The real truth about Netflix's Adolescence

And why the hype is misplaced

‘Adolescence' is currently the most-watched show on Netflix, and for good reason. The four-part mini-series is beautifully shot, brilliantly acted, and gripping from start to finish. The fact that each episode was filmed in a single take makes it even more impressive. It has been cited in Parliament, discussed on "Loose Women," and has garnered over 66 million views on Netflix.

The series taps into every parent’s worst fear: what their children are looking at on the internet, behind their closed bedroom doors. The hyper-realistic way it’s filmed, featuring ordinary characters like a plumber dad, a wife, and two kids, makes the plot feel that much more relatable. For the average viewer, the events unfolding feel like they could easily happen to them.

'Adolescence' tells the story of the arrest and investigation of 13-year-old murderer Jamie Miller, who kills a teenage girl after she mocked him on social media. As each episode unravels, details of Jamie’s online browsing history and its impact on him and other young men are revealed. Owen Cooper’s performance as Jamie is simply remarkable—a feat he can happily hang his hat on for the rest of his career.

But the series’ stunning cinematography and excellent acting are where the accolades must end. Throughout the series, it becomes clear that this is indeed a work of fiction. Once you manage to sift through the rave reviews calling it ‘the most brilliant TV drama in years’ (a stretch in my opinion), the flaws become painfully obvious. As a form of social commentary, 'Adolescence' left much to be desired—not least because it ends up regurgitating the newly fashionable received wisdom about boys and smartphones, the internet, and ‘toxic masculinity'.

The fact that it was raised by Keir Starmer in Parliament is a case in point. While he accidentally described it as a ‘documentary’, I’m sure that’s what he truly believes. After all, it validates the worldview of his ilk—the middle-class luvvies who are happy to believe that violence carried out by young men is largely influenced by the content they consume online rather than the often-troubled homes that they come from. The idea of a working-class white boy, raised in a two-parent home and exposed to Andrew Tate online, stabbing a young girl for mocking him is indeed highly implausible. But I’m sure this must have never occurred to the Prime Minister.

It's far more convenient to blame young men’s struggles on the manosphere. That way, they don’t have to have uncomfortable conversations about family breakdown and the prevalence of drugs and gang culture in our society. MP Anneliese Midgley—a recent MP undoubtedly trying to make a name for herself—called for the series to be screened in Parliament and schools, claiming it could help counter misogyny and violence against women and girls. Unsurprisingly, the Prime Minister backed her call. Is it any wonder that our young men are so lost when it is these lazy opportunists fighting their corner?

The politicians and news media treating 'Adolescence' as a realistic portrayal of youth violence in Britain are frankly deluded. There is no epidemic of Andrew Tate-addled boys stabbing girls to death in fits of incel revenge. And it certainly wasn’t present in any of the real-world source material that inspired the series.

A closer look at the cases Stephen Graham drew upon shows anything but the scourge of manosphere-obsessed miscreants we have become obsessed with. The first real-life incident—the story of 12-year-old Ava White, who was killed by a 14-year-old assailant at a bus stop in Liverpool—didn’t have anything to do with Andrew Tate. The assailant’s previous convictions and the fact that he grew up in chronic dysfunction were more directly to blame for his heinous crime. In fact, the father of the 14-year-old was jailed for domestic violence against his mother.

Equally, the second case of Hassan Sentamu, a 17-year-old who murdered a friend of his ex-girlfriend in Croydon in 2023, showed a similar trend of a troubled upbringing and exposure to violence. The sentencing remarks made by the presiding judge—who sentenced Sentamu to life in prison—painted the bleak reality. Sentamu had a long history of violent and threatening behaviour, sparked, it has been suggested, by abusive behaviour towards him while he was growing up in Uganda. Before his crime, his behavioural issues and autism had led him to be educated in a special school. He was also the product of a single mother home. He had to be temporarily removed by social services after they found that his mother, already struggling to raise four other girls singlehandedly, had neglected his care. His crime does not seem to have had much to do with social media or the internet.

The third case of Brianna Ghey’s brutal murder also had little to do with the show’s overarching narrative. For one of Ghey’s killers, Eddie Ratcliffe, he had a fairly normal, unremarkable upbringing—except for the fact that his businessman father was jailed for making indecent images of children. In the case of the other murderer, Scarlett Jenkinson (another product of a two-parent home) was suspended from school for handing out cannabis gummy sweets.

Of course, long before Andrew Tate, there were the killers who fit more of the trend of fatherless homes than manosphere disciples. Take the killers of Jamie Bulger, for example. While Jon Venables had a normal two-parent upbringing, Robert Thompson (who was considered the ringleader of the killing) had a father who ran off with another woman five years prior, leaving his mum to raise him and his seven siblings on her own.

The overwhelming data on the link between fatherlessness, young offenders and gang culture has long been clear. According to a report by the Centre for Social Justice, about 70% of young offenders come from broken homes, and a similar report in 2013 found that 76% of young offenders in custody came from father-absent homes.

It is astonishing that 'Adolescence' fails to touch on these points at all. To say that the show stretches the limits of the imagination would be an understatement. Is anyone really supposed to believe that the product of a hard-working, two-parent family where the dad’s mild anger management issues amount to him trashing a shed on occasion would result in a knife-wielding brute who would murder a peer for making fun of him?

It certainly doesn’t help that Jamie’s character looks to weigh just as much as any blade he might carry.

Much of the criticism of the series online, too, is missing the point—obsessing over allegations of ‘race-swapping’ and dismissing the show as a ‘white, male bashing, establishment sponsored tripe’. The bigger question is what we are meant to derive from this series. Obviously, very little.

Ultimately, Adolescence fails to ask the hard questions about the scourge of drugs, gang culture and the kinds of homes that produce young offenders. Making Andrew Tate the face of everything wrong with young men today is lazy and narrow-minded. The show’s creators, much like audience it caters to, have become so subsumed by the national moral panic over social media, the manosphere, and the pernicious influence of the likes of Andrew Tate (or ‘the Andrew Tate shite’, as a female detective sergeant in the show sighs at one point), that it labours to create a narrative completely detached from reality.