Adolescence: Netflix’s new No. 1 hit is one of the best shows of the year. – Slate

Netflix is often full of crap. Netflix is also where I just watched Adolescence, a new four-episode miniseries that, in addition to topping the streamer’s charts, is some of the best television of the year. This British import, written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, is about a crime: A 13-year-old boy, Jamie Miller, has been accused of stabbing a classmate to death. Each episode is a one-shot—done in a single take, in an immersive style that feels alternately hectic and unbearably intimate. Each episode bites at the question “How did Jamie get here?” from a different angle. But the show’s only nominally about an investigation into the means, motive, and execution of the crime in question—at its core, Adolescence is about a whole lot more than that.TV about the internet’s effects on kids can be hard to pull off, and this show runs the risk of looking like “issue television,” something that’s only for people who already care about what children  are doing online. But these four episodes have more to say than almost any recent work of television about the making of the modern self—the way our personalities and offline histories tangle up with online life, making it harder and harder to understand people’s motivations and actions. Because it has unflinching regard for the impossibility of this conundrum, Adolescence inflicts a mood of subtle devastation that’s very difficult to shake, even long after you’ve finished watching the series.Episode 1 starts in a way that consumers of crime fiction would find familiar. The camera follows the officers who go into the Miller family home and arrest Jamie the morning after the crime. They drive him to the station, book him, get him a solicitor, take his DNA, and inform him of the evidence against him. His family—his weathered plumber father, Eddie, played by the excellent, gruff Graham; stay-at-home mum, Manda (Christine Tremarco); and older sister, Lisa (Amélie Pease)—seems straightforwardly supportive, nothing but stunned by the accusations. Jamie, played with terrifying efficacy by the total newcomer Owen Cooper, cries in the van on the way to the station, asking over and over for his dad as the camera focuses on the back of his head, where dark brown hair curls on his tender young neck. You feel like there must be some mistake—but Detective Inspector Bascombe (Ashley Walters), who put together the case, and who’s the point-of-view character for much of the episode, seems quite competent, and he’s sure he has the right kid. You see at the end of the episode that he has good reason.DI Bascombe, with his partner Detective Sergeant Frank (Faye Marsay), are our guides in the second episode, set a few days later and located entirely in Jamie’s school, where they go to ask kids questions about the relationship between the victim and the accused. The school is a crowded, raucous place, full of agitation produced by the recent news of the death of a schoolmate. The halls are overstuffed with fighting, yelling kids in uniform and teachers who do nothing but press play on videos and scream at students for using their phones. Because DI Bascombe also has a kid in this school—a bullied kid, who often tries to fake sickness to get out of attending—and it’s the detective’s broad shoulders that the camera is following down the dingy halls, you really sop up the intensifying unease. (Where, you see him wondering, am I sending my kid?) No teacher, and neither of the cops, can connect with any student in this school. It’s a building seething with failure.The problem at the school could be shorthandedly identified as being “about the internet”: The teachers don’t understand the kids’ online lives; the kids scorn the teachers as being totally out of it. When the concept of the manosphere comes up between the cops, after DI Bascombe’s son helps him interpret some emojis that the victim used in a comment on one of Jamie’s Instagram posts, DS Frank says, “Sure, I’ve heard of that … Andrew Tate?”—the exact kind of reaction a concerned older person who looks in on this world from the outside might have. But the kids have gotten things so tangled up, deploying these concepts to hurt one another with utmost cruelty, that the adults have no hope of parsing it.The third episode—the series standout, and one you’re going to want to set aside time to watch without any distraction, from start to finish—confines itself mostly to one room in a detention facility, where a young psychologist (Erin Doherty) interviews Jamie so she can write a pretrial report. Cooper, in a display of acting sophisticated for someone so young, ratchets between sweet youthful cheer, anger, confusion, and back to anger. As Jamie describes what happened between him and the victim online, he drops in lines that sounds like @-replies on a toxic Twitter thread—describing a leaked nude of the victim’s chest shared with every boy in the class, he cruelly calls her “a bit flat—not my type,” before going on to explain that he tried to ask her out, given that she had been socially reduced by the experience and he thought she might feel vulnerable enough to say yes. “I thought you said she wasn’t your type?” the psychologist, keeping a perfect poker face, gently asks.The hardest stretch of this conversation comes when Jamie tries to get the psychologist to say whether or not she thinks he’s handsome, attempting to crack into her professional facade. Is he doing this honestly, to connect with her, to understand her as a person? Or is this more manosphere stuff—is he talking this way because he picked up the idea that men and women can be assigned values based on their attractiveness, and those values will determine all of their future interactions? The havoc this eugenic idea has wreaked in his life, we can see, is infinite. But Adolescence doesn’t let you off the hook. During a break from the conversation, the camera follows the psychologist into the booth of a security guard, where she politely answers his overeager, borderline flirtatious questions while looking at footage of Jamie. By showing us the mismatch between this beautiful young professional and the homelier, pockmarked security guard, who tells her he hates his job, Adolescence asks: Is Jamie right, though? Is the world really just cruel?In the final episode, the series returns to the Miller family, who we haven’t seen on screen since the first installment. On the father’s 50th birthday, the family, now reduced to three, makes plans for a small celebration. But the father’s van has been vandalized by local kids, and they go to a hardware store to buy solvent to remove the paint. On the way there, with the camera positioned at the top of the windshield capturing the trio sitting across the front of the van, they try for normalcy, with the parents telling a tag-team story about how they first started dating when they were about Jamie’s age. Even that memory is bittersweet, as we silently realize that the ordinary humiliations of the parents’ youth—Eddie slipping and falling in front of everyone at a school dance—resulted only in good memories, not simmering resentments. The question hangs in the air: Why did the parents pass through this portal, while Jamie got stuck?The fragile good mood gets ripped apart when the family arrives at the store and encounters a worker who confides in the father that he recognizes him. “I’m on your son’s side … I’ve seen the pictures of her, so you’ve got my support … You should crowdfund for a lawyer, there’s a lot of us,” the guy confides, as the two stand in a quiet aisle. Eddie slowly descends into barely concealed fury and panic, a mood Stephen Graham is an expert at conveying. Here, too, the questions pile up: Was it Eddie’s latent anger that, in turn, made Jamie so angry? Was it Eddie, who tried to make his art-loving son over into an athlete, who “did this”? Was it Manda, who let Jamie disappear into his bedroom after school and stay up late, doing who-knows-what on the computer that still looms in the corner of his bedroom, where we finish the series with Eddie on the twin bed, weeping for his absent son?The great strength of Adolescence is that there is no one answer. Fear porn about kids’ online socialization is not the entirety of this show—Adolescence is far from just some TV adaptation of The Anxious Generation, though parents may certainly emerge from a watch newly determined to strip their children of all access to the internet. Adolescence is about the fracturing of society, and the way that kids transitioning between childhood and adulthood see it for what it is—and make up their own stories to explain it, for better or for worse.Slate is published by The Slate
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Source: https://slate.com/culture/2025/03/adolescence-netflix-series-incel-ending-jamie-stephen-graham.html