Spoilers follow for all four episodes of Adolescence, now streaming on Netflix.
In the second episode of Adolescence — the new acclaimed Netflix limited series and runaway hit about a 13-year-old boy accused of murder — Detective Sergeant Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) tells one of her male colleagues what upsets her most about the case. She and Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) are visiting the secondary school previously attended by the accused killer, Jamie (newcomer Owen Cooper, who was only 14 at the time of filming), and his classmate Katie (Emilia Holliday), the girl he’s accused of killing.
“You know what I don’t like about all this?” Frank says. “The perp always gets the front line: A man raped a woman. We’ve been following Jamie’s brain around this entire case. Katie isn’t important; Jamie is. Everyone will remember Jamie; no one will remember her. That’s what annoys me. That’s what gets to me.”
It’s an astute observation, and perhaps a self-critically meta one, given that the show in which Frank is saying these lines is devoted entirely to Jamie: what he did, why he did it, and who’s to blame. Meanwhile, the person whose life he’s extinguished is relegated to a briefly shown photograph of a smiling girl in a baseball cap, some comments on social media, and a teacher who remembers she “talked a bit too much.” The only time we see Katie alive is at a distance in the CCTV footage police have obtained of the girl silently shoving Jamie away from her in a parking lot late at night, before he pursues her and stabs her to death. In Adolescence’s four episodes — all shot in one appropriately claustrophobic and unsettling long take — Katie isn’t important; Jamie is. The show knows this, acknowledges it, and makes the case for its own existence nonetheless. But focusing on the topic of teenage violence and misogyny from the perspective of one of its perpetrators doesn’t necessarily provide us with any new or special insights into young men’s online radicalization — and it threatens to further obscure the lived reality and humanity of those who suffer its real-world consequences in the process.
Many have heralded the gripping third episode, which takes place almost entirely in one room in a youth psychiatric facility seven months after Jamie’s arrest, as far and away the best of the bunch. I’d agree with them; it’s also the most revealing episode in terms of the show’s exploration of gender dynamics and male rage. A court-appointed psychologist named Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty) interviews Jamie for an independent pretrial report on his mental health; we’re made to understand they’ve met several times before. The pair kick things off with friendly banter before she encourages him to tell her about his relationships with his father and grandfather. What are they like, she asks. “Men,” Jamie says. He accuses Briony of trying to trick him; of being posh; of “chatting shit.” She ensures him they’re just having a conversation. This is the first of many times Jamie will fluctuate between a sometimes friendly, sometimes petulant child, and the aggressive, paranoid, resentful man he’s becoming.
When Briony has convinced him to go along with her questions about how he feels about men and masculinity, Jamie is reticent at first. Is his dad funny? “Sometimes.” Loving? “No, that’s weird.” Angry? “I suppose.” Though he’s quick to clarify his father has never hit him: “He just gets mad. We all do.” We learn that his father, Eddie, played by series co-creator and co-writer Stephen Graham, is into sports and that he once tried the classic dad move of getting his son to follow in his footsteps. It went poorly, as those things so often do. When Jamie tried playing football, he admits to Briony, Eddie would “cheer me on and everything, but when I’d fuck up —” Jamie pauses, the camera close on his face as it storms with sadness and mortification just beneath the surface. “He’d just look away … Maybe he didn’t want me to see him looking sorry … Or, I don’t know, ashamed.” When Briony asks him how he felt about that — seeing his dad’s shame — Jamie bristles again, wondering accusatorily why she hasn’t pushed back and assured him that must be all in his head; a father wouldn’t be ashamed of his child. Would he? Soon afterward, Jamie has his first major outburst, standing over Briony as she sits in her chair, screaming at her that she doesn’t control his life: “Get that in that little fucking head of yours.”
Quite a lot of Adolescence is devoted to plumbing the complicated depths of Jamie’s relationship with his father. That relationship is given much more attention than the few mostly feeble and surface-level attempts at explaining teens today, despite what the series’ title might suggest. Only one episode, the second (with a title card featuring photos of the teenage actors when they were younger children, innocents) is set in teen world, at the secondary school where the detective worries to her superior that Katie will be forgotten while Jamie lives on in infamy. It’s also the only time when we meet anyone who both knew and loved Katie. When the police interview her best friend, Jade (Fatima Bojang), about what the murdered girl was like, she says Katie was “the best person she knew” — but the most important fact about her is that she’s dead now. Jade gets angry at a line of questioning that she thinks is victim blaming — the cops ask her if Katie really couldn’t stand Jamie, why did they comment on each other’s Instagrams? — which is followed by a brief After-School Special sort of scene between Jade and a teacher about her home life. We don’t see Jade speaking with any of her peers (were she and Katie total loners?), though we do get to witness multiple teen boys feverishly discussing Jamie’s case and whether they think he really did it (yes).
