"Adolescence" Is Good TV But It's Unrealistic

The Netflix hit shouldn't be used to influence policy

Photo: Netflix.

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“At 14, Miguel Angel Cantu has the stare of a bloodied war veteran.

He opens his eyes wide and emits a penetrating glare of hate and anger that can strike fear into grown men. But his eyes also betray the look of someone suffering inside.

At 13, he committed a double murder, gunning down two rival gang members in premeditated attacks. He also sold cocaine and committed armed robberies.”

I wrote those words back in 2005 in a Houston Chronicle story about gangs of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. I had interviewed Miguel in a youth prison, one of the first murderers I met after coming over from the UK and starting on my journalism into the narco wars; since then I’ve interviewed more killers than I can count in various countries, many teenagers, many more grown men.

Miguel and his thousand-yard stare came back to me as I watched the British hit series Adolescence on Netflix over the weekend and the scene of a fictional boy, “Jamie,” who also committed murder at 13 and was in youth prison talking to a psychologist. A lot of people love the series and find this episode emotional and terrifying. Yet, I couldn’t help comparing it to my real experience and thinking Jamie doesn’t come across as a teenage murderer in how he handles himself or what he says.

I don’t think this a major deficit of the show. I find real-life killers carry a distinct aura and the best adult stars struggle to capture it let alone teenage actors. But it’s television and it doesn’t have to be super realistic to be great; in fact most top TV lacks some realism.

Adolescence explores how Jamie stabs a schoolgirl to death after he is influenced by the so-called“manosphere,” which is described on Wikipedia as “a varied collection of websites, blogs, and online forums promoting masculinity, misogyny and opposition to feminism.” The series is not only a hit, topping Netflix charts in many countries, including the United States. It’s a phenomenon. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a critics rating of 99 percent. The Guardian calls it “the closest thing to TV perfection in decades.” It has garnered mass positive coverage and its two writers, Stephen Graham (also an actor and producer on the show) and Jack Thorne, are across news shows talking about stabbing and the manosphere.

It’s certainly gripping TV, with a roaring cast and cinematography, better than most shows in the current era of mass-streaming. It’s effective in connecting with viewers emotionally and plays on their anxieties, especially those of middle-class parents. As writer Thorne said in an interview to explain its success: “It’s tapped into something quite primal, which is people’s fears of what happens when their teenager’s doors are closed.”

But it’s also unrealistic in many ways in how it portrays youth violence, an issue I have delved into deeply, talking to teenage criminals from London to Baltimore to El Salvador. Again, lacking realism is fine for TV shows. But Adolescence is being treated as evidence that could influence policy and its producers are regaled as having special insight into teen stabbings.

An episode of the News Agents podcast is headlined: “Creator Jack Thorne REVEALS The DEEP TRUTH Behind ‘Adolescence’!” Thorne even told the BBC “I want [Adolescence] to be shown in schools, I want it to be shown in Parliament. It’s crucial because this is only going to get worse.” In response, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer endorsed the show, which he said he is watching with his teenage children, and made the Freudian slip of calling it a documentary, before he corrected himself.

There are real political implications. Starmer’s Labour government is enforcing an Online Safety Act. The law aims to reduce harm from the internet but critics claim it could be used for censorship.

Amid the furor then, it’s worth elaborating how the show is not realistic, and if politicians or journalists treat it as such they are displaying ignorance on the important and heartbreaking issue of youth murder.

Gang Bangers Versus Incels

Adolescence is filmed in four one-take episodes, creating an intensity that adds to the illusion you are watching real life. Graham, playing Jamie’s dad, is one of the best actors to come out of the UK (he is so good that Martin Scorsese had previously cast the “scouser” as an Italian American). Ashley Walters commands a strong screen presence as the cop. The teenagers are engaging, especially Jamie’s friend Ryan.

Thorne is a clearly talented writer, immersing himself, and thus the viewer, into the world he weaves. Yet this environment he paints is a fantasy that deliberately steers away from the reality of British teen violence.

There is a genuine issue with youth stabbings in the UK; in the year up to March 2024, blades were used to murder 53 teenagers (aged up to 19) in England and Wales. This is tragic but the UK still has a much lower murder rate than many countries.

Many of the teen murders are by gangs, crews of boys and young men (and some girls), linked to certain council estates and drill rappers, mostly in big cities. Many of these gang affiliates are black, but there are also white immigrant and white British members. Adolescence features no gangs at all and is set in a small northern town. That is fine, it’s a TV series with a different focus, but any serious discussion about stabbings in the UK has to include the gang issue.

Youth criminals in the UK also have a problem with fatherlessness. In 2010 (and it is probably higher now), 76 percent of children sentenced in the UK had an absent dad. Yet tellingly, the writers deliberately rejected this theme. Thorne said: “Stephen had one stipulation right at the beginning of the writing process, which is we are not going to blame the parents. We are not going to do a drama which says someone does this because they have got an alcoholic father who hits them…or any of those sorts of tropes.”

