'Adolescence' Isn't Daring Enough

The hit show raises hard questions, offers few answers

I’m not much of a TV watcher. I find myself regularly out of the loop when people are gathering around the Twitter water cooler to discuss the latest finale, and I’m at peace with that. But I occasionally make exceptions, especially for limited series. When the British crime drama Adolescence hit Netflix this month, I knew it would be one of them. It spans a tight four episodes, each masterfully shot in a single long take. Newcomer Owen Cooper gives a star-making performance as Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old working-class schoolboy accused of murdering a female classmate. The show subverts audience expectations by quickly revealing that Jamie is in fact guilty. The driving question thus becomes not “Who?” but “Why?”

Veteran actor Stephen Graham co-created the show with Jack Thorne and stars as Jamie’s father. It was not based on any one particular crime, as some have inaccurately claimed, but it was inspired by what felt to Graham like a distinct uptick in boy-on-girl murder. With a drama like this, he hoped to spark a conversation. He’s certainly succeeded. The series has become such an overnight phenomenon that this reflection already feels like a grain of sand atop a still-growing pile of Takes. I offer it nonetheless, in hopes that I can add something. I write not just as a professional take-haver, but as a sometime high school teacher, as well as someone who was learning about toxic Internet masculinity culture before it was a hot topic. I also have sisters, and I don't want them to date men in the school of Andrew Tate. (I wrote a short article bringing some of these threads together here, back when Tate first crawled out from under his rock to become a Thing. Knock on wood, we’ve passed Peak Tate, despite his talent for keeping himself in the news cycle.)

It should go without saying, but I mention these things to make it clear that whatever my criticisms of the show, I carry no water for online misogynists. I also don’t share the online right’s cynicism about the makers’ motives. I believe they genuinely care about boys, care about the unique challenges of raising boys in 2025, and care about protecting girls. And from a craft standpoint, there’s much to praise in what they’ve made. Once you realize the one-shot technique is real, not just a sleight of hand, it’s hard to look away. That technical choice in turn informs the dramatic choice to limit the show to only a few “windows” on the story, four “blinks of an eye,” in Jack Thorne’s words. For the writers, it leaves little margin for the sort of fluff that typically bogs down a series like this. And of course, for the actors, it leaves precious little margin for error. The third episode, mostly a two-hander between Owen Cooper and stage star Erin Doherty as Jamie’s therapist, is a standout. It offers the vitality of theater blended with the intimacy of cinema.

Still, I understand some of the reasons why it’s earning a chilly reception in the right-leaning journalistic circles where I run. It’s nothing if not earnest, in the venerable tradition of on-the-nose British social realism that wants to drive change around a Social Problem. I think of older work like Janet Green’s Sapphire (About Race) or Victim (About Homosexuality). But Adolescence suffers from the fact that it earnestly wants to be About too many things at once: About Masculinity, About Cyberbullying, About Knife Crime, and of course, About Adolescence. Further, it wants to treat all these things while deliberately filtering out all the considerations of familial dysfunction, mental illness, abuse, or ethnoreligious culture clash that typically bear on this kind of crime. Jamie has been very intentionally written as a character no one would have pegged as a killer: a cute, prepubescent white boy in a stable home with loving parents, no abuse trauma, and no history of mental disturbance. Granted, something interesting could be done with this insistent peeling away of potential excuses, approaching that Lord of the Flies-like intuition that evil is a child’s natural state. But the writers have merely substituted 2020s excuses for 1990s ones.

Thorne has claimed the point of the show is not to make parents worry “your kid is next” and imply there are “Jamies everywhere,” but this is in tension with a featurette where he expressly describes their goal as “Don’t put this in the extraordinary. Make this feel like it could happen to you, because that is the reality of what is happening in our world.” That at least sounds like he’s saying there are potential Jamies everywhere, lacking only the opportunity to tumble down the wrong rabbit hole on Reddit or 4chan. Jamie doesn’t cite any influencers by name, but he and his peers have all taken to heart the “80-20 rule,” the idea that 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men, meaning the hapless male majority must resort to pick-up trickery. We learn the girls were aware of the rule as well and used it to taunt the boys. Specifically, we learn Jamie’s would-be victim, Katie, used it to taunt him, with strings of emojis that have to be decoded by the Detective Inspector’s son (in dialogue that feels too much like a Gen X simulacrum of Gen Z speech).

