WARNING: SPOILERS

The British Netflix miniseries Adolescence, created by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, has taken the world by storm, finally starting a long overdue general conversation on the influence of the manosphere on the aggressive, misogynistic behaviour of teen boys. The four-episode series only maintains a minimum of suspense in the first episode until it is proven, thanks to a CCTV video, that 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) did indeed knife to death his classmate Katie, even though he has told repeatedly his father (played by series creator Stephen Graham) that “I haven’t done anything wrong.” While the first episode narrates Jamie’s arrest and interrogation until that terrifying scene at the police station, the second episode deals with DI Luke Bascombe and DS Misha Frank’s visit to Jamie’s school, to find out who provided him with the knife. The third episode focuses on Jamie’s interview with the child psychologist assigned to offer an independent report to the court. The fourth narrates the sad birthday of Jamie’s father, as the family waits for his trial.
I understand the importance that this miniseries has taken on, and do not hesitate to recommend it. If you have teen sons or daughters, or siblings, please watch it with them. However, I do not think that Adolescence is a masterpiece, as everyone is saying. For me, the decision to shoot each episode in a single take is ultimately a serious mistake. The gimmick distracts from the content and forces the narration to focus too narrowly on certain locations and characters. I was concerned, above all, that the victim is only represented by her best friend, Jade, with other friends, and her family being excluded from the miniseries. Oddly, Graham and Thorne thought it was a good idea to have the actress we only see in a photo (and being stabbed at a distance) to sing the song for the final credits, though this is something I learned only by checking the IMDB trivia.

The script supposes that parents, teachers and the police are totally ignorant of how teens interact online, particularly on Instagram, which is where the main misencounter between Jamie and Katie happens. The two attend the same school, but are not friends. As Jamie narrates to the psychologist, Katie sent a photo showing her breasts to a boy who promptly circulated it to the whole school. Jamie, who had apparently a crush on her, believed that Katie’s humiliation made her vulnerable and more accessible. He approached her to establish some kind of sexual contact, even though he had had none previously. Katie, understanding the manoeuvre, rejected Jamie and mocked him online as an incel. He then talked to his mates Ryan and Tommy, and the former suggested that he scared Katie into compliance, providing Jamie with a knife. When he approached her in an empty parking lot, Katie laughed at him again, and Jamie, as the video shows, stabbed her in a fury seven times. This sequence of events is established by episode three, but it is inferred, rather than shown directly.

My main complaint is that even though Adolescence has started a necessary conversation, it has done so on the basis of a weak plot, which only address superficially the issue of the manosphere’s influence on teen boys and their rampant misogyny. To begin with, Jamie is too young and inexperienced at thirteen to feel so mightily offended by Katie’s negative judgement that he is an incel. ‘Incel’ (or ‘involuntary celibate’) is a word originally invented by a young Canadian woman, named Alana, whose Celibacy Project was intended to be a friendly meeting point for persons seeking company. That was back in 1997. To her horror, ‘incel’ was soon appropriated by single men unable to get dates or constantly failing in their relationships, to comfort each other with the idea that women were to blame for their lack of amatory skills. The corresponding Wikipedia article is a good introduction to the concept and its development, but suffice it to say that incels have empowered a number of ultra-misogynistic influencers, among them the infamous Andrew Tate (not an incel himself). I do not doubt that a 13-year-old is already used to watching pornography, posts photos of semi-naked models on Instagram, or even follows Tate (though this is not explicitly mentioned in the series). I doubt, though, that his masculinity is already so warped that he overreacts in that murderous way to Katie’s online slur. This corresponds to a boy at least one or two years older.

