Adolescence Is Unrealistic

The fictional Netflix drama series Adolescence is making TV ratings history in the U.K. Jamie Miller, a thirteen-year-old English boy, is arrested for stabbing a girl from his school to death. His family must deal with the fallout. Keir Starmer said he watched the show with his children, and there are calls for it to be screened in Parliament. In Ireland, one of the country’s most senior politicians has said it should be compulsory viewing in high schools. In the U.S., there have been glowing reviews in the New York Times and Rolling Stone. Stephen Graham, who co-wrote the series and who plays Jamie’s father, appeared on the Tonight Show to discuss Adolescence: “We didn’t want it to be a whodunnit,” he said. “We wanted it to be more of a why—why he did it.”

Why, indeed. Viewers get to know a lot about Jamie. Though he is bullied at school, he is certainly not friendless. He is sensitive and intelligent, while prone to moments of sarcastic rage. He may be knowledgeable about sex up to a point, but, ultimately, he is clueless and naive. He is useless at sport, but good at drawing. He is a good-looking child but has become convinced he is ugly. In his complexities and confusions, he is probably not very dissimilar to thousands of other English boys at certain stages of their young lives.

Except that Jamie brutally kills a girl. The worm turns when his victim, Katie, repeatedly calls him an “incel” on Instagram. Katie had previously rejected Jamie’s advances, made after another boy had shared nude pictures of her. (Jamie mistakenly assumed that, emotionally bruised by humiliation, she would be open to his kindly presented interest.) It is heavily implied that hours and hours spent consuming manosphere content on the computer in his bedroom provide Jamie with the emotional and ideological fuel needed to kill.  

The debate prompted by Adolescence has revolved around “online male radicalization” and “toxic misogyny.” The “violence carried out by young men, influenced by what they see online, is a real problem,” Starmer told the House of Commons. When speaking to Jimmy Fallon, Graham mentioned two real-life cases of boys knifing girls to death that had occurred within weeks of one another in England. “What kind of a society are we living in at the moment,” he asked, “where young boys are stabbing young girls?” Graham made reference to social media and “all this stuff in the world that really influences young minds.”

Adolescence is, in many respects, an excellent show: The shooting of each episode in a single, uninterrupted take immerses us completely in the unfolding events; some of the acting is mind-bogglingly good; and the final episode in particular is soaked in pathos. But the question of causality is where things begin to get troublesome. What can we learn from the troubles of Jamie and his family about the roots of his awful act and of similar events in the real world? Does Adolescence merit its elevation to Mirror of the Soul of the Young English Male—a mirror that everyone, but especially politicians, policy makers, and boys themselves, is now obliged to look into? 

Commentary on Adolescence has, broadly speaking, identified three murders in recent years—Holly Newton, Ava White, and Elianne Andam—that could be said to resemble the program’s core scenario. When reading the judges’ sentencing remarks in these cases, however, it is clear that the perpetrators have nothing in common with Jamie Miller. 

Jamie is loved by his kindly parents, whose marriage is intact and strong. His father has something of a temper but is never violent toward Jamie. There are tensions and misunderstandings between the two, mismatches between their personalities and temperaments, but nothing that countless father-and-son relationships are not required to navigate.  

The lives of the boys we read about in the sentencing reports, while wildly different from that of Jamie, are hauntingly similar to one another. Most striking is the prevalence of early exposure to domestic violence: “Violence to others which you had witnessed meant you had had to confront things which no child should have to . . .”; “Sadly, you appear to have been exposed to violence at a young age. Your father was violent to your mother . . .”; “You were the subject of child protection plans because you suffered neglect and other disturbing childhood experiences which caused trauma and interfered with your development.”

Unsurprisingly, fatherlessness also looms large: 76 percent of children in custody in England and Wales say they had an absent father. The father of one of the killers discussed above went to prison for six years when his son was eight. Another perpetrator came to England aged three, accompanied only by his mother, following allegations of domestic abuse against his father. (Aged eleven, this boy was sent back to his home country to go to boarding school where he reported being physically abused and beaten with a metal pole.)  

A drama series exploring the actual backgrounds, home lives, and mindsets of boys who have stabbed girls to death, as glimpsed in the sentencing reports, would end up more harrowing and disturbing than Adolescence itself. But would Netflix even consider commissioning such a drama? Would the prime minister gather his children around the television to watch it?

The current debate is perhaps a new example of what the Scottish journalist Stephen Daisley has called “the law of displaced culpability,” under which politicians and the commentariat flee the true causes of a problem, because to do so would mean confronting issues that unnerve them (rampant family breakdown, for instance), and seek the safety of something that is easier to distance themselves from, to blame, and to regulate: the internet, the manosphere, Andrew Tate, or even Jordan Peterson, who was recently hauled back into the dock alongside Tate in both the Guardian and Harper’s Bazaar. 

All of this has been prompted by the curious televisual beast that is Adolescence: a hyper-realistic drama that is profoundly unrealistic at heart.