The second episode doesn’t give us anything specific or real about Katie. Instead, its purpose is for Bascombe to learn from his son, who attends the same school, that the police have been totally clueless about the emojis Katie used in her interactions with Jamie online, which are meant to imply he’s a loser virginal incel. Andrew Tate gets name-dropped. More than probing the particularities of these teenagers’ lives and relationships in an era of virulent online misogyny, however, the shallow buzzword revelations just play up the show’s most prevalent theme of father-son tensions; Bascombe tells Frank their talk about emojis were the most words he’s exchanged with his teenager for quite a while. It’s Bascombe listening to a voice-mail from his son that opens the whole series.
Graham told Netflix’s in-house magazine, Tudum, that he was inspired to create the show after seeing young boys accused of knife crimes on the news. “It shocked me,” he says. “I was thinking, What’s going on? What’s happening in society where a boy stabs a girl to death? What’s the inciting incident here? And then it happened again, and it happened again, and it happened again. I really just wanted to shine a light on it and ask, Why is this happening today? What’s going on? How have we come to this?”
Those are seemingly the big questions animating the series: What was Jamie’s motive? What causes children to commit violent crimes against other children? And it’s in the third episode when we get some answers. Jamie tells Briony that boys in school had been passing around topless photos of Katie, laughing at her for being so flat chested, and he thought that was the prime time to ask her out: when she was being made fun of, and therefore a “weak” target. He put on his best tracksuit and asked her to the fair. “I’m not that desperate,” she told him in response. He gets so worked up relaying this story that he makes what sounds like an accidental confession, then gets so mad at himself that he flies into another rage, throwing his chair across the room, which encourages Briony to prematurely abort the session and choke back tears once he’s out of sight.
In her review for the New York Times, critic Margaret Lyons writes that she watched this episode multiple times, “and it can land in different ways. Through one lens, [Briony] plays [Jamie] like a piano, provoking a variety of emotional responses. Through another, she is a ship on his ocean, a witness to his tempestuousness but not its cause.” I’ve also watched the episode a few times, and I’ve wondered how a professional who must have spoken with dozens of violent and dangerous people managed to get so shaken by a 13-year-old boy — Jamie makes fun of her for this, too, taunting her for being scared of a child. I’ve considered whether she’s the one who really holds all the cards — she elicits a confession, after all — or whether, as she jokes to Jamie at one point, he’s really the one in charge. The strength of both actors’ performances, their intimate push and pull, opens the door to these different interpretations. Though perhaps that ambiguity is also the result of some wishy-washy writing. We learn that Jamie — who has commented crude things on models’ Instagrams and brags about his sexual exploits to Briony before denying he’s ever experienced those things at all — doesn’t consider himself popular, had been bullied at school, and that he had a motive to kill Katie because she was one of his tormentors (recall the incel comments). Does Briony — and the show itself — really believe that Jamie was the victim of abuse at school, or was she using the specter of his being made fun of to bait him into revealing the truth?
What episode three does do well is depict a boy teetering between his resentment and even hatred of women — he implies Briony is flat chested like Katie and therefore undesirable; he belittles and intimidates her; he compares her unfavorably to his other male therapist — and his desperation for attention and affirmation. A guard drags Jamie from the interview after he asks Briony what she thinks of him, and he starts screaming when she won’t answer: “Do you like me? Do you like me?” He bangs on the windows, desperate. “Tell my dad I’m all right.”
Of course, his father’s opinion of him matters more than that of any woman’s. And Eddie knows this. The show’s final episode — the one most heavily criticized for being “slow” and involving “too much irrelevant chitchat” — takes place over a year after the murder, when Jamie’s family is trying to return to normal while he’s awaiting trial. It’s all about Eddie — the whole series, despite the third episode without him, has really been all about Eddie and his struggle to accept the truth of what his son did — who frets that even though he didn’t hit his children, the way his father had hit him, maybe he didn’t do enough to prevent violence from manifesting in his own son. This isn’t a story about adolescence today: it’s one of inherited rage, shame, and misogyny. A tale as old as time.
What starts out as a much more intriguing premise — a teenage victim of revenge porn turns the tables, becoming the bully of her own bullies — is left unexplored. In the finale, we learn that when Eddie was an adolescent, he once dressed up in a pink wig (“Your dad never cared when people were laughing at him,” his wife tells their daughter), implying he was once the kind of guy who was confident enough to sidestep masculinity’s rules. But no longer: “Don’t laugh at me! Fuck off!” he screams at the teen boy he accuses of spray-painting “nonce” (British slang for pedophile) on his work van, whom he also shoves to the ground. While getting more time with Eddie, I kept thinking back to Katie and Jade, their untold stories. What happens to young girls who, not so unlike Jamie, are conditioned to hate themselves? What of their shame and their rage?
“We wanted you to look at this family and think, My God. This could be happening to us!” Graham told Tudum. “And what’s happening here is an ordinary family’s worst nightmare.” With his impressively weepy performance (less so his co-written script), Graham captures that nightmare well. Though one also has to wonder: Wasn’t it Katie’s friends and family, and Katie herself, who experienced the worst nightmare of all?
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Adolescence ignores her story to its detriment.
