Netflix’s harrowing four-part series Adolescence is one of the year’s most intense (and disturbing) dramas. The story of a teenage boy accused of stabbing a female classmate to death is both horrifyingly timely and technically thrilling. Unflinching in its honesty about the ways toxic masculinity and internet culture are poisoning a generation of youth, its ambitious technical style—each of its four episodes is presented as a single, nonstop take—means it’s almost impossible for audiences to look away, no matter how uncomfortable they may feel with what they’re seeing. After all, as Arthur Miller once said, attention must be paid.
The series opens with an arrest, but that’s the last time anything about Adolescence feels like a traditional procedural. Primarily because the show isn’t trying to figure out who committed a heinous act, but why. The gruesome nature of 13-year-old Jamie Miller’s crime is confirmed by the end of the first episode, and what follows isn’t so much the story of how he did what he did, but an uncomfortable look at the world that that seems to be steadily radicalizing young men like him, left to stew in a potent brew of loneliness and casual misogyny. You should know going in that Adolescence isn’t a series that’s interested in tying its story off with a neat little bow or imparting easy-to-digest platitudes about the needs of young boys in crisis. Instead, it’s interested in starting a conversation, even if everyone involved with the show is fully aware that none of the questions it raises have easy solutions.
“I read an article a while ago now where a young boy stabbed a young girl to death. And then a good few months down the line, there was a piece on BBC News, where another young boy had done the same thing, and they were on completely opposite ends of the country,” star and series co-creator Stephen Graham tells Paste. “And it really hurt my heart to realize we’ve reached this point in society where young boys—and they are boys, they’re not men—are stabbing girls to death. I thought it might be a good idea to look at something like that and try to…look, I’m not saying we have the answers, but maybe we can create some kind of conversation.”
For Graham’s co-creator, Jack Thorne, Adolescence is an act of self-reflection on many levels, particularly for the adults in the story—and those watching at home.
“It started with we wanted to tell a story about knife crime, but really, it became about us wanting to talk about male rage,” Thorne adds. “It became about looking at ourselves as men and looking at what is available now to young boys and what that would have done to us, how that would have changed us. The challenge of trying to understand Jamie is looking at all the people that could have saved him, all the people that could have changed or transformed him, and trying to create a complicated portrait of that society.”
Most of the adults in Adolescence are taken aback by the world their modern-day teens appear to be inhabiting, from a school system that seems almost entirely uninterested in education to online subcultures that seem to encourage the worst in them all. They’re equally flummoxed by the dark material that these kids seem to be encountering not just regularly, but “right under the noses” of those meant to be looking out for them. And one can only assume the folks watching at home share many of the same feelings.
“This show—it’s gotta be an eye-opener for parents, definitely,” Owen Cooper, who plays Jamie, says. “All the emojis and stuff, even I didn’t know about that. Parents are going to be shocked because so many of them just don’t know what their kids are doing online.”
Even the series cast found themselves a bit shocked by some of what they learned.
“I have such admiration for therapists and psychologists and I do not know how they do that day in, day out,” Erin Doherty, who plays child psychologist Briony, says. “It’s terrifying, this subject matter. Very challenging and scary at times. We want to deny it. But it’s insidious.”
According to Doherty, the “intensity” of her experience was heightened by the fact that her episode was shot in a single room, which built to an “unavoidable” release by the time her interview has concluded and Briony’s witnessed both the tragedy and horror that is Jamie close-up. But where here story is more focused on the specifics of Jamie’s case, DI Bascombe’s experience puts him at the heart of his world, where he witnesses everything from his classmates sending one another nudes to the cruelties of cyber-bullying. It’s eye-opening, to be sure.
“I had no clue about all the Instagram stuff and what all the emojis mean or whatever,” Ashley Walters, who plays the police officer, laughs. “I didn’t understand any of that so I had to learn all about it in real time. I’ve got boys myself and I realized maybe I’m not spending enough time talking to my own kids, know what I mean? It’s opening people’s eyes, I think, to reality. Violence between young people, we’ve heard about it, but we don’t talk about it. That’s the journey we’re on in this show.”
Perhaps most importantly, Adolescence confronts its difficult and often frightening subject matter with empathy for those at all points in its story, refusing to embrace easy answers or comforting stereotypes in any aspect of the story it’s telling.
“There is no black and white here,” Graham says. “We wanted each one of these characters to have lots of complexities, from Jamie through to Eddie, to the teachers in school. We didn’t want this to be a story about cliched characters.”
Bascombe is not just the officer who arrests Jamie for the murder of Katie, he’s also the father of a son who’s relatively the same age. During the officers’ trip through Jamie’s school to gather evidence, it’s Adam who must explain to his father that the case—and the relationship between Katie and her killer—was darker and more complicated than initially assumed.
