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The new Netflix limited series, following the family of a young boy who is arrested for murder, is already the most watched show in the UK and has infiltrated discussions in Parliament. Its success speaks to the insidious impacts of social media on a generation increasingly misunderstood by the world around them.
‘I want it to be shown in schools, I want it to be shown in Parliament. It’s crucial because this is only going to get worse.’
Those were the words of Jack Thorne, co-writer and creator of Netflix’s latest breakout show Adolescence, which tracks the fallout of thirteen-year-old Jamie’s arrest for murder.
The story of a family’s lives being ripped apart in the aftermath of a grim crime is no new territory of the streaming service, which often sees big numbers for thrillers and true crime documentaries. But Adolescence is in many ways a unicorn, both for its content and structure.
Each hour-long episode was shot in one uninterrupted take, a creative choice that feels less like a stunt and more a harrowingly successful attempt to plant the viewer firmly within the scene. Watching the story unfold, you feel like an invisible voyeur – creeping in the background waiting to be caught.
This sense of unease is what sets Adolescence apart from other crime dramas. There’s no cutting, no breaking away. You’re watching everything unfold in real-time, making for a stark and unnerving study on the impacts of modern masculinity and its hold over young men.
According to Netflix, each episode was shot around fifteen times, not counting takes that were scrapped due to slip-ups (the take used for episode one was only the second the cast and crew had shot). This painstaking approach to filmmaking is rarely seen nowadays, especially not in an episodic format. But the appetite for it is still clearly there.
In the days since the series launched, Netflix has shared behind-the-scenes insights on how each episode was shot, including the use of a drone-rig to pull-off a flyover shot at the end of episode 2, and the decision to dress crew in costume so they could blend in with extras when needed.
This tireless dedication to crafting something wholly original – and (crucially, during an era of AI-fuelled anxiety) human – has certainly paid off. Reviews glow across the board, the show has an almost perfect score on popular review aggregator ‘Rotten Tomatoes’, and Lucy Mangan called it ‘the closest thing to TV perfection in decades.’
Yet however quickly Adolescence has blown up, it’s still unusual for a show about such an ostensibly unique experience to resonate so widely – to the point that it looks to be impacting political conversation in the country’s highest office.
So why has a story about a thirteen-year-old killer hit such a nerve? I’d argue that the show’s intimate filmography gets to the root of this question; Adolescence speaks to a subject that many of us are either too scared to broach, or too ignorant to fully comprehend. But it’s one that exists under our noses, in our homes, in our children’s bedrooms. And it only grows more powerful in its insidiousness.
Writing for the Guardian about his decision to create the show, Thorne says Stephen Graham, who plays Jamie’s dad, first approached him about writing a series about knife crime.
‘He wanted to talk about young male violence towards women and he had two stipulations: he wanted to do it in a series of single shots, and he didn’t want to blame the parents.’
This second point is crucial to Adolescence’s success. Because this isn’t just another nail-biting thriller with twists and turns. It’s not a search for the killer or an effort to understand their motive.
We know early on that Jamie has done what he has because of influences alien to the adults around him, yet all too familiar to his peers. For a story that’s so often framed around the parents – what they did or didn’t do, how they could have let their child become such a monster – this is what makes Adolescence so unsettling.
At its core, the show is about ‘male rage’ and how it festers in young boys in new and complex ways amid the rise of social media. While parenting certainly plays a role in the decisions of young children, there are now new influences at play – often far more pervasive and powerful than the adults in a young boy’s life.
These influences are always accessible, and are being fed by the algorithm in distinctly gendered ways to suit the desires and fears of those viewing them. Media has never been more divisive. Men and women are exposed to entirely different – often oppositional – narratives that have transformed the gender divide into a chasm.
‘We’ve all seen the rise of figures like Andrew Tate, preaching power and dominance as the ultimate goal, using *safe* platforms like Spotify to preach hatred and misogyny… and whether we like it or not, teenage boys are listening,’ says writer Chloe Adams.
