India, March 27 -- Adolescence, a four-part British miniseries now streaming on Netflix, is not merely a drama but a quiet reckoning. It begins, like so many contemporary stories of disillusionment, with a child at the center of a crime, a 13-year-old boy, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), arrested for the murder of his classmate, Katie Leonard.

Yet this is no procedural, no whodunit engineered for plot twists and courtroom revelations. Instead, the series unfolds with the restraint of a psychological study and the gravity of a tragedy already set in motion.

It is less concerned with what happened than with everything that happened before: the silences, the fractures, the blind spots where something irrevocable grew.

There are moments in whi...