Sam Tissot
05.04.2025
Adolescence is a gut-wrenching social drama in line with the best traditions of social realism in British film-making and TV. The series, created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham and directed by Philip Barantini, broke all previous records for an audience of a streaming program in the U.K. Fictional but inspired by real events, the series takes on a subject that plagues modern societies: violent anti-social behaviour among school age children. While in the United Kingdom this is most common in the form of knife crime, the same fundamental forces are ultimately at work in phenomena like America’s school shooting epidemic. Nor are such incidents limited to the Anglosphere, shown tragically on April 24, when a young girl in the French city of Rennes was killed in a knife attack at her school.
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| Jack Thorne |
Adolescence is filmed across four one-shot episodes. With this one-camera and one-take approach the show feels at times more like a drilled theatre production than a TV release. The style combined with sharp dialogue creates great moments of build-up and tension across the series. The viewer is left in awe of how the crew and actors were able to pull off the take so seamlessly. However, the acting is so engaging that the viewer’s attention is quickly brought back to the narrative.
Each episode focuses on a particular aspect of the aftermath of the murder of a young girl at the hand of the show’s protagonist, a 13-year-old named Jamie (Owen Cooper). The first deals with Jamie’s arrest and charging with the crime. The second deals with the efforts of two police officers (Ashley Walters and Faye Marsay) to gather evidence about the murder weapon at Jamie’s school and their attempt to understand Jamie’s motives through interviews with his schoolmates. The third, and perhaps most striking, is an interview between Jamie and a psychologist (the brilliant Erin Doherty) that takes place six months after the crime. In the final episode, we see how Jamie’s parents (Stephen Graham and Christine Tremarco) struggle to come to grips with their son’s crime and their own responsibility 13 months on from the incident.
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| Stephen Graham and Christine Tremarco in Adolescence (2025) photo:Netflix |
Many reviews from leftwing outlets, for example that of the Revolutionary Communist Party (formerly the International Marxist Tendency), have focused on the series’ exposure of the rise of sexist views among young men in Britain. While this is certainly an important dimension of the show and its subject matter, as well as of contemporary British society, focusing solely on this aspect ultimately provides a one-sided view of the complex and deeply troubled society sensitively portrayed by Adolescence.
The implication is that if the problem is just that young men have bad ideas and they come from social media, then we can just ban sexist influencers like Andrew Tate and put on a few more “sexism awareness” sessions in schools. Voila! The problem will disappear. This is the sort of one-sided view that goes hand-in-hand with various reformist remedies for the scourge of sexism and violence gaining ground among young people in Britain and across the world. This sort of reasoning likely lies behind Starmer’s support for the wide circulation of the show.
However, it misses the whole point of what makes Adolescence so powerful and why young people should see it. What Adolescence achieves, and what makes it such a striking piece of artwork, is to shed light not on the consequences of a few unhealthy ideas, but on the whole sick society that creates and encourages them. It gives a multi-dimensional picture of the social crisis facing youth (inclusive of both young men and women) and adults, whether they be parents or teachers.
In its crossfire are not just sexist attitudes, but the normalisation of violence, the mental health crisis of youth, bullying and the general coarsening of modern society. As co-writer Stephen Graham, who also portrays Jamie’s dad, explained in an interview with Netflix:
One of our aims was to ask, “What is happening to our young men these days, and what are the pressures they face from their peers, from the internet, and from social media?” And the pressures that come from all of those things are as difficult for kids here as they are the world over.
Explaining how the fictional story is inspired by true events, Graham continued:
There was an incident where a young boy [allegedly] stabbed a girl. It shocked me. I was thinking, “What’s going on? What’s happening in society where a boy stabs a girl to death? What’s the inciting incident here?” And then it happened again, and it happened again, and it happened again. I really just wanted to shine a light on it, and ask, “Why is this happening today? What’s going on? How have we come to this?”
The troubling questions raised by Adolescence, regularly suppressed by the ultra-sanitized British media, can only be properly answered through a consideration of the myriad forces pressing on young people and their origin. The series’ central strength is in showing how an incident such as a violent murder of a young girl cannot be reduced to the one-sided explanations commonly offered up in the media.
Throughout its four episodes, Adolescence touches on themes such as the objectification of women, under-aged porn consumption, cyber bullying, social inequality and normalisation of violence. The show acknowledges the particular risks of granting unsupervised young people to the internet and social media etc., but unlike many analyses of contemporary ills it does not treat these issues in an isolated and de-contextualized manner. Instead, it charts, in a British setting, the effects of the general coarsening of social relations that has been seen in every corner of the globe as social inequality has skyrocketed accompanied by government austerity and the increasing marketisation of sex, increased social isolation and the promotion of violence. These are the same anti-social pressures that have led to the scourge of school-shootings in the US and the major rise in sexual crimes seen across many major countries.
