How the Adolescence Sound Design Guides Viewers
Subtle choices (and sometimes very loud choices) help us process what's happening amid the chaos of the Netflix hit.
Welcome to the wild and wonderful era of Emmy Awards: Phase 1, a time before nomination voting when the arbitrary rules governing what is timely are set aside, and we can discuss projects that were released weeks or months earlier and deserve to be top of mind again. Adolescence premiered on Netflix March 13, 2025.
Before Adolescence, supervising sound editor James Drake and director Philip Barantini had already worked together on the one-take 2021 movie Boiling Point. They were in ADR sessions on another project when Barantini casually mentioned the then-upcoming series, co-created by Jack Thorne and Boiling Point star Stephen Graham. “‘We're gonna do it again, but we're gonna do it four times, and it's gonna be a TV series,’” Drake remembers Barantini saying. “And the ideas he had about Episode 1 were way beyond anything that we'd tried before. But he's a great director, great leader, and the master of those projects, so you're in safe hands.”
Sound design is always a tricky art, as the panelists on Netflix’s May 27 Sonic Showcase FYSEE Q&A attested. In many ways, Drake’s work on Adolescence serves as a crash course for audiences in how sound can subtly shift our perspectives.
“Phil always said that it was about naturalism and grit and reality,” Drake said. “What [the sound team was] doing was shaping and moving those moments of tension further away and closer when we needed. It was kind of a joy to do because we had a blank canvas: There were no edits, no music, nothing. It was just a mono guide track, and then we started building layers.”
The goals of those layers often revolved around point of view, offering a respite from the documentary-style visuals of teenage Jamie arrested for murdering a classmate. That also aids us in processing what’s happening, providing some editorial guidance about what characters are thinking and feeling.
“My favorite time that we do it in Episode 1 is where Eddie [Jamie’s father, played by Graham] is in the nurse's room and they're about to examine Jamie. And it's this horrendous moment of a father being present when his son is being strip-searched,” Drake said. “Instantly, Phil and I both had the same [idea to] take all sound away. So all those layers of room tone and rattling fans, they all just get very slowly subtracted as the camera moves in on [Eddie], and you just have his breath, and then you just have the Foley and the voices in the background. [The show is] quite harrowing, but hopefully it really works.”
Later in that episode—which begins with police officers knocking down the family’s front door and ends with a stunned father sitting beside his teen son in police custody—officers show Eddie exactly why they have arrested Jamie: damning, irrefutable CCTV footage. Drake singled out that moment as one he is particularly proud of.
“The reveal of what Jamie did… we tried so many different things in that moment,” he said. “We tried music, we tried sound design, we tried just loads of things. [But] the original idea was just the hum of the laptop. That the camera would move in, and the laptop hums just very gently, and we just focus [on the footage playing on the screen]. We went all the way around and back to it.”
Adolescence is now streaming on Netflix.