The key conversation in the series happens in episode two, between DI Bascombe and his son, Adam, who is also in Jamie’s class. Bascombe is separated from his wife, and struggles to communicate with his son; he misses, for instance, that Adam’s pleading that his stomach hurts as an excuse to skip school signals that he is being bullied. Seeing how clueless his father is regarding the murder case, Adam explains to him how teens communicate online, the meaning of the insulting emojis Katie used, and why teens are so cruel to each other. This is simply how their world operates. The conversation takes just one scene, and I believe that more time is used in Bascombe’s absurdly long chase of Ryan, when he bolts from school trying to avoid revealing to the Police that the knife Jamie used to murder Katie was his. Ryan has been beaten up in public by Jade, Katie’s best friend, who accuses him of having organized her death. Nothing is made of her violent outburst, except for showing her pain at having lost her only friend (Jade is black, Katie white).

From the point of view of the psychological exploration of Jamie’s personality, it might seem that episode three, with its long conversation between him and child psychologist Briony would be revealing. Instead, it’s a bit of a mess, since Graham and Jones portray Jamie as both a shy boy who has never had sex because he doesn’t know how to approach girls and a nasty little monster who does not hesitate to intimidate Briony. I neglected to mention, by the way, that the Miller family does not appear to be problematic. Since the Jamie arrested in the first episode is so childlike (he even pees his pants) and looks so vulnerable during his interrogation, as spectators we have no evidence of how he behaves with his family and friends. He may have pretended to be a nice little boy at home, but, surely, as it is hinted later, this is not who he was with his mates. Ryan, who ends up arrested as an accessory to murder, does not seem to be responsible for the crime beyond lending the knife, but he is also a piece of work, as seen in his first conversation with Bascombe. Since, anyway, we don’t see the three male friends together, we have no idea of how they interact, what kind of conversations they have and whether they understand the consequences of Katie’s death. The murder, shown from afar and in grainy video, is shocking, but even more crushing is the scene that follows, with Eddie, the father, coming to terms with the realization that Jamie has lied to him. It is important to note that Jamie does not claim he did not kill Katie; he insists instead that he didn’t do anything wrong, to the point that his psychologist must ask openly whether he understands death. He does, but he has problems to grasp that he is a murderer until the end of the series (we don’t see that process, either).

For me, the scariest part of Adolescence was not the murder, or the horrors endured by Jamie’s parents (and his sister), but the representation of the secondary school he attended, during Bascombe and Frank’s visit. I have just read an article in which a 14-year-old English boy, whose mother has decided to homeschool him, claims that the portrait of the school in Adolescence is accurate. I wish it wasn’t. In one scene, Bascombe and Frank are introduced to Adam’s class, and the teacher mentions that Bascombe is his father; Fredo, the boy’s bully, slaps the back of Adam’s head and mocks him, as if teacher and police were not there. You see teachers yelling all the time, struggling to keep order. The obnoxious boy who mocks Ryan when Jade beats him up appears to embody the negative spirit that dominates English school life. The harsh pecking order, the bullying of classmates and teachers, the indifference towards education, have always been present one way or another in schools, but there were limits. Adolescence presents the English state-sponsored secondary school as a space of discord (and even bad smells!) where teens are not educated at all, just kept enclosed against their will for a few hours a day.

I have seen in many articles and posts a call to pity boys like Jamie, and be sympathetic. My impression, watching in particular episode two, is that, first, the victim deserves more pity and empathy and, second, the whole generation is lost. My husband told me that in the last scene, when Eddie visits his son Jamie’s room, he expected him to throw the boy’s computer through the window. Instead Eddie tucks in the boy’s teddy bear in Jamie’s bed, which is cloying and ineffective. Eddie and his wife are content that their daughter (Jamie’s elder sister) is a good girl, and never talk about what needs to be done to help other parents. It seems clear to me that, as many educators have been claiming for ages, children should not be given smartphones nor have access to social media until they are 16, and that their access to the internet should be monitored. A key issue I have not seen discussed is privacy. It’s fine to respect children’s privacy, but only to a certain extent. Smartphones, PCs and laptops need to be checked by parents regularly. Playing police to your children can be awkward and embarrassing, but as Adolescence warns, it’s always better to be on the safe side. Too much freedom may have appalling consequences.

And, please, let’s build a better childhood. The children deserve it.