Children’s exposure to harms, particularly online, have skyrocketed in recent years. A US survey of 10 to 17 year-olds performed by commonsensemedia.org found that 75% of male respondents reported seeing pornography, with female respondents reporting 70%. The average age of first exposure among respondents was just 12. Other studies have put the number of underage male porn viewers at 93%. In 2015, the global industry was estimated to be worth $97 billion and has undoubtedly grown leaps and bounds since then.
A recent feature on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight revealed online sports gambling, illegal until a few years ago in most states and now embraced by major sports leagues in the US, is increasing massively among underage teenagers in the US. The US industry posted $11 billion in revenue for 2023, a 42% increase from 2022. This is without considering the proliferation of de facto gambling disguised in various ways on various popular video games such as Minecraft, Call of Duty and Fortnite.
Body image is another important issue afflicting young people and we see in Episode 3 how Jamie’s self-perception has been warped by exposure to unrealistic beauty standards. Boys and girls, often prepubescent, browse Instagram or Tiktok and compare themselves to adult fitness influencers and models. Young women feel like they need to look like an airbrushed Victoria’s Secret model and young men feel like they are failing unless they look like steroid-riddled body builders. Of course, this isn’t a new issue since magazines and TV have given previous generation plenty of reasons for self-loathing, but the rise of social media has provided fertile ground for a massive increase in product placement and endorsement through promotions targeting each individual’s desires or, in many cases, insecurities.
Teenagers also face a world in which violence is increasingly normalized. While many pearl-clutching conservatives love to square the blame solely on video games (they may indeed play a role), children live in a world where extreme violence saturates screens. This has been the case since at least the 1990s with 24-hour news reporting on the latest results of the US-led coalition’s “shock and awe” tactics in the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. One generation on, one of my seminal memories as a teenager was seeing Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi lynched on the BBC News. Often, I would also retreat to my room and stumble across various ISIS or drug-cartel execution videos on the internet. All of these things became very normal. A decade later, young people need only open Instagram, X, or Google to watch children being blown to bits by US and European-made bombs in Gaza or raw footage from the front lines in Ukraine. For an increasing number of young people, violence is just part of everyday life. Should we be surprised that trivialized violence translates into an increase in horrific crimes perpetrated against teenagers and young children?
While the precise extent of these social ills vary from country to country and study to study, it is clear that the general trend is toward a generation of youth with addiction issues, a warped self-perception, and desensitization to violence. This is great for the profits of porn and gambling companies, perhaps even the recruitment rolls of the military. But what does it mean for social relations?
The third episode shows how such forces have shaped Jamie’s psyche. In a discussion with a clinical psychologist -- Briony Ariston, played by The Crown's Erin Doherty – we watch how, six months after the incident, Jamie’s psyche is broken down. He reveals not just his retrograde attitude toward women, but his warped notions about normal sexual behavior for a 13-year-old boy, his belief that he is ugly and unsuccessful, in sharp contrast to his appearance as a regular looking and rather intelligent young man, and his profound anger at life and society. Why does an intelligent young man develop such a horrific view of himself and his social peers?
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| Owen Cooper and Erin Doherty in Adolescence (2025) Photo:Netflix |
One incident has generated particular attention. In one much discussed moment Jamie expresses his belief in the 80/20 dating principle promoted in the “manosphere” online. This is the notion, inspired by the Pareto principle, that 80 percent of women are only interested in 20 percent of men. Many reviews have focused on a debunking of this theory, for example here and here. In fact, there is evidence from studies of likes on dating apps that suggest women are in fact more selective than men in “liking” or “swiping” potential partners, although whether this translates to inequality when it comes to actual dating is less clear. Even if there was some truth to this distribution of sexual interest, we still have to ask how a young man comes to believe such inequality is the natural and necessary state of things.
Young men and women are hardly immune from their surroundings. In a society and political system that encourages and defends extreme inequality as humankind’s natural state (“There is no alternative,” as Margaret Thatcher infamously declared), should we be surprised that so many youth believe that the 80/20 dating principle is the norm? The same follows for many other ahistorical ‘truths’ promoted as the natural way of things both with regards to dating and wider life in the 2020s. It is one example of how the justification and normalization of social inequality has led to a warped notion of gender relations.
