Review: Adolescence (Netflix, 2025)

Any time there’s a film or show that explodes onto the scene, borne by a tidal wave of critical acclaim, it’s always worth trying to suss out why it’s so popular, if only to avoid those that are astroturfed into popularity. Sometimes it’s the technical achievement of the filmmaking—some new advancement in CGI, better costume design, better cameras, etc. Sometimes it’s a romantic story and great chemistry between the leads. Sometimes it’s car chases.

Sometimes it’s because the acting is every bit as good in all the ways the breathless reviews say it is, and Adolescence is as good as any Oscar-winning film. After years of ever more expensive sets and glossy production values distracting from weak acting and weaker stories (*cough* Mayfair Witches *cough*), in a lot of ways Adolescence is an anti-prestige drama—the makeup is minimal, the clothes are sometimes ill-fitting, the sets are places where a lot of people live and work (albeit remarkably clean and new). The acting and directing are so good that they outshine the show’s few, if substantive, flaws. Owen Cooper, who plays Jamie Miller, is more talented than a lot of adult actors on TV. He keeps the viewer guessing at every turn, initially as to Jamie’s awareness of why he’s being arrested, all the way through to whether he really understands what he’s done. Jamie may not be quite as smart as he believes he is, but he’s definitely smarter than the adults around him give him credit for, and watching his gaze flit from adult to adult, calculating how best to secure and retain the sympathy of everyone he’s in the room with—and his growing desperation in those moments when he realizes he’s lost that sympathy—is electrifying. Episode 3 in particular deserves all the awards: Jamie’s intense psychological fencing match with Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty) around what motivated Jamie to kill is breathtaking and devastating to watch.

I’m glad the show has so disturbed and alarmed viewers that it’s reviving an international conversation about bullying and how social media is spreading and exacerbating that problem; I’m baffled that this particular show is being used as a teaching tool instead of a springboard for taking a deeper look into how and why children bully each other in the first place, and how social media is making the problem worse. It reminds me of the argument that memorials to those killed in war do more to make us forget why the dead were killed than to remember. For a show ostensibly about the repercussions of violent misogyny, it spends precious little time on Jamie’s victim or why he killed her. DS Frank (Faye Marsay), one of the cops investigating Katie’s murder, expresses irritation that the case will inevitably become about the killer and no one will even remember the victim’s name; DI Bascombe (Ashley Walters) pushes back, stating that the work they’re doing is for Katie’s sake, and yet the rest of the show proves Frank’s point. Katie is almost entirely erased from the story. We don’t learn her name until we’re 40 minutes into the first episode, we never see her family, and the sole demonstration of real grief for her is limited to perhaps five minutes. As the story progresses from Jamie’s arrest to the questioning of his schoolmates, someone mentions that Katie mocked Jamie online and Bascome instantly blames her for her own murder—oh, Jamie was bullied by a girl, that explains why he stabbed her to death. How many times Katie mocked Jamie in public (virtually or in person), how Katie felt knowing that dozens of her schoolmates were sharing photos of her naked, how long the photos were shared around and to how many boys—neither the cops nor the teachers ask anyone about those aspects of the dynamic. That Jamie has learned his attitudes towards girls from the Tate brothers and the manosphere is implied but never made explicit: all we actually know is that Jamie spends a lot of time online, he likes pictures of models on Instagram, and there’s a mention of Andrew Tate. There are brief discussions of social media, the sharing of nude photos, and the significance of a variety of emojis, but one could be forgiven for thinking that Katie, Jamie, and maybe a few other boys are the only schoolkids involved in this online environment; a lot of other kids appear to know about it but do not seem to be particularly affected by it. This is one of the show’s flaws—the two cops, and a lot of the teachers, are absolutely young enough to know what terms like “red pill” mean and to know that emojis are used as code, even if they don’t know the specific meanings assigned to certain emojis by the schoolkids. Mr. Malik’s (Faraz Ayub) genuine distaste for, even fear of, the kids he’s in charge of is one of the more convincing moments in the school scenes; the earnest bafflement on the part of the other schoolteachers and Bascombe, and the idea that what schoolkids do is just one vast mystery, falls flat, particularly when Bascombe talks about his own time in high school. He clearly remembers being a teenager, and the kids he’s interviewing are hardly the first generation to feel like school is just a years-long running of the gauntlet.