Now, is it worth having a conversation about how online pickup artists are poisoning relations between the sexes? Definitely. Was I thrilled when my high school boy students went through a phase of binge-watching influencers like Tate and Sneako? Definitely not. (Sneako is younger than Tate but also a major figure in this whole strange world. Yet even he seems shocked and chastened in this clip where he meets some gleefully misogynistic little fans.) For my boys, though, the fleeting appeal of these figures had more to do with a vague aura of coolness and status than it did with misogyny. Their dreams were made of dollar signs, Bugattis, and Air Jordans. They were in a state of innocence or denial about Tate’s serious crimes. It thus fell on me as their youngest and most online teacher to walk the line of nudging them out of that state without shaming them. And as you would hope, the phase passed. When I gently teased them about it during a reunion last spring, they were properly sheepish. Again, this is not to downplay Tate’s truly malign influence, or to downplay the broader problem that parents are generally oblivious to what the boys are getting up to online. But for an average 13-year-old boy, there will be many stairs in between “Watches Andrew Tate videos” and “Hates all girls,” let alone “Stabs female classmate to death.”

The showmakers are eager to screen their work in schools. Depending on what sort of kids are in the audience, it might spark fruitful, practical dialogue, as reported in this hopeful article. But it may not have the effect they want on cocky teen boys. As my friend Ben Sixsmith points out (and Ben like me is hardly sanguine about toxic influencers), teenagers see adult authority figures as finger-wagging and uncool at the best of times. Some of the young people in the above article talk about how banning all mention of characters like Tate at school had just made his fanbase all the more entrenched. Echoing Ben’s independent suggestion, it worked much better for a male peer to “take the piss out of him” by pointing out what a grifting loser he is.

I would add that the left in particular has no prayer of reaching an increasingly right-leaning male Gen Z. A still shot of Jamie’s therapist in Episode 3 has been turned into a right-wing Twitter meme, in which she becomes the avatar of leftist schoolmarmery. (“The longhouse,” in alt-right speak.) In the show, she’s supposed to be a brave, compassionate authority figure. In meme world, she’s solemnly grilling Jamie over his fondness for unedited Roald Dahl books, or a budding obsession with Anglo-futurism, or an indiscreet “Not this sh*t again” when his English teacher reads Maya Angelou. The meme has legs only because the left has made it non-satirical. My mind went back to this story about an American schoolboy kicked out of class for carrying a backpack with a Gadsden flag patch on it. Twitter promptly memed a snapshot of him barely containing laughter while his condescending female teacher gives him A Look.

Of course, that boy really hadn’t done anything except wear a flag patch. But little Jamie has butchered a girl with a kitchen knife. And that episode is in fact a well-written, well-acted set piece that deserves to be assessed on its own terms, as the therapist character deserves to be assessed on her own terms. But it’s being aired on a cultural channel that many young men tuned out of long ago.

I think the script actually aspires to be more nuanced than “It was Andrew Tate wot did it,” to quote one snarky reviewer. I’m glad it’s willing to suggest, among other things, that it was the wretched public ed system wot did it. Episode 2 portrays Jamie’s school as a Hobbesian jungle, full of powerless teachers and children learning nothing. I was reminded of Bo Burnham’s teen drama Eighth Grade, whose anxious female protagonist navigates an American middle-school hellscape. As in that film, cyberbullying plays a depressingly believable role here. It emerges that Katie had texted a topless pic to another boy who cruelly broadcasted it school-wide. But then she herself turned bully when she led the taunting of Jamie and his “incel” friends. And so the miserable cycle goes, and so it goes. One sees the pieces of what could have been a compelling drama that just focused on this cycle without also trying to hook it on an adolescent knife murder.