The question of the inhumane nature of modern schooling, as well as what kids consume at home, is also raised in Adolescence. Throughout episode 2, one is struck by the chaos that reigns in Jamie’s school, described by one of the police officers investigating the case as little more than a “holding pen.” The classes are overcrowded, and teachers are clearly overworked. Many are trying to make the best of a bad situation. Others such as Mr. Malik, played by Faraz Ayub, are apathetic at best.
However, the picture painted of Jamie’s school is not just the result of teacher shortages and chronic underfunding but flows from a wider cultural crisis. Students are disinterested, more concerned with getting one up on each other and picking on anyone lower on the social ladder, than with any sort of intellectual development. When a student does step out of line, and we are given the impression this occurs constantly, they are shouted out by a teacher or even intimidated physically until they stop.
Even while acknowledging schools were hardly perfect in previous generations and in some ways much worse, the series shows a relatively run-of-the-mill school in northern England in a deep crisis. How did we get here?
State (or public in non-British English) schools in capitalist society are increasingly unable to engage with the children they have been charged with educating. This is clearly taking its toll on young people. Children are valued if they excel in exams while at the same time are often discouraged from pursuing their own interests. And those poor bored souls who “misbehave” – or rebel -- are punished and belittled, reinforcing the very behaviour for which they are being castigated. Many bourgeois politicians talk of schools as simply institutions for developing skills that can be later used in the workforce. The rest of a students’ humanity can go by the wayside as long as they are employable down the line.
History shows us other models of education are possible such as Summerhill or Montessori schools, or indeed fascinating experiments in the early Soviet Union that were subsequently suppressed with the rise of Stalinism. However, under increasingly authoritarian capitalist states in which conformity and discipline are the order of the day, such alternatives are never given the resources and support needed to flourish.
In contemporary society, there are the wider cultural and political issues which have developed a culture of apathy and nihilism among young people. Uninspired and uninterested, these children are harried across their teenage years to prepare for standardised examinations. Many of them don’t see the point in putting in the work and they can hardly be blamed for this. Even if they aren’t already dismayed by the prospect of taking on a mountain of debt to attend university, they struggle to imagine a worthwhile future amid the climate crisis, rising inequality and the rise of authoritarianism.
In most cases this sense of hopelessness is only reinforced in the education system. As we’ve seen above many teenagers have sex and violence crammed down their throats. Then, even when pre-pubescent, they see themselves as failures if they do not have the sexual prowess of a Casanova or the body of a Kim Kardashian. Then when they are bored and uninspired in the classroom they are disciplined, reinforcing their feelings of worthlessness and driving them further into the comfort of their warped fantasies and anti-social behavior.
Surrounded by such hopelessness, is it any wonder that crypto-scammers, life coaches and various alpha-male or ‘trad wife’ influencers are captivating young people? To many, these tales of mostly illusionary success or life-satisfaction must seem like the only way out. Add to this a sublimation of all of societal ills derived from efforts to rip off and exploit your fellow humans and you have unhappy, uninterested kids with increasingly deranged fantasies about how they can break out of this restrictive cycle of existence.
The police officer’s description of a “holding pen” may even be an understatement. The picture we get of Jamie’s school is that it is a breeding ground of anti-social and self-destructive behaviour, of which Jamie’s murder of his classmate is just the most extreme expression. Adolescence makes it clear that it is no accident that a bright young man like Jamie is capable of such a horrific crime when most of his day is spent in the modern schooling system. There is something much deeper going on here than a few irresponsible teachers or cuts to school budgets.
None of this absolves Jamie of individual responsibility for this crime, nor shifts the primary blame to his teachers or parents, but it shows the impossible situation facing insecure children, terrified parents and exhausted teachers as they try to navigate the social and political challenges of 21st century life.
Of course, a fictional dramatisation cannot be expected to provide answers to such profound issues. However, in forcing the audience to reflect on these questions in such a striking and emotive manner it makes clear crimes such as Jamie’s and other social ills afflicting youth will not and cannot be solved with a quick fix or a clever policy. Ultimately we are given an image of a society, our own society, where moral values, children’s physical and mental health and social relations as a whole have been severely degraded.
The show’s creators have
produced a piece of art that raises fundamental questions about the society we
have created how that is refracted through its most sensitive layer: its youth.
Not everyone will end up caving in to societal pressures as did Jamie, but
every young person is forced to deal with them whether they like it or not.
Whether the show’s creators are conscious of it or not, the multifaceted and
rich portrayal of these social ills suggests the only way to address our
cultural crisis is the complete overhaul of capitalist society and the perverse
effect it has on the development of its youth.
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