Rarely does a television series stop you in your tracks, through the heartbreaking power of its content and the creative process employed in its making. Such is the Netflix series from the UK titled Adolescence.
The series has rocketed to success around the world, stimulated discussion among UK Parliamentarians, and prompted conversations globally about the disintegration of social relationships among young people.
I walk in a public garden and occasionally pass a fellow 88-year-old. We greet one another, but have never chatted. This week she stopped and asked me if I had seen Adolescence. I had, and asked her what she thought it was about. She replied, “I think it is about how parents cannot protect their children from their peer groups anymore. It’s difficult to be a parent today.”
Adolescence is about that, and much more. The series does not point the finger of blame at any one cause, but attributes them all — the community, the school system, social media, parents and ultimately government policy — for letting children down while parents cannot grasp what is going on in a society which is disintegrating.
Adolescence is a story, fiction. But people are responding as if it were a documentary — that is what Keir Starmer called it — because of the style and techniques employed by the producers.
It tells the story of a 13-year-old boy, Jamie, who is arrested in his home by the police for the suspected violent stabbing and murder of a young girl at his school. Episode 1 reveals the arrest, interrogation and revelation of the violent murder, and of Jamie’s father’s trauma as he realises what has happened. Episode 2, set in a school, follows the police as they attempt to gather evidence and understand the motive. Episode 3, set seven months later, covers a psychologist’s interview with Jamie trying to get an understanding of his state of mind and his motive. Episode 4 follows the family 13 months later, on Dad’s 50th birthday, as they are trying to put their life back together, and focuses on their agonising soul-searching, wondering where they went wrong, as their son decides to plead guilty.
The power of the series is generated by the approach taken. Every 55-minute episode is a single moving, gliding and soaring camera shot unbroken by editing. It means that you follow the story as it unfolds in real time, immersed completely in the action and never looking away.
Every location must be clearly miked for sound and the performance of the actors must be flawless. Episode 3 required the young boy, who had never acted before, to understand a roughly 40-page script and, without a hitch, express complex emotions of apprehension, fear and anger when trying to anticipate and outwit his interrogator, who is a skilled professional trying to break him down. In Episode 4, Jamie’s mum and dad go through a rollercoaster of intense emotions trying to hold themselves together while they agonise about the child they brought up and where they fell down on the job.
It is a compelling and remarkable achievement, and it seems the creative team, more than anyone, are gobsmacked by the response, something they could not have imagined. To their credit, the huge commercial success is not leading them to do a sequel. The story they wanted to tell is told.
The series provides no answers; it asks us to examine ourselves, the lives we lead, the community we live in, the culture in our schools, the culture of social media and the rise of misogynistic violence toward girls by boys and the bitchy bullying of boys by girls. It asks what is happening to our young people.
Jess Hill’s Quarterly Essay, Losing It. Can we stop violence against women and children? (April 2025), addresses the broader issues of which Adolescence can be seen as an addendum: the losing battle we are facing concerning male violence, as sexual assaults are at a 31-year high and large intervention campaigns are failing to stop the epidemic. She suggests, paradoxically, despite advances in equality of the sexes, in education levels in work and status, those advances may in fact be part of the complex tapestry of causes for the increase in conflict.
Violence by boys against girls, as well as by men against women, is increasing and the promotion of toxic masculinity is a part of the puzzle. Hill quotes the ASIO chief Mike Burgess, who linked an alarming increase in youth radicalisation to the influence of social media, where regular users get sucked into an algorithm recommending more and more violent misogynist propaganda, including posts glorifying incel terrorists. (An incel is a member of an online community of young men who consider themselves unable to attract women sexually, typically associated with views that are hostile towards women and men who are sexually active. It’s a word I had not heard before). A significant number of boys — one in four in one referenced survey — see Andrew Tate as a role model. Meanwhile, young girls feel increasingly alienated from young men. Katie Leonard, the murdered girl in the series, also has a story. Young men and young women can’t find mates. Marriage is on the decline and the number of children born is below replacement level.
Adolescence does not purport to be a blueprint to study domestic violence generally. Some are criticising the series for presenting a boy such as Jamie, who is white and who is not the victim of a violent father or deprived background, as the perpetrator. They are faulting the story because it is not a documentary which misses the point. The value of the series, along with being a cracker of a viewing experience, is in helping provoke discussion about all the issues involved. And we do have a monumental issue here for society.
How did we get here? What is going on in our community and in our schools? Why are young adults being driven apart? What can a parent do to help their kids navigate childhood? Adolescence asks these questions using the power of television, the only medium that can equal the reach of social media, but which rarely takes them on.
And by implication, the series asks how do we engage the tech oligopolies which are facilitating confusion and alienation among the young? The answers are more complex than banning social media for those under 16.
Patricia Edgar is an Ambassador for NARI the National Ageing Research Institute. She is the author of 12 books, and winner of multiple awards for her film and television productions. She is best known as the Founding Director of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation.