Review | Adolescence

The popularity of Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne’s four-part mini series Adolescence sparked a national conversation about online radicalisation, abuse, misogyny and family dynamics, prompting Prime Minister Keir Starmer to make it compulsory viewing in schools, but is it really as transformative as they say, asks Eve H

In March, Netflix released the psychological crime drama Adolescence, a limited four-parter  written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, who also starred. It became an instant hit as the most-watched TV show in Britain in a single week due to themes of masculinity and teenage violence, and the show’s phenomenal acting, directing and production.

Adolescence has created an instant star of the previously unknown child actor Owen Cooper. His performance as Jamie has earned him huge praise, particularly considering the one-shot filming style which created a sense of urgency for the viewer. The experience is akin to watching a play (not out of character for the director Jack Thorne, known for creating the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child).

It’s central question is not whether a teenage Jamie murdered a teenage girl; it is why, how this happened, and what this says about masculinity and society today. The show primarily asks this question to Jamie’s parents and his school. Through his father Eddie, (Stephen Graham), it is highlighted how the generational trauma of masculinity manifests. Eddie tells his wife Manda (Christine Tremarco) that he was beaten by his own father, Jamie’s granddad.  As a result, he vowed never to beat his own children.

The show clearly displays how just because this physical violence from father to son, from male body to male body, has been taken off the table, the threat of violence lingers in the air. It is still ever present, because it is not being expressed in any other way. Some alternative examples of how this could be expressed (which are not discussed in the show), are through emotional processing, talk therapy, or art therapy – art ironically being something Jamie previously expressed an interest in, but wasn’t encouraged to continue with, perhaps because this wasn’t seen as masculine enough by his father.

The unexpressed or unprocessed violence then inevitably leaks out; for Jamie it is through him enacting it upon his female peer by stabbing her seven times to her death; for Eddie, the father, it is through enacting it on physical objects (his van, which a teenager had graffitied ‘nonce’ after the social disgrace of his son arrested for murder).

Male violence, a concept which has long been discussed by Marxist feminists in the context of the idea of family abolition, such as Alexandra Kollontai in The Social Basis of the Woman Question (1909). In the last episode of the show, we see a home life which will be familiar to many households, one where, even though physical violence has decreased, the repressed rage combined with the incredible predilection to not express oneself even within the supposed safety of one’s own home, to pretend everything is fine when it is far from the case, to believe that emotions are gauche, leads to a situation where the man’s emotions run the home.

The father’s idea of masculinity is one where he feels he must be in control and the wife, mother, daughter are simply there to pacify his wants, desires, needs – this is not a world where women’s needs are acknowledged, expressed, or centred. Women and girls become a bit part in this pantomime of dancing around men’s feelings. Katie, the girl who is murdered and stabbed seven times, doesn’t even appear as a character in the show, and neither does her family. She does not speak and will never speak – this has been permanently taken from her by Jamie. The therapist in episode three asks him: ‘Do you know what death is?’

The politics of Adolescence are confused; the show’s attitude is one of ‘just asking questions’ rather than providing answers or even providing a framework in which the viewer could begin to draw conclusions for themselves, which therefore leaves the topics and events discussed in the show open to reactionary interpretations.

This has allowed the show to receive praise from a wide spectrum of political quarters, with Keir Starmer recently hosting a roundtable at Downing Street with the writer Thorne, charities and Netflix, where a deal was arranged to have the show played for free in secondary schools – an idea which, unless it is used in drama classes as an example of great acting – seems politically confused and patronising. Teenagers are already aware of how problems with misogyny, social media, and violence affect them today. This show is for adults, to show them how teenagers’ lives are different from their own adolescence. 

Adolescence’s success and the contents of the show has also been leveraged to give the creator of the show Jack Thorne a platform on which to argue for: banning smartphones in schools, banning social media for under 16s, and for banning internet anonymity. These policies are also supported by many Labour MPs, and closely align with the ‘Online Safety Act 2023’, whose compliance deadline for online platforms has now passed.

These are reactionary policies which do little to tackle the particular way in which misogyny is spread online, give no new resources to parents, schools, youth clubs or other organisations. Nothing is proposed to help to teach teenagers life skills such as how to healthily and safely express their feelings and emotions. The success of Adolescence is a lesson for us in the importance of being explicit and uncompromising in our politics and framework with which to understand the world and to imagine a better one, given the inevitability of capitalists to always leverage cultural reproduction for their own ends.