Review: There Are No Top-Down Solutions to the Problems Depicted in Adolescence

The limited-run Netflix series is fueling a real-life push for the British government to protect kids from online dangers.

Adolescence, a British TV series streaming on Netflix, depicts the arrest of 13-year-old Jamie for the brutal murder of his classmate, Katie, and the subsequent fallout in an imaginary English town. Shot in a continuous single-camera style, each episode explores the perspectives of Jamie's family, law enforcement, and an evaluating psychologist.

The limited-series format mimics the unsatisfying endings of real-life criminal justice cases. We see a legally defined conclusion, but many questions are left unanswered, as in life, leaving the characters—and viewers—to make sense of the chaos and what should come next after such a shocking act. Jamie's parents ask what, if anything, they could have done differently, and face the uncomfortable reality that many circumstances lie outside of their control.

The series clearly wants to condemn the toxic and misogynistic communities that had infiltrated Jamie's life. Given the recent villainization of social media, it is unsurprising the drama has fueled a real-life push for the British government to protect kids from online dangers. But even with the series creators pushing for "radical action" following the show's success, the storytelling's realism helps keep the agenda in check. This story does not compel viewers to conclude that top-down social control is a sure solution to human failures and crimes.

Comments

[bye]

still this doesn't ameliorate the broken families, the poverty of woman divorced under no-fault, or the corruption of morals that government doles produce

It seems millenia ago but Senator Moynihan saw it

The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

[Mickey Rat]

"But even with the series creators pushing for "radical action" following the show's success, the storytelling's realism helps keep the agenda in check."

The show posits a situation which is an outlier (at best) for the knife crimes epidemic in Britain, that is, the killer coming from an intact ethnically British working class family. This is to support the politically correct position that anyone can go bad. And then the contention that the murder was motivated by "misogyny", when the victim and her friends had been systematically psychologically torturing and ostracizing Jamie because he asked her for a date. That means the character's motivations were a personal grudge, not a general hatred of women.

Other than those issues, sure it was "realistic".

[John Rohan]

The producers don't openly admit it, but it's well known that it's based on the case of teens of African origin in the UK. Hassan Sentamu, an 18-year-old was imprisoned for murdering 15-year-old Elianne Andam in Croydon in 2023.

[Social Justice is neither]

Which means there is a top down solution, namely closing the border.

[Mike Parsons]

It's propaganda, and should be labeled as such. The last thing we should do is make any policy based on propaganda.

The show depicts the narrative that the race hustlers and grifters push: that "white rage", misogyny, are a threat, that really its a crap shoot and anyone could be a criminal (despite overwhelming evidence that its people of color in the west).

Basically pointing to the 'white incel' despite this narrative being contrived out of whole cloth by leftist activists.

[tuphat]

That's your entire take on this?

[Don't look at me! (Not signed with autopen)]

Unless it’s a documentary, it has little to do with real life.

[Incunabulum]

1. Adolescence is fiction.

2. Stop showing the white kid from the movie, it was a black kid.

3. Yes, there is a top-down solution - its called 'throw motherfuckers in jail'.

4. The UK has the problems it has *because the judicial system* is famously lenient and biased towards non-whites (and is now, officially, biased against whites) so criminals never see significant consequences to their actions until they've become career criminals with massive records.

5. The UK has no guns. Shoot a few people breaking into your house 'for a prank, bro!' and that'll stop.

[Rick James]

Shot in a continuous single-camera style

Overdone...

Um, here's Spiked-Online's take on this terrible show:

Why are we still talking about Adolescence?

The Netflix series has been turned into establishment propaganda.

My last column for spiked touched on the political class’s excitement over Netflix propaganda – sorry, drama series – Adolescence. It was all of two weeks ago. And I must confess, as I hit send on the usual sorry collection of vitriol, polemic and scorn, my main concern was that by the time the digital presses had rolled, it would be obsolete. Such a pathetic little squall must surely blow itself out overnight? But no.

Instead, the humiliating spectacle of watching Keir Starmer, prime minister of the once and future greatest country in the world, allow a television drama to put a ring through his attention and lead him around like a pet porker is still ongoing. One might almost wonder if a crackdown on social media – which the show heavily implies is long overdue – isn’t something he’s quite keen to do anyway.

Alongside the ubiquitous demands for more social-media censorship, moves are now afoot to make Adolescence not merely free to view in British schools, as Netflix has just agreed to do, but also compulsory. It’s only a matter of time, surely, before it replaces the footy in pubs, barber shops (ones that actually cut hair anyway) and cab offices up and down the country. Anyone attempting to buy anything sharper than a spatula from Amazon might soon have to watch a few edited highlights of the show and answer a short questionnaire.

[Rick James]

Shelley famously said that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, but in his day, they were working in the infancy of mass media. Netflix has assumed that role now. It’s only a matter of time, as Steerpike in the Spectator suggests, before Netflix moves on to assisted suicide and produces a gritty drama about a troublesome granny who just won’t die, to help get the British establishment’s dearly cherished assisted-suicide bill through parliament.

[Bipedal Humanoid]

[Bipedal Humanoid]

UK leadership slobberknobs on this show as a teaching moment, while ignoring the death cult within its borders that rapes white girls.