The first episode was over, but I stayed on the edge of the ottoman, where I had moved to make sure I heard every word. My arms were folded tightly against the pain. Yet the next evening, I was eager to watch the next episode.
I had waited to watch Adolescence, put off by the hype. Still, the crowd has its wisdom. Three weeks after its mid-March release, the limited series had 114.5 million views and had become the first streaming show to top the U.K.’s weekly ratings.
Adolescence moves through four episodes: a thirteen-year-old boy’s arrest for the murder of a classmate; interviews at his school, a gladiatorial arena of bullying and rage; a therapist’s session with Jamie six months later, as she prepares a pre-sentencing report on his mental state; and a day with Jamie’s parents, still reeling thirteen months later as they try to figure out where they went wrong. The series has been pronounced “a rich work of social critique” (The New York Times), “as close to televisual perfection as you can get” (The Guardian), “as flawless a four hours of TV drama as I have ever seen” (Deadline), and “among the very best things—and an early contender for the best thing—you will see on the small screen this year” (Rolling Stone).
Adolescence is intense, devastating, provocative. It is also everything its (few) critics say: devoid of follow-through on a dozen tantalizing details, deliberate in spending an inordinate amount of time on conversation, abrupt in ending. But viewers’ other online criticisms were often precisely what I loved about the show.
First, the cinematography. Having spent most of my life with my nose in a book, I had to read to find out why, other than its phenomenal acting, Adolescence had such power over me. The filming is continuous, single-shot: one camera follows the action straight through each episode. The technique started more than eighty years ago, with Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. But in this era of constant interruption and distraction, jangled rapidfire switches in perspective, deliberate disorientations in time and space, and compressed, accelerated action, it feels radically countercultural. There is no cross-cutting, no fade and open somewhere else, no break in time, no relief. We stay with the characters in that episode from start to finish, living alongside them in real time, experiencing what they experience, immersed.
Adolescence’s detractors call the choice “manipulative,” the technique “gimmicky.” They acknowledge the stunning performances of co-creator Stephen Graham, who plays the father, and Owen Cooper, who plays Jamie. But they wanted more details, more police-procedural follow-through. (Funny, how all of us have been conditioned by entertainment: I, too, kept waiting for a twist, and to this day people are online asking, “Did the kid really do it?”—despite CCTV footage that showed him stabbing his schoolmate again and again.) This handful of viewers also says the pace was too slow, one objecting to the agonized, heartfelt conversation between Jamie’s parents as they search for what they might have done wrong. “I had to fast forward through them as I realized nothing relevant was being said,” the critic finishes, calling that conversation “long winded” and “superfluous.”
Detractors also bristle at the references to incels. Jamie insists that he is “ugly” and explains the incel 80:20 rule: 80 percent of women are said to be attracted to just 20 percent of men. He backs this up with a mention of the infamous Andrew Tate, who insists that women are inferior, morally deficient, and “intrinsically lazy.” Tate, who has been charged with sexual trafficking and rape but claims innocence, once texted a woman, “I love raping you.” Women are men’s property, he says. If he suspected a woman might have cheated on him? “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch.”
Tate is not an incel, objects one viewer—though Tate’s misogyny and apotheosis in the manosphere makes him a hero to those young men. Graham stumbled into Tate on YouTube and tried to imagine how the hate spewing from that man’s mouth would affect a naïve teenage boy unsure of what it meant to be a man. Co-creator Jack Thorne, who wrote the script, could see exactly what would attract Jamie to these ideas. “There’s a logic to it,” he says. There is a reason you have trouble talking to girls, a reason they do not welcome your fumbling overtures. It is not your fault. You can be indignant and outraged, rather than ashamed. “He is this vulnerable kid, and then he hears this stuff which makes sense to him about why he’s isolated, why he’s alone, why he doesn’t belong, and he ingests it,” Thorne told the BBC. “He starts to believe that the only way to reset this balance is through violence.”
In a survey by a British teaching union, several teachers felt Tate’s remarks had influenced boys’ treatment of girls and of other boys who were not sufficiently “masculine.” One said a ten-year-old boy had refused to speak to a female teacher; another said boys had used “derogatory language towards female staff…as a direct result of Andrew Tate videos.” But Thorne waded through 4Chan and Reddit and realized, “They’re watching a lot more dangerous stuff than Andrew Tate.” He found even more ominous misogyny slid into “the smaller blogs and vlogs and the little bits like people talking about a video game, but then explaining through that video game why women hate you.”
Jamie is also a victim of cyberbullying, as was the young woman he stabbed. In a twist of logic possible only in a confused young mind, he decides to ask her out after she is humiliated by the posting of her nude photos, reasoning that now she is “weak” and might therefore accept him. Instead, she uses coded emojis on his posts to brand him an incel.
The third possible cause is Jamie’s father, as cisgender as they come, feelings suppressed until they explode in temper. He is mortified by his son’s lack of athletic ability, and Jamie knows it. But he is a loving father and husband, trying his hardest.
“Social media. Andrew Tate. Toxic masculinity. Family dynamics. It throws them all in—but never explores any of them,” one viewer complains.
In-depth, meticulous exploration was never the intent. Adolescence was made to provoke thought, not dictate answers. I understand these viewers’ frustration: the last episode left me blurting, “What? Wait!” I, too, wanted more explanation, more story, a chance to watch the trial, a chance the video was blurred and the kid was innocent. A twist. I did not want the story to end by telling us that this could happen to almost any kid in almost any family, that it is this easy for a child to be moved to murderous rage.
Detractors say “the real problem is migrant crime” and one post accused the show of race-swapping the story of an actual killer who was Black. Elon Musk reposted the false accusation as true and added, “Wow.” Adolescence did originate in real life—not in a particular story, but in the U.K.’s rising rate of knife crimes, with more than 17 percent of offenders between the ages of ten and seventeen. As production was wrapping up, a seventeen-year-old boy pleaded guilty to fatally stabbing three schoolgirls in a dance class. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that “loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom, accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety,” should be considered terror threats. Two months later, he watched Adolescence and swiftly arranged a roundtable discussion with Thorne and experts on children’s issues. Netflix has agreed to make the show available to all secondary schools across the U.K.
As for that desperately sad, untidy ending, it was far closer to reality than the sort of storytelling we have come to crave: fast-paced and action-packed, with a chase scene and a triumphantly fair, black-and-white, hero-beats-villain closure. That is manipulative. That is gimmicky. Gutted by the emotions some viewers resented, I watched the screen go dark and felt both miserable and grateful. I was glad that I could be this maddened by complexity without wanting to turn away, and I was relieved that I could still be immersed in a film through empathy, not artificially jacked-up adrenaline.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
