The Strange Messages Behind 'Adolescence'

If you haven’t seen Netflix’s new drama Adolescence, then I’m sure you’ve heard about it. It is currently Netflix’s top-rated show globally: a major achievement for a slow-paced drama set in the North of England without any big-hitter actors. It has sparked political and social conversation, and even Keir Starmer is talking about it. 

The show centres around thirteen-year-old Jamie Miller who, in the opening sequence of the first episode, is arrested for the murder of his classmate, Katie. Jamie is adamant that he did not commit this crime, and whines and cries in the police station as his family all insist this is some kind of strange mistake. That is, until some pretty damning CCTV footage is presented in which Jamie is caught stabbing Katie seven times. Suddenly he is not a sweet young boy to whom a bad thing has happened, but a cold-blooded killer.

Over the course of the four-part series, I searched for an adequate explanation of the events which led up to Jamie’s decision to stab his classmate. The show, created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (who plays Jamie’s father), made a conscious decision to not give Jamie an ‘out’ for his act of murder. He comes from an upper-working class family, his parents are happily married, his father is angry but never violent, and he has never been the victim of any abuse. He doesn’t have cause to be a killer. Yet the show seems to suggest being plied with enough online content about the ‘manosphere’ and the ‘80/20 rule’ (80 per cent of women only find twenty per cent of men attractive), other types of Andrew Tate radicalisation, and one girl rejecting him romantically pushed him to the edge, making him procure a knife and murder her in a car park. 

Thorne affirms that the key difference between him and the show’s protagonist, Jamie, is that “he had the internet to read at night whereas I had Terry Pratchett and Judy Blume.” This is quite a statement from Thorne. I don’t know anything about him, but I’d like to conjecture that, even with access to a few Andrew Tate videos, he wouldn’t have gone about brandishing a knife at any unsuspecting women that happened to walk by. I just don’t quite buy the show’s message that the rhetoric of the ‘manosphere’ has the ability to poison the minds of all otherwise law-abiding, untroubled boys across the nation. There is also no real-life empirical support to back Thorne’s ideas either; as he says, “there’s no part of this that is based on a true story.” As such, I find all the extrapolation that has followed the release of this series surrounding the male capacity for unprovoked violence a little far-fetched. There is definitely a lot of gender-based violence committed by men unto women, but I’m pretty sure it preceded both smartphones and Andrew Tate.  

Another aspect of this series — and the discourse that followed — I found frustrating was that it was all about men. The show gave us Jamie’s backstory, we met Jamie’s friends, and we saw the effect of his sentencing on his family. Katie had zero airtime; we didn’t see how her family processed her murder or learn anything about her at all. It was all about the perpetrator, not about the victim. It’s all about male violence, not about the women they commit violence against. All the news coverage that followed the series release also centred around men: are men as violent as the show tells us? How should we educate a future generation of men? Are young men being radicalised? 

An article in The Spectator even went as far as to say that ‘femcels’ were the real problem, and if women didn’t hate men, they wouldn’t feel the need to kill us. Feels a bit like the ‘what was she wearing?’ of a new generation. 

The victims of the series being billed as Jamie’s family, not Katie’s, I found quite a strange decision that silences the real victim of the show, and the wider victims of the social problems the show wishes to spotlight.

Illustration by Liza Vasilyeva