Adolescence is compelling, but here’s what it gets wrong

Involuntary celibacy – “incel” – culture, toxic masculinity, knife crime and young teens on social media. Netflix series Adolescence has become a focal point for anxieties about the lost boys of the internet and, in doing so, it has attracted a record 66 million views in two weeks. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has even suggested the show is important enough to be shown in parliament.

The series is four hours of harrowing watching, following the story of 13-year-old Jamie Miller, who is accused of murdering a 14-year-old girl with a knife. One rainy weekend, my nearly 13-year-old son and I watched it in a single day. He asked me to write this.

Owen Cooper plays Jamie Miller, who is arrested for murder, in the Netflix drama Adolescence.

It’s difficult, though compelling watching for a parent. The arrest with which the series begins emphasises the fragile shoulders and skinny torso of the accused young teen; a child really, taken into adult custody for a violent crime. Obviously, he should be protected by his parents. Obviously, he can’t be. It’s too late for that. Jamie has become part of a world the parents don’t understand. As the police seek a motive for the crime, Jamie’s loneliness in prison is only underscored by the loneliness of the outside and online worlds he had inhabited.

One of the investigating police officers even compares his school to a prison, in which the teachers are so stretched just trying to manage unruly inmates that learning is pretty much out of the question. Yet the main interaction of the teens isn’t in person but online; their bodies have become fleshy props in service of those cyber interactions. The girls send nudes to the boys. The boys share them to prove something – to themselves or others. Everyone is ranking everyone else, all the time.

The writers of the show want Adolescence to be an educational tool, a conversation-starter. “One of our aims was to ask, ‘What is happening to our young men these days, and what are the pressures they face from their peers, from the internet and from social media?’,” says co-creator Stephen Graham, who also plays the role of Jamie’s father. Instead, Adolescence has drawn a frame around a conversational void that is bigger than the writers seem to have realised.

The void is, as they might have hoped, being filled by cultural commentators. Academic and social scientist Dr Anthony Collins was invited onto a podcast by Gen-Z media outlet The Daily Aus to discuss incel culture in the context of the show. But Collins immediately pointed out that incel culture is incredibly uncommon among boys as young as Jamie, and is much more likely to arise in older teens or young men in their early 20s. He points out that Adolescence uses “incel” as a kind of “black box” to explain how a child from a loving family becomes a killer.

Keir Starmer holds a roundtable meeting with Sarah Simpkin from the Children’s Society and Adolescence co-writer Jack Thorne at 10 Downing Street.Credit: AP

My son and I also puzzled over that black box in discussing the series. It is unclear what exactly the process is, which is supposed to have taken Jamie, a character whom the writers take pains to depict as intelligent, from happy kid to “incel” killer. We know he saw a top half nude of Katie, the victim, which was being shared around the school. She’s judged as “flat”. We find out she’s bullied Jamie by calling him an incel, creating a pile-on on social media. Incel is a catch-all and a cop-out by the writers.

There is no examination of why Katie would send the nude to the boy and the social pressures driving young girls in their interactions with young boys. But this would have been a helpful question for the series to raise – among the most mystified are some of the boys who receive them. In real life, I know of a boy about that age who has been sent unsolicited sexy pictures of girls by the girls themselves (not nudes, but nearly).

British journalist Brendan O’Neill objects to the series on the basis that it is statistically incredibly unlikely “for a working-class boy from a stable family to commit a horrific knife crime because he saw stupid stuff on the internet”. As O’Neill says, “the terrible reality is that Britain’s black boys from fatherless homes are the most likely to get swept up in knife violence”. His argument is that Adolescence stigmatises working-class white boys without shedding any light on the heartbreaking plight of boys drawn into gangs by replacement father figures.

William Costello, a psychologist and a doctoral researcher at the University of Texas, says incel-related violence is relatively rare, with only about 60 instances of incel-related violence around the world. In an interview with Triggernometry, podcaster Konstantin Kisin, he also suggests it’s strange, given the known profiles, to have cast a white boy in the leading role.

Personally, I’m not bothered by the race of the actors in the series. In fact, casting the main character as white may provide an opportunity to have a discussion that would otherwise have become too race-focused with any other casting. (There’s a sort of racial bias in that alone, but that’s a column for another day.) I have a different comment to throw into the void: unless we turn the focus on the parents, the opportunity this series presents will be wasted.

In some ways, Adolescence is the sort of fictionalised warning parents needed a couple of decades before Chanel Contos revealed that countless teenage girls feel they were inadequately prepared to know and enforce their own wishes in the face of a society that celebrates sexuality. But the thing is, we did have those shows. We already knew as a culture what the girls who contacted Contos told us: many of their experiences involved a party at a family home, in which the parents were absent or uninvolved, but supplied the alcohol.

In the same way, the real moral of Adolescence is that the tragedy is facilitated by the computer behind Jamie’s closed bedroom door. Incel culture is our latest obsession, but the black box is that parents have a terrible track record of generous neglect. My son now at least understands why screen time is so strictly enforced.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.