They instead made the teenage murderer live with both parents, and have a father who is non-violent but disappointed Jamie is bad at football. Again, it’s a TV series and they can make up what they want, but this is just their fantasy.

The vast majority of teenage murder victims are male. Yet there have been some brutal stabbings of girls, including one that may have inspired the series. In 2023, Hassan Sentamu, then 17, stabbed a 15-year-old girl to death in Croydon, South London. Sentamu was much older than Jamie in Adolescence, had a history of violence and the victim was a friend of a girl he broke up with.

Sentamu is also black which led to a flurry of accusations on X that the producers “race-swapped” the characters. This in turn caused the writers to claim they are under attack from the kind of bigoted on-line crazies the series is exposing.

I have no problem with Adolescence focusing on a white villain, obviously. Britain is about 80 percent white and there are plenty of young hooligans slashing and “glassing.” Jamie just doesn’t convince me he is one of them.

Meanwhile, the detective in the northern town is played by Walters, a black Londoner and rapper. Such an officer would be rare in the borough (the population of Doncaster for example is 1 percent black) but it’s not impossible. Yet it’s hard to think this wasn’t a conscious choice by the producers as part of their message. I personally like Walters as an actor (and listened to him back when he was in So Solid Crew). And yet again, they can cast who they like as it’s fiction. But we need to treat it as such.

The 80/20 Rule

Rather than being a tough nut then, Jamie is a skinny kid who has a computer in his bedroom and a couple of geeky friends who can’t pull girls. As the detective investigates, and talks to his own son at school, he finds out Jamie and his mates are immersed in the manosphere.

The cop hears about red pills and the 80/20 rule, the idea that 20 percent of men get 80 percent of girls leaving dangerous incels, or involuntary celibates. To add some worthy nuance, Jamie is also the victim of on-line bullying at the hands of the girl he targets, making fun of him as an incel.

There have been murders in the UK, in Plymouth and Bushey, by men who appeared to be influenced by misogynist content, although it’s tough to know how decisive it was; men also murdered women before the internet. Yet there have been no cases of 13 year olds stabbing girls at their British school because of the manosphere. It’s just a compelling fictional idea.

The case of a depressed kid slaying class-mates more resembles the school shootings in the United States, a very different reality linked to firearms. Another real and contrasting incident is that of Axel Rudakubana, who at 17 stabbed and killed young girls in Southport while they were filming Adolescence. Rudakubana had been referred to Prevent, a counter-terrorist program, and downloaded an Al-Qaeda training manual among other violent material.

The discussion about Adolescence focuses on the manosphere, which is perceived more widely as being a problem in the UK, at least in the media. “We’ve got to get out of toxic masculinity,” writer Thorne says. “We also need to be encouraging young men to think of masculinity as a spectrum.” The series paints a more interesting picture of masculinity than such statements might suggest. I found scenes of Graham as a father considering how he failed with his son pretty touching.

Andrew Tate, who is seen as the devil in this debate, is name-checked in the series. The former kick boxer and influencer spews out genuinely horrible misogynistic trash and has been accused of various sex crimes. However, I would caution as to how much real impact he has on behavior, especially on knife-wielding teens.

Art As Activism

Thorne has used his moment of fame to call for banning or limiting cell phones and social media access for teenagers. I broadly agree with him on this. I think kids under 16 should hand in their phones when they go into the classroom and shouldn’t be on platforms like Instagram. Jonathan Haidt makes a convincing argument that these apps increase anxiety, especially among girls.

Yet while I concur with that call, I still think it’s absurd to treat the series as reality. The Guardian seemed to make this mistake in writing this subhead: “When a Netflix drama highlights how online influencers can turn a teenager into a killer, it’s time to rethink social media.” Adolescence is not highlighting a case; it’s inventing a case.

There can be good examples of art used for activism. The stories of Charles Dickens raised awareness about poverty in Victorian London paving the way towards better housing and hospitals. I watched the nuclear war movies Threads and The Day After as a kid and they scared the shit out of me; perhaps they helped our leaders stay away from the nuclear button, or maybe they just terrified us.

There is also a great tradition of realist British movies about youth violence. The great director Alan Clark made classics such as Scum in 1979 (which you can find on YouTube), about a youth prison, including a graphic male rape scene. Clark had deeper insight into violent teens in a revealing unpatronizing way; we weren’t made to watch it at school but it became a cult classic that many kids knew the lines from.

Adolescence portrays a slightly strange version of Britain that I struggle to recognize, of paranoia and alienation, a lack of sense of place. But Britain is in a strange place right now. The series does manage to raise various contemporary themes in an intriguing way and as such it’s a show worth analyzing. But it’s as interesting to analyze the fantasies of the producers, and the way journalists and politicians confuse it with reality, as to peer into the young and confused mind of Jamie.

Copyright Ioan Grillo and CrashOut Media 2025