The following article contains spoilers for Adolescence.
There has never been more TV to watch than there is right now, and yet it often feels like there’s nothing worth watching. So when a striking, singular work like Adolescence comes along, it’s a port in the storm. The harrowing four-part Netflix series is technically innovative—each of its four episodes consists of a single continuous shot—with a gripping, nuanced script that digs in its talons early on, until you come to the end of the final hour and find yourself wrecked.
At the crack of dawn in the suburbs in the north of England, an armed police unit surrounds the sleepy home of freckled tween Jamie Miller (newcomer Owen Cooper, one of the best child actors I’ve ever seen). They bash down the front door, stick an assault rifle in the face of Jamie’s unexceptional dad Eddie (Stephen Graham, who also co-wrote the series) and order his unexceptional mom Manda (Christine Tremarco) to the floor. Jamie pisses himself as he is read his rights and whisked away in the back of a police van. The charge? He is alleged to have stabbed a female school friend to death.
This bracing opening sets the tone for the rest of the episode, which takes place at the police station as Jamie is interred, processed and eventually questioned. It is a sense of authenticity that undergirds the entire miniseries—the emphasis is on docudrama-style naturalism, elevated by an ensemble that feels like a shoo-in for awards. Everyone knocks it out of the park to the point that it feels redundant to offer superlatives for any individual in the cast, but there is an alchemy to Cooper’s performance that is especially remarkable, given his age and inexperience.
It is established fairly early on that Jamie committed the crime, so Adolescence isn’t a whodunnit so much as a why-did-it. Was it a crime of tween passion? Was he a bullied loner? What of his upbringing? There are no easy answers insofar as his family goes: Eddie is a hard-working plumber who has his faults, but he isn’t an abusive alcoholic, as per the usual tropes; Manda is as ordinary as they come. What soon unfurls is a web of online indoctrination, Jamie seemingly radicalized to hate women and girls by YouTube grifters and incel ideologues. (Andrew Tate is namedropped at least once.) It becomes clear that there was nothing Eddie and Manda could do, really; their son was transformed from the presumed safety of his bedroom.
Adolescence is in part, then, a cautionary tale about the perils of social media for developing minds. It is a timely issue to grapple with—a social crisis that has been staring us in the face for years, the threat of which only seems more amplified whenever you see overt misogyny being amplified on Elon Musk’s X.com in the name of “free speech.” The second episode takes us to Jamie’s school sometime after he was charged, through the perspective of DI Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters), the detective who is trying to work out what would lead a 13-year-old to stab his peer to death. The school milieu will itself be familiar to anyone who has been through the British state education system in the last ten to fifteen years: beleaguered teachers on the brink, cruel kids, gum under the desks. But still—hardly the environment that should lead a boy to kill.
It is the series’ staggering third episode, in which Jamie is psychologically assessed by the counsellor (Erin Doherty) assigned to his case, that most explicitly folds in the impact of incel culture and online misogyny. And it is to the credit of Adolescence that it exists within the grey area of Jamie’s raw tragedy: a bright young kid with big, sweet eyes who was taught to hate himself, that he was unloved and would always be, and whose terrible answer was to lash out in a deadly manner.
It is an overwhelmingly sad story. A vital element of Graham and Thorne’s script is that no one is made into a cartoon villain—but one swift, brutal act destroys dozens of lives. Adolescence might be fiction, but it’s a sobering reminder of a very real threat posed in the social media age, when unchecked algorithms push sexist firebrands onto the For You pages of kids around the world; online prejudice can have terrifying real-life consequences.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.
