When Adolescence launched on Netflix a week ago, its timing felt uncanny. This hard-hitting series about the malign influence of the online “manosphere” arrived just as news broke about a story that had been making UK headlines for nine months: that of notorious crossbow killer Kyle Clifford, who raped and murdered 25-year-old Louise Hunt last year after she ended their relationship. The latest update showed that Clifford had searched the web for Andrew Tate’s podcast mere hours before killing Hunt, her sister Hannah and mother Carol at their family home in Hertfordshire.
The show’s star and co-creator Stephen Graham was originally horrified by a spate of violent incidents across Britain in which teenage boys committed deadly knife crimes against girls. The actor said these shocking stories “hurt my heart” and asked of him: “What’s going on in our society where this kind of thing is becoming a regular occurrence?” He teamed up with screenwriter Jack Thorne – a regular collaborator who has worked with Graham on such acclaimed British dramas as This Is England, The Virtues andHelp – to create a potent drama interrogating this distressing trend. Thorne says they wanted to “look into the eye of male rage”.
The gritty, emotionally charged result follows the working-class Miller family from Yorkshire. Their world is blown apart when 13-year-old schoolboy Jamie is arrested in a dawn raid on suspicion of murdering a female classmate, Katie Leonard. Poignantly, Jamie wets himself with panic when armed police burst through his bedroom door. He repeatedly insists he’s innocent. However, it’s no spoiler to say that chilling CCTV footage makes clear who was responsible for the frenzied multiple stabbing. This isn’t a whodunnit, it’s a whydunnit. Exploring what motivated this shocking crime is why Adolescence has struck such a chord.
The series tackles the devastating and sometimes fatal consequences of toxic masculinity. The manosphere and Andrew Tate are name-checked in the script but the central character, says Thorne, has been “indoctrinated by voices a lot more dangerous than Tate’s”.
Jamie has fallen under the spell of misogynistic influencers and suffered cyber-bullying for being an “incel”. His parents admit that he would shut himself in his bedroom and be on his computer long into the night. They assumed he was safe but he was secretly being radicalised. His story highlights the corrosive impact of social media on impressionable minds and has resonated profoundly with audiences. Parents of teenagers have been watching rapt, heartbroken and horrified in equal measure – with the show clocking up an astonishing 24.3m views in its first four days of release, four times more than the number two show. It tops the Netflix ratings in 71 countries, ranging from Chile to Vietnam. One British police force has even said it should be a “wake-up call for parents”.
Labour MP Anneliese Midgley has called for the series to be screened in parliament and in schools, arguing that it could help counter misogyny and violence against women and girls. PM Keir Starmer backed the idea, praising Adolescence and saying that he’d watched it with his own teenage children. Starmer added that violence against girls was “abhorrent … a growing problem … we have to tackle it”.
There have been discussions on the BBC’s Newsnight and Today programmes. Graham appeared live on CNN yesterday, reflecting on how the internet “is parenting our children just as much as we are”. This was followed by an interview on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon in which Graham said: “We’re all accountable – the education system, parenting, the community, the government and especially social media.”
Thorne has called for the introduction of a “digital age of consent” by banning smartphones for under-16s. Pundits have suggested that social media giants should do more to regulate algorithm-driven extreme content. A recent survey came to the depressing conclusion that more than half of young women are now frightened of their male peers.
The debate was further fuelled by former England football manager Sir Gareth Southgate delivering a televised lecture this week, warning about the dangers of “callous, manipulative and toxic influencers” and demanding better male role models. His pleas were echoed by feminist writer Caitlin Moran, author of What About Men?, on Channel 4 News. She said toxic masculinity was “very joyless and very depressing”, expressing the hope that Southgate’s speech and Adolescence would be a watershed moment.
The series has won widespread plaudits both for its tour de force performances – expect all the cast to be in the mix for major acting awards next year – and for its technical virtuosity. Each episode is filmed in one hour-long continuous take, without any cuts, edits or CGI. The camera never leaves the action, adding an immersive tension that suits the unflinching content. As Adolescence fever has gripped audiences worldwide, Netflix has cannily released behind-the-scenes footage of how the filming was achieved via a cleverly choreographed system of cameras being passed between operators, who fixed them to cranes, vehicles and drones on the fly.
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The searing, shape-shifting series is four dramas in one. The opening part is a police procedural. Subsequent episodes switch gear into a school drama, a two-hander play, then finally a kitchen sink soap opera. These chapters combine into a coherent, gut-punchingly powerful whole. Adolescence currently holds a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has received unanimous five-star reviews.
The Guardian’s critic Lucy Mangan called it “the closest thing to TV perfection in decades”. This view was echoed in the US. Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall hailed it as “among the very best things – and an early contender for the best thing – you will see on the small screen this year”. In the New York Times, Margaret Lyons described it as “a rich work of social critique”, describing the third episode as “one of the more fascinating hours of TV I’ve seen in a long time”.
Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips said: “Netflix’s brilliant Adolescence is not just a drama. It’s a disturbing glimpse into the minds of thousands of young boys warped by the violence and abuse they are witnessing every day online.”
Social media is similarly overflowing with praise. Film director Paul Feig saluted the first episode as “one of the best hours of television I’ve ever seen”. While Bafta-winning screenwriter Sarah Phelps saluted its “God-tier writing”. Adolescence looks set to become an all-time TV classic. However, its most lasting legacy could be the urgent questions it asks, the vital conversations it starts and the societal change it kickstarts.
