the environment his parents never fully saw. The coded cruelty of social media. The way humiliation metastasizes online while adults imagine the internet as something separate from real life.

Eddie stands among flowers left at the murder site. Graham plays it not as grief but as displacement—an awareness that his sorrow, however real, is no longer the center of the story. He still has his son; he’s lost something else.

The show doesn’t offer easy villains. It offers something harder: the possibility that decency is not immunity. That good intentions don’t guarantee good outcomes. That you can do everything you think you’re supposed to do and still end up watching your child plead guilty to murder.

For many parents watching, this is where Adolescence cuts deepest. The fear it taps into is that something life-altering could happen quietly behind a closed bedroom door, on a screen you thought was safer than the world outside. In the gap between what you provided and what was actually needed, a gap you didn’t even know existed until it was too late.

The third episode confines itself to a conversation between Jamie and a psychologist after the crime. It forces us to sit with the boy’s thinking: the entitlement, the victim-blaming, the manosphere ideology he’s absorbed without realizing it.

Eddie isn’t present. But by the time the series returns to him, the question has shifted from “How did this happen?” to “How could we miss this?”

That question lands on Eddie’s 50th birthday. He wakes to find his work van defaced with graffiti. Graham and Christine Tremarco, who plays Eddie’s wife, Manda, spend the episode trying to reclaim a normal day. They buy paint remover. They play a-ha’s “Take On Me” and reminisce about their youth. They try to get the day back.

But normalcy is gone. A store employee endorses Jamie’s crime. Eddie catches the vandals and roughs one of them up. Then, shaking with shame, he hurls blue paint at the van, blotting out the slur while ruining it entirely.

Graham plays Eddie’s unraveling with agonizing specificity. The tremor in his hands; the way his jaw locks. The sound he makes when he finally breaks down in Jamie’s bedroom later is the sound of someone who’s run out of ways to hold it together.

Jamie calls during the drive home. He’s decided to plead guilty.

After the call, Eddie and Manda finally ask the question aloud.

“Should we have done more, though?”

Manda’s response is gentle. “I think it’d be good if we accepted that maybe we shoulda done,” she says. “I think it’d be OK for us to think that.”

What she offers isn’t concrete blame. It’s permission to acknowledge that somewhere in the ordinary rhythms of raising kids, something slipped past them. Not abuse. Just inattention. A closed door they didn’t knock on.

The show locates their failure—if that’s even the right word—inside structures larger than any household. Parenting happens inside a culture now able to radicalize young men through the very devices we’re told keep children safe.

Knowing that doesn’t absolve the ache. It doesn’t make it easier to stand in your child’s bedroom and realize what can never be recovered.

In the final scene, Eddie lies down on Jamie’s bed. He tucks in the teddy bear, kisses it as a proxy for the boy he can’t hold anymore. What makes the performance devastating is its restraint. Graham trusts that if he simply is this man—exhausted, heartbroken, still trying to parent a child who’s beyond his reach—we’ll feel what Eddie feels. And we do.

“I should have done better” might be the most universal line a parent can speak. It doesn’t require tragedy to resonate. It requires only the knowledge that you were responsible for another life and that somewhere, in some way you can’t quite name, you feel you might have fallen short. Every parent who’s ever questioned whether they said the right thing, set the right boundary, paid enough attention, asked the right questions understands what Eddie is carrying in that moment.

The line doesn’t ask for forgiveness. It doesn’t expect absolution. It’s simply an accounting, spoken aloud to no one who can hear it. Because sometimes the only thing left to do is speak the truth and keep living anyway.

In a year filled with bold performances, Graham offered something rarer: a study in responsibility without absolution, grief without release.

Some reckonings don’t redeem us. They don’t offer closure or transformation. They ask us to see clearly. To acknowledge what we missed. To live with that knowledge.

Eddie Miller is not a bad father. That’s what makes his story unbearable. He tried. He loved his children deeply. And still, it wasn’t enough—not because he failed spectacularly, but because the gap between what a parent can control and what actually shapes a child is wider and darker than we want to admit.

That’s the fear Adolescence makes visible. Not that we might fail through cruelty or neglect—that’s almost easier to accept, because it suggests clear cause and effect. But that we might do everything right and still end up in a room that smells of childhood, holding a stuffed animal, whispering a quiet apology that won’t yield forgiveness.

The performance lingers because it understands that for anyone who’s ever been responsible for a child—or who’s ever been responsible for another—Eddie’s final words aren’t just his. They’re the words we all carry. The fear that when it mattered most, we should have done better, and the terrible knowledge that by the time we realize it, it’s already too late.