“For Bascombe, [this case] is a mirror held up in his face,” Walters says. ”I think he went into it thinking, ‘What sort of parents would allow their child to get into a situation like this?’ But by the end of the school episode, he realizes it’s as easy as not giving your children the quality time that they need sometimes, or talking to them about how they feel or about what’s going on in their lives.”
It is Jamie’s father, Eddie, however, who is given the most powerful and complicated emotional arc. While many shows probably would have leaned into the idea that something was lacking in Jamie’s parents—that his mother was neglectful, his father abusive or some other trope-y excuse. Instead, Adolescence is careful to show us that those assumptions couldn’t be further from the truth (even though Eddie has his own issues with how he was raised to see masculinity).
“As much as he tries, he’s a product of his environment and the way he was raised. But there’s genuinely a lot of depth to Eddie,” Graham says. “He comes from that kind of…Eddie is not a very tactile man. There’s a moment when Jamie gets strip-searched and Eddie has to watch that, and the only time he touches him is after his kid has just been through that horrific experience. He touches him on the shoulder, and that’s his way of trying to show his son he’s there for him. He doesn’t know how to express his love completely. Because he’s a product of a different generation. He doesn’t know how to behave in these situations—he’s a hardworking man, he’s never gone against the law. He’s probably never been in a police station before. So he’s full of guilt, he’s full of shame, he’s embarrassed. He doesn’t know how to cope in this environment. But he still doesn’t want to let his son down.”
In many ways, the same is true of Eddie’s son. Adolescence doesn’t shy away from showing us the full extent of Jamie’s monstrous views, but it also reminds us that he’s still a child, who longs for the approval of both his father and his peers.
“Jamie is always trying to impress his dad,” Cooper says. “He used to do football and boxing, and he never really liked it, but he did it because of his dad. He just wants his dad to be proud of him. But by the time it’s episode four, he feels like he’s lost it all. His dad’s disappointed in him.”
The most obvious flaw in Adolescence is probably its lack of focus on Jamie’s victim. Although the show directly references the uncomfortable fact that, in sensational cases like this the killers are remembered rather than the victim whose life they stole, the show touches only briefly on Katie’s life, what she may have been subjected to at the hands of her classmates, and how she behaved in turn. But according to Thorne that was, deliberate.
“I think it would have been hugely different and I think someone should write it,” he says when asked about what a version of Adolescence from Kate’s perspective might have looked like. “Hopefully, Netflix will make it! But, here, we were very deliberately telling one side of this story because we didn’t want it to be complete. Completeness is where easy answers lie and we wanted to [stay] in the uneasy. We won’t give you all the answers.”
That doesn’t mean Katie’s story was entirely ignored, however.
“We did a lot of talking about Katie,” Thorne continues. “We have a whole sense, a whole biography of Katie that we’ve drawn up in our heads, and someone—and it should definitely be a woman writer—should do it. Creating a complicated portrait of female adolescence would be incredible to see and I hope it gets made. I’d watch it.”
Katie’s presence haunts the show through to its final moments, however. It’s actress Emilia Holliday who sings the plaintive version of Aurora’s “Through the Eyes of a Child” that plays over the series’ end credits.
In many ways, Adolescence is a story about parents and community as much as it is about modern teens. A clear generational divide looms through much of the series, but although the show is sympathetic toward the bewildered grown-ups trying to make sense of it all from the sidelines, it doesn’t absolve them of the need to try and meet their children where they’re at.
“I think we’re all accountable in many ways,” Graham says. “There’s the ideology that it takes a village to raise a child. That’s parents, education, society, influences, the internet, teachers, the government. We’re all accountable for these things that have happened in our country. This was an opportunity to look at [these issues] and try to raise awareness. Because the family it happens to could be anyone.”
“This show has always been about the hope that not just parents but us as a society, that we talk to our children and we talk to each other more. That men talk to each other more and say it’s okay to speak up,” director Philip Barantini says. “Because when [kids] are up in their room, you think they’re safe, and they’re not. So I hope it has parents and teachers and family members talking to their kids, and the kids feeling confident enough to talk back.”
But, according to its co-creator Adolescence is also about drawing attention to a problem that’s gone unremarked upon for much too long.
“For me, I think [this show] is more of a scream. It’s more of look: we’re in a crisis here and we need to think radically as a society about how we save our boys and how we save the girls that those boys are damaging,” Thorne says. “Because it’s terrifying out there. When I went down these places and looked into these rabbit holes, it’s…there’s a lot of people proposing a lot of very dark things.”
Adolescence is currently streaming on Netflix.
Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky at @LacyMB
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