Almost every clue the show gives us as to Jamie’s life prior to the day he murdered Katie points to him being a relatively well-adjusted kid. In episode four his mother Manda (Christine Tremarco) says that she and his father Eddie (Stephen Graham) should have done more to help him manage his temper, but they are loving and supportive parents and none of Jamie’s teachers report any concerns about his wellbeing. Katie’s handful of comments about him on Instagram are the only instance we hear of him being bullied, unless you include Eddie describing the other fathers at a kids’ football match years before laughing at Jamie for being bad at the sport—an incident that prompted Eddie to help him find other hobbies, not to force Jamie to carry on being shamed. There’s no evidence that Jamie has learned his toxic masculinity at home. One of the joys of watching Graham’s acting is the vulnerability he brings to so many of his characters, and Eddie Miller is one of his best performances to date. Eddie’s definitely guilty of some old-school sexism—Dad earns the money and his women spend it, har har—but not once does he denigrate a woman for being a woman. We only see him on screen during periods of intense stress and he tries mightily to control his temper when he knows it’s fraying. We have the shouting in the first episode when heavily armed police break down the front door and flood the house; Jamie’s description of Eddie tearing down a shed in a rage, with no explanation of why Eddie was upset (and the little tell that Jamie laughed during the incident); and two moments in episode four, first when Eddie is told that his work van has been vandalized and second when he discovers who vandalized it. None of Eddie’s responses that we see are disproportionate to the provocations. His wife and daughter are frightened for him, but they are not frightened of him. Neither is Eddie afraid of laughing at himself, or of others laughing at him. When Manda tells their daughter Lisa (Amelie Pease) about Eddie’s dancefloor faceplant at a school party when they were 13, and that he was teased about it for the rest of the year, he doesn’t show any discomfort—indeed, he elaborates on the story, explaining to Lisa how the incident strengthened his budding romance with Manda (Lisa, in typical teenage fashion, clearly wishes the car seat would open up and swallow her). We also learn in the final episode that he made a conscious decision to never hit his children because he never forgot how painful and humiliating it was to be beaten by his own father.

So the mystery of what radicalized Jamie remains, even as the final episode concludes. Andrew Tate’s poisonous role modelling of violent misogyny is mentioned—just the once—and it is assumed that Jamie was a fan, but Katie seems to be his only victim. No one reports that Jamie had a penchant for teasing or torturing younger children or small animals, a common precursor for more serious assaults; neither Lisa nor any of Jamie’s classmates say anything about Jamie harassing them (again, the girls barely get a word in here). The show’s title alludes to a universal experience of a specific period of psychological and physiological development, but the implication that just any teenager could turn into a real-life Jamie Miller doesn’t make sense without more information on Jamie than the story provides. If he was simply so emotionally fragile that Katie’s comment about him being an incel and later refusing to date him was enough to push him over the edge, that sets him apart from the average teenage experience, not emblematic of it. Jamie, as a character, as a personality, as a child with severe emotional dysregulation, is the exception; children and teenagers being shamed and harmed by each other and those who teach and care for them—verbally, physically, sexually—is the rule, and has been for who knows how long. If Adolescence was intended to be a look inside how violent misogyny and bullying spread (to be fair, I’m not convinced it was, despite the fact that it is now being promoted as such)—it fails in that regard. Social media is the fork, not the food. Preventing teenagers from accessing social media is not going to make a dent in the mansophere or the violent misogyny its leaders espouse; nor is it going to stop teenagers from accessing those ideas through books, films, conversations with older friends and family members. Even if social media companies were genuinely willing to remove the Tate brothers and all their ilk from their platforms (and we know most, if not all, are not), the bullying and misogyny will persist as long as we remain fans of the news networks and brands and public figures that are deeply invested in maintaining rape culture. Violence against women and every other marginalized population is profitable and, in a lot of cases, provides predators and abusers cover for their own actions, and learning how to value and respect every person’s well-being requires work most of us are still not prepared to do.

The show is elevated far beyond its script by the incredible performances of its stars and the almost documentarian focus of the camera as it tracks the actors. As an exploration of bullying, it does a good job of showing what’s going on in schools to those of us who don’t have school-aged children—like a lot of shows before it—but it’s just another window onto the chaos. The only fresh perspective I think the creators both intended to present and succeeded far beyond expectations is to show a family navigating intense emotional pain without vilifying the victim/victim’s family or replacing the necessary process of self-reflection by falling back on religion or substance abuse. In their struggle to cope with their grief the Millers focus on listening to each other and maintaining their bond as a family; it is heartbreaking to watch, and the only real lesson the show offers. The number of real families like the fictional Millers is increasing, and I suspect they don’t get any more mental health support than the millions of people trying to cope with other life-changing events.