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 [murder]. 

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.”

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