I’m personally open to Jack Thorne’s crusading proposal that the smartphone be banned for children under 16, which echoes similar recent proposals by Jonathan Haidt. I was lucky to teach at a very small private school where students surrendered their phones every morning, and the benefits were palpable. However, it must be said that it’s a typically leftist tic to focus on banning the tools humans use to do evil things—phones, guns, etc.—as if that thing is the source of the evil, or the “pollution,” and if we can just eliminate the thing, the Social Problem will be near-solved.

There are dangers in letting fiction drive real-world policy like this, especially in a country like England which already takes censorship to tyrannical extremes. It’s fair game to point out that the show was partly funded by the British government, and it now provides a way for politicians like Keir Starmer to deflect attention from their own poor governance towards the bogeyman of “online misinformation.” (In a Freudian slip, Starmer recently called the show a “documentary.”) Among other things, the show is being cited in favor of the draconian Online Safety Act.

Yet with all these calls for censoring this and banning that, I note with interest that no one is proposing a ban on porn.

Porn is referred to exactly once in the script, in the therapy episode where Jamie is being probed on his feelings about girls. The interview becomes uncomfortable as the therapist asks him what he’d like to do with a girl on a date. “Would you want to kiss her?” He gets defensive: “Are you allowed to ask these questions?” “What,” she replies, “you don’t discuss this in PSHE?” which in the UK is short for “Personal, social, health and economic education.” Then she asks (in perfect politically correct fashion), what he thinks is the normal amount a boy his age would do sexually with a girl “or boy.” After telling a few tall tales about how far he’s gone, then backtracking, Jamie begins to say he’s seen “photos,” meaning photos of girls like Katie who were blackmailed at his school. The therapist asks if he means porn. Impatiently, he replies, “No, not porn. Everyone sees porn.”

I’m not sure quite what the writers meant to convey with this passing line and its delivery. Perhaps its very casualness is intended to shock: If you’re worried your kids might have seen porn, buckle up, because it gets much worse from here. But in terms of what has concretely wreaked the most havoc on young minds and souls, freely accessible pornography has loomed much larger for much longer than any online subculture. It lurks behind the entire premise of a show in which 13-year-olds are acting out adult sexual neuroses and rivalries. Indeed, it lurks behind the toxic “manosphere” subculture. Yet it’s the subculture that’s been placed front and center in the show’s marketing. Perhaps that’s because going after misogynists costs nothing in mainstream social capital, whereas lobbying for a porn ban might get you lumped in with Dread Christian Nationalists.

And if we wanted to be really edgy here, as long as they’re going to call us Christian Nationalists anyway, we could go way, way back and question the whole premise of sex education for 13-year-olds. We could question institutions that operate under the default assumption that teenagers are going to have sex anyway, so we might as well teach them how. We might even give them essentially pornographic sex ed, because it’s no worse than what we all know they’re all watching anyway, right?

Adolescence is not wrong that with the Internet came an overabundance of dark portals, and with the PC and the smartphone came the possibility for a child to open them with a single click. That is terrifyingly true, and the show skillfully conveys the good Gen X parent’s paralyzing nausea in the face of that truth. “He was in his room, weren’t he?” Jamie’s father reflects in the anguished finale. “And we thought he was safe, didn’t we? Didn’t we think he was safe?” Most parents won’t suffer the specific torment Jamie’s parents are suffering, but many are still haunted by questions about whether they could have taken this precaution to stop their child from opening that portal. Many will go to their grave wondering how they could have done better, how things could have been different. Could things have been different? Will you ever know? And the answer may be never. You will never know.

What we do know is that children are not basically good, because people are not basically good. We know that children need a roadmap for what love looks like, what manhood and womanhood look like. We know they will get lost when they seek it out on YouTube or Reddit or the Dark Web, because they’re just kids, and they’re just fumbling around, and they don’t know the way.

Do we?