The arrival of searing new series Adolescence could hardly be more timely...
On a street level, it’s about knife crime. Over the past decade, the number of UK teenagers killed with a blade or sharp object has risen by 240%. On a cultural level, it’s about cyberbullying, the malign influence of social media and the unfathomable pressures faced by boys in Britain today. Male rage, toxic masculinity, online misogyny. This isn’t just all-too-plausible fiction. It’s unavoidable fact.
As the boy’s father, Eddie, a self-employed plumber in an unspecified Yorkshire town, Graham spends the opening hour shell-shocked. He is inclined to believe his son’s protestations of innocence, as any parent would. That is, until he is poleaxed by chilling footage of the frenzied multiple stabbing.
Erin Doherty drops in for a blistering head-to-head as clinical psychologist Briony. Christine Tremarco is heartbreaking in the finale as Jamie’s mother, Manda. And then come the kids. Newcomer Owen Cooper – incredibly, it’s the 15-year-old’s acting debut – is flat-out phenomenal as Jamie. He goes from sympathetic to scary, lost little boy to angry young man, often within the same breath, announcing himself as a major talent in the process. Fatima Bojang is movingly raw as Katie’s bereaved best friend Jade. Amélie Pease excels as Jamie’s elder sister Lisa, whose low-key wisdom becomes the glue holding her fractured family together.
The story is brought to life by telling details. The way that Jamie still has space-themed wallpaper in his bedroom and wets himself when armed police burst in, reminding us of the “gormless little boy” behind the shocking violence. The way the secure training centre where he awaits trial is populated by youngsters with radiator burns who yell at Coronation Street. The way incidental characters – the creepy CCTV guy, the DIY store conspiracy theorist – warn us that adult males can be equally threatening. The way nonsensical graffiti and a nosy neighbour are what finally tip Eddie over the edge. (...)
Adolescence lays bare how an outwardly normal but inwardly self-loathing and susceptible youngster can be radicalised without anyone noticing. His parents recall Jamie coming home from school, heading straight upstairs, slamming his bedroom door and spending hours at his computer. They thought he was safe. They thought they were doing the right thing. It’s a scenario which will ring bells with many parents. Some will be alarm bells.
We take pains to teach them how to cross roads and not talk to strangers. We rarely teach them how to navigate the internet. There is often a glaring gap between parents’ blissfully ignorant image of their children’s lives and the truth of what they get up to online. We think they’re playing Roblox but they’re actually on Reddit. We think they’re doing homework or innocently texting mates. They are watching pornography or, as DS Frank pithily puts it, “that Andrew Tate shite”.
Jamie’s plight becomes a poignant study of the nightmarish influence of the so-called manosphere – that pernicious online world of “red pills”, “truth groups” and the 80-20 rule (which posits that 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men). It’s a shadowy sphere populated by alphas, “incels”, MRAs (men’s rights activists) and PUAs (pickup artists), whose fragile egos turn into entitled fury. From mocking emojis on Instagram to the dark web and deepfakes, it’s another country to anyone over 40. No wonder parents are, as Bascombe’s son points out, “blundering around, not getting it”. (...)
As unanimous five-star reviews attest, Adolescence is the best drama of 2025 so far. We’re less than a quarter of the way through, admittedly, but the rest of the year’s TV will have to go some to beat it. This is old-fashioned, issue-led, socially conscious television – and all the better for it.
by Michael Hogan, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Netflix
[ed. Powerful throughout. See also: Is this the most terrifying TV show of our times? Adolescence, the drama that will horrify all parents (Guardian):]
“I didn’t want his dad to be a violent man,” confirms Graham. “I didn’t want Mum to be a drinker. I didn’t want our young boy to be molested by his uncle Tony. I wanted to remove all of those possibilities for us to go: ‘Oh, that’s why he did it.’”
As a result, Adolescence takes us somewhere even more terrifying. Jamie, the show’s 13-year-old subject, is an outwardly normal, well-adjusted kid. But the conversations around him, at school and online, start to lean towards incels and the manosphere. Slowly, a picture builds about how this regular kid found himself radicalised without anyone even realising. (...)
[ed. Powerful throughout. See also: Is this the most terrifying TV show of our times? Adolescence, the drama that will horrify all parents (Guardian):]
***
“Steve’s starting point was not wanting to blame the parents,” says Thorne of his collaboration. “It was: ‘Let’s not make this about a kid who commits a crime because of an evil thing going on at home.’”“I didn’t want his dad to be a violent man,” confirms Graham. “I didn’t want Mum to be a drinker. I didn’t want our young boy to be molested by his uncle Tony. I wanted to remove all of those possibilities for us to go: ‘Oh, that’s why he did it.’”
As a result, Adolescence takes us somewhere even more terrifying. Jamie, the show’s 13-year-old subject, is an outwardly normal, well-adjusted kid. But the conversations around him, at school and online, start to lean towards incels and the manosphere. Slowly, a picture builds about how this regular kid found himself radicalised without anyone even realising. (...)
Still, as heavy as Adolescence is, it also stretches the capacity of what can be achieved with a single take... the scale of Adolescence meant that the camera had to be continually passed from operator to operator, getting clipped in and out of different devices by various teams as necessary.
He takes me through the show’s opening sequence. “When the episode starts, my cinematographer Matt is holding the camera,” he explains. “As we’re filming the actors in the car, the camera’s being attached to a crane. The car drives off, and the crane follows. While this is happening, Matt has gone in another car, driven ahead and jumped out so he can take the camera into the house. When we come back out of the house, the other camera operator Lee is sat in the custody van. Matt would pass Lee the camera, so now Lee’s got the camera while Matt drives ahead to the police station, so he’s ready to take the camera when we go inside.”
Such visual flashiness might suggest that Adolescence is purely a technical experiment, but that couldn’t be further from the case. “I never want the one-take thing to be at the forefront,” says Barantini. “I wanted this to be seamless, but not a spectacle.
