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The arrival of searing new series Adolescence could hardly be more timely. The drama dropped on Netflix just as it emerged that crossbow killer Kyle Clifford had searched online for misogynistic podcasts and watched Andrew Tate videos hours before murdering three female members of the Hunt family. Then again, such stories hit headlines with depressing regularity. Perhaps Adolescence would have felt unnervingly on-the-nose whenever it launched.
The initial idea came to its star, Stephen Graham, after a spate of distressing violent crimes. In 2021, 12-year-old Ava White was fatally stabbed by a 14-year-old boy in Graham’s home city of Liverpool. In 2023, 15-year-old Elianne Andam was attacked with a kitchen knife by 17-year-old Hassan Sentamu outside a Croydon shopping centre.
“It really hit my heart,” Graham said at the show’s premiere. “I just thought: ‘What’s happening? How have we come to this? What’s going on with our society?’” The actor roped in his regular collaborator, top-tier screenwriter Jack Thorne, to create a hard-hitting drama interrogating why boys are committing such extreme acts against girls.
The result is the harrowing but heartfelt Adolescence, a four-parter that follows the Miller family, whose lives are blown apart when 13-year-old schoolboy Jamie is arrested in a dawn raid for killing a female classmate called Katie.
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.
It might be a masterclass from the best actor working today but Graham leaves room for his castmates to shine. Ashley Walters delivers a career-best turn as lead investigator DI Luke Bascombe. Walters was considering quitting acting and moving behind the camera but Adolescence changed his mind, not least because it resonated personally with a man who, in his own teens, was sentenced to 18 months for gun possession. He has admitted to “crying most nights” while learning the script.
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.
This authentic naturalism can also be seen in the recurring motif of food. Teenagers are permanently hungry, after all. When Jamie is offered a bowl of cornflakes in his holding cell, his dad repeatedly nudges him to “eat your cornies”. DI Bascombe reaches out to his own son by taking him for “chips and a Coke”. Briony bonds with Jamie by sprinkling marshmallows in his hot chocolate. Like a typical vegetable-averse kid, he expresses horror at the idea of salad in a sandwich. The Miller family maintain a veneer of normality via a full English breakfast (complete with black pudding) and a Chinese takeaway (complete with prawn crackers).
Adolescence reunites Graham with Boiling Point director Philip Barantini, who’s clearly a glutton for single-shot punishment. The 2021 chef drama was filmed in one continuous take. Each episode of Adolescence is shot in the same seamless style, without a single edit. It’s not only a stunning technical accomplishment – exactly how does it flow from overhead crane shot to in-your-face closeup, from corridor to car interior to play park, without us seeing the joins? – but it lends an immersive, unflinching immediacy to proceedings.
The camera never leaves the action. Neither can we. It’s no flashy gimmick but a way of ratcheting up the thrumming real-time tension. Rarely has a state secondary school been so vividly portrayed as in episode two. It’s Grange Hill with smartphones and security lanyards. When Bascombe and his sidekick DS Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) complain about the stink, noise and claustrophobic chaos, the audience feel it too.
It’s refreshing that Adolescence comes from Netflix, a platform not exactly known for quintessentially British drama. Nor indeed self-contained stories told over a punchy four episodes. In many ways, this feels like a BBC or Channel 4 project. Instead, the streamer’s deeper pockets are partly what enabled Barantini to be so technically ambitious.
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”.
The fourth and final episode is where the reliably superb Graham reduces viewers to rubble. Eddie turns from a combustible ball of anger into a hollowed-out husk of grief, guilt and regret. The climactic scene of him tearfully tucking Jamie’s childhood teddy bear into his bed and apologising to it (“Sorry, son, I should’ve done better”) is devastating.
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. It might not be as overtly political as Thorne’s Toxic Town but in terms of its potential to kickstart real world change, it’s the most rousing TV since Mr Bates vs the Post Office.
It’s a cautionary tale about getting teenagers off screens and engaging with real life again. A reminder that human contact and family time might help save them. A plea to support, talk and listen, not let them fall through the cracks and disappear down the digital rabbit hole. It will open conversations that desperately need to be had.
With its killer combination of artistic virtuosity, startling performances and gut-punch power, Adolescence is a howl of despair and a call to action. It will resonate with troubled teens, terrify their parents and linger with viewers. The questions it poses are urgent and vital. Providing answers? Well, that’s the hard part. But it’s up to us to solve this pressing issue before many more people die.
