Nope, as the tale goes, parents working long hours and unsupervised internet access had a lot to do with what took place, some attributes like demanding a relationship with an unwilling partner or demanding sex with no consent are not ever good, regardless of what some sources tell you.
IIRC the boy that distributed the naked pictures was not punished, but the main point here is that it is not that crimes against women are more important, it is that the evidence points to women having a harder time to report the crimes.
Again, women are the ones having a harder time to convince justice and police to do the proper thing.
We had a kid like that in my primary school to High School. A school bully. Tried to take his show into the adult world. Got himself knifed and killed in a bar.
As much as it was played for Mr Miller having problems controlling his anger and rage, and throwing the paint is consistent with that, honestly I saw him as not very inappropriate chasing the punks down and throwing the bike. He didn’t hit them. He just put a bit of fear into them. That punk … jerk? … needs to learn that at some point he will harass the wrong person as part of his “fun” and get himself killed.
My daughter explained to me that it’s really about “hiding the seams” well, like they did in Birdman. It’s probably not really one shot/one take, but they edit it to make it look that way.
Then it’s a pretty incredible accomplishment. Especially in episode 2 where the camera follows the boy through the window and down the street, and eventually onto a drone and then back down to the earth. That was incredible from a technical standpoint, never mind the excellent acting and timing.
Here is a video that shows how it was done. There was a lot of handing the camera off between different operators. It also show how they attached it to the drone.
They did two takes a day for five straight days. A fair amount of time the spoken dialogue was when the actor was facing away from the camera so some of it may have been dubbed which doesn’t take anything away at all.
The podcast The Rest Is Entertainment did a Q&A this week with the director and the director of photography. Some good inside info about how it was cast and shot.
I haven’t watched the above video from Netflix so I’m not sure how much overlap there is.
We binged all four episodes last night. I get easily distracted watching TV, especially with an iPad on the sofa next to me. But this held my attention from start to finish.
For me, the best parts were how the minor adult characters handled and reacted to these events. We see a very minor character, PC Jenkins, accompanying Bascombe and Jaime from the arrest to the police station with this look of despair that’s a little confusing until we get to the strip search. I was thinking, that guy has the shittiest job in the world until we meet the school staff in episode two. These cops and teachers, even the solicitor and psychologist, despite all the protocols, are essentially winging it emotionally. None of them seem to know how they should feel about this tragedy, let alone have any idea how to stop it from happening again.
The show is brilliant filmmaking…and I will never watch it again.
I found episode one to be one of the hardest hours of television I’ve ever seen. As the father of a 13-year-old boy, I was immediately torn between the protective mindset of a father and the dramatic tension of not knowing whether he did it or not. We’ve all seen enough police procedurals to know that the cops probably had a bomb to drop in the interview room, but I still wasn’t prepared for the video that was shown to Jamie and his father.
Immediately after the all-to-real moment of the father asking his son “just one time” to tell him the truth. Followed by the bald-faced lie that he had nothing to do with it. As a dad who has (obviously) had their son lie to them many times (as all kids do at some point), that really hit hard.
My husband and i watched the first two episodes tonight. (Thanks to this thread, when he mentioned it, i said i was interested, too, instead of saying, “yes dear”. He watches a lot more Netflix than i do.)
Oh my God, yes, when the police showed that video. I couldn’t imagine.
And i didn’t realize how young they all are. Thirteen. Yikes.
Just got a chance to watch the video @hajario linked too. Great stuff! Shows a little bit more of the technical side, which I feel was just as much a character in this show as the writing and acting.
One thing it reminded me of, something that stunned me while I was watching - these people are all crying in real time. Real tears.
I assume it’s one thing to get set and get ready and conjure up a sad memory then shoot your scene. Maybe get some eye drops if the tears don’t flow.
But to be in the middle of all that technical stuff and remembering your lines and hitting your marks and to cry so believably…you are really IN it at that point. I think it’s pretty amazing!
Another thing I noticed is that right before they were about to leave a room they’d have an extra walk by kind of ahead of them to cue the next group of people. The choreography was ingenious.
And do it take after take! I actually hadn’t thought about the point you’re making, but that makes the ending of episode 1 even more impressive. I get that actors (good actors) #1 talent is probably the ability to access their emotions much more readily than us untalented normies (I once saw Amy Adams shed a tear on cue on a talk show, great party trick). But that still seems like such a raw scene to be able to just hit with no cuts to prepare a couple of times a day. Now I wonder how much scenes like that figured into which take they would use for a given episode.
Apparently this show will be shown in schools across the UK after Netflix offered it for free, supported by the Government. Quite the national conversation it has started.
I can’t help but feel like this is somewhat missing the point…
One of the big takeaways from the show, at least for me, is that you can’t expect children to successfully navigate the internet and process the deluge of information and misinformation they are exposed to. Because they are children, and their brains have not developed the critical thinking and self-regulation skills necessary to do so.
Rather, it’s the adults that need to take action. By banning phones in schools, not allowing younger children to have smart phones with internet access, and putting strict age limits on social media sites. As the mom admits in the final(?) scene of the show - “we could have done more”.
Screening the show for children is fine, I guess, but it’s the parents and teachers and politicians that need to act - not just expect their 13-year-olds so suddenly become thoughtful consumers of social media.
Even in that article the activist concludes that “banning social media among children… isn’t pragmatic”. But that’s exactly the solution! We ban children from smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol. We put ratings on movies and don’t let children watch things that are not age-appropriate. But then we give them a phone or computer with no guardrails and expect them to somehow know what TikToks are OK to watch and which are dangerous? Which ideas are bullshit and which are useful?
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