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“I’m only 13.” This truth is at the heart of Adolescence, Netflix’s new drama by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham—an impeccable, if harrowing, exploration of the trepidatious transition of boyhood to manhood and the ultimate radicalization of a schoolboy. The series, shot in one-take, hour-long episodes, opens with 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) being arrested on suspicion of the murder of his classmate Katie. Police procedurals play out, Jamie vehemently denies the accusations, but by the end of the interrogation, we are under no illusions about Jamie’s guilt: CCTV captures the vicious stabbing. From then, the question is no longer who committed the crime but why.
In the wake of the murder, we’re searching for some catharsis, some understanding, some reason behind Jamie’s actions. We need the parents at fault—abusive, distracted—we need Jamie to be different from all the normal boys we know, we need something in the system to have let Jamie down. Detective Bascombe (Ashley Walters) visits Jamie’s phone-addled school, ostensibly searching for the murder weapon but observing instead the toxic online avalanche teachers are faced with.
I think some of us are aware of the frazzling attention spans of juvenile minds, and of course, we already know about incels, about the manosphere, about Andrew Tate. But to call Adolescence an incel drama, though technically accurate, is misleading. It is about male rage, it is about corrosive misogyny, it’s about the deep-seated fear (and expectation) of rejection.
Above all, it is about nascent men figuring out their burgeoning masculinity against the din of the internet. Through the slow-burning grief of Jamie’s reeling family, we explore his lack of physical prowess in amateur (but still extremely competitive) sports; his burning desire for picture-perfect, highly eroticized femininity; his spurning when he tries to date a girl he sees as momentarily socially vulnerable. Jamie’s conflicting reality is truly ominous: the immature boy, the furious man, and the jagged cusp between both. (His unbearably uncomfortable psychological assessment in a detention center shows off his dominating anger, its short fuse, and his childlike naivete all at once.) In pursuit of the why, we are trying to decipher the motivation of a silly kid as much as a barbaric murderer.
I don’t want to be glib, but the component parts of Adolescence are atypical. We’re inundated with narratives of murdered girls and women, of modern-day motives, of tenacious detectives closing in on a killer. And we’re so used to these stories being thrilling, usually titillating, sometimes salacious, always entertaining. I don’t think anything can prepare you for Adolescence’s almost forensic lack of artifice; its uncompromising, miserable realism; and as a result, the utter bleakness of its sense of accuracy.
I’m wondering who shouldn’t be worried about the radicalization of men, young and old. There’s a terrifying community lurking just beneath our internet—beneath the Mayhem cycle, Met Gala dresses, and Bad Bunny’s buns. It is intense, and it is terrifying. For all the escapism great TV offers, Adolescence reminds us we’re sitting atop a brutal reality. It asks the question we thought we already knew the answer to: What harm is sitting alone in your room?