Netflix’s 'Adolescence' Doesn’t Get Half the Story

It’s easy to praise Netflix’s new drama series Adolescence. 

Creators Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham have a skill not just for seeing a criminal drama through the “law” stage of booking and processing, but also for stewing in the stressful purgatory before the trial and “order” to explain how a 13-year-old kid killed his classmate. Director Philip Barantini purposefully adds to all this confusion, fear and questioning through an adrenaline rush of four episodes, each of which is shot so that the audience experiences it as one long take. No one will argue against the timeliness of the show’s topics, which discuss the struggles of kids in the internet age and how “bullying” doesn’t always look the way you think it does.

But there’s a quick bit of dialogue during the second episode that sets up the most problematic aspect of this drama. 

“The perpetrator always gets the front line; ‘a man raped a woman,’” says Misha Frank (Faye Marsay), a detective sergeant investigating how a 13-year-old girl (Emilia Holliday’s Katie) came to be stabbed to death by an acquaintance at her school (Owen Cooper’s Jamie). “We’ve followed Jamie’s brain around this entire case. Katie isn’t important. Jamie is. Everyone will remember Jamie. No one will remember her. That’s what annoys me. That’s what gets to me.”

DS Frank, herself, proves to be more or less inconsequential to this story as it unfolds. This creative decision, intentionally or not, only serves to double down on her monologue. She’s right. For all the work the parents with organizations like Sandy Hook Promise and the alums of places like Columbine High School and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have done to make sure we know that their children and friends did not die in vain, most Americans can probably more easily name the school shooters of those tragedies than any single one of the victims, and those involved multiple killings.

Adolescence creators Thorne and Graham are full-on adults, the latter of whom also stars as Jamie’s emotionally wrecked father Eddie. What they seem to be saying is that this story will shock you... if you’re also old enough to remember the Clinton impeachment hearings, maybe. If you’re Generations Z and Alpha, it’s obvious what happened: toxic masculinity and internet culture.

Most of the series, including a particularly haunting third episode featuring The Crown’s Erin Doherty as a psychologist investigating the case, is about Jamie. Episode 1: Can we believe that the freckle-faced, deer-in-headlights Jamie, who looks like a meeker sibling of Alex Lawther’s character from the Black Mirror episode “Shut Up and Dance,” would even have the physical strength to commit such an act? Episode 2: How premeditated was it and how has bullying evolved from the days of toilet swirlies and crank calls? Episode 3: Here’s how easily, and unassumingly, a smart young man with a solid home life can begin to see himself as ugly, lonely and forever doomed to roam this earth as a virgin. Also, here’s how angry this can make him. 

The fourth episode isn’t really about Jamie at all. It’s about the guilt his parents, Graham’s Eddie and Christine Tremarco’s Manda, feel over not seeing this coming. Together with their daughter Lisa (Amelie Pease), they are technically innocent and doomed to be forever judged by their neighbors and coworkers.

All of this makes Adolescence both disturbing and frustrating. 

We’ve been told about adults and older teens who have been warped into the ways of incel culture. But Adolescence argues that we should start preventative measures even earlier. It’s probably right. Andrew Tate, the American British social media personality and face of the manosphere, gets a passing mention in this show. In real life, he and his brother Tristan are enjoying a welcome home tour through parts of the United States despite connections to human trafficking charges in Romania and arguments that their content may have influenced a triple murder by crossbow back in the UK.

What the show doesn’t do, what it seemingly forgets to do, is tell the victim’s side of the story. From Jamie’s perspective, he didn’t even have a crush on Katie; but he did think she’d go out with him. She’d been mocked and rejected by another boy, so she’d have lowered her standards, right? When she turns him down flat and begins to leave coded messages on his Instagram posts, he breaks. 

So what did happen to Katie? To paraphrase DS Frank, what is it like to follow her brain around through this case? How angry was she that some other boy was showing a nude photo of her all over school? Did she know that sharing sexts could be considered sexual abuse even if it’s also regarded as commonplace? Did she know how to fight it? Where did she learn about incel culture and did she even understand what it meant to dot Jamie’s ‘grams with little red pill emojis? What chances are there for a generation of kids, regardless of gender, who are taught that 80-percent of women are attracted to 20-percent of men?  

Knowing Netflix, we might one day find out. The streamer mined scandalization and trauma to eke out four seasons of the teen bullying drama 13 Reasons Why despite protests from watchdog groups. That show included a horrifically detailed death scene, which the channel only took down years later after documented evidence showed it had real-life implications, as well as scenes of violent assaults. 

Graham and Barantini also worked together on Boiling Point, a film and subsequent sequel BBC One series that follows the same "one shot" style as Adolescence, but were about the considerably lower stakes world of fine dining, both of which were big hits in the U.K. If Adolescence does well — which the critical response suggests it will — and if more people ask how much the manosphere is infiltrating their kitchen table conversations, it’s possible there could be a second season, or at least a spiritual successor of some sort. 

Just, please, this time don’t forget the Katies of these stories.

All four episodes of Adolescence are streaming on Netflix.