There is a moment in the final heartrending scene between husband and wife Eddie and Manda Miller at the end of Netflix’s new four-part series, Adolescence, in which Eddie – played brilliantly by Stephen Graham – sobs: ‘But he was in his room, wasn’t he? We thought he was safe. What harm can he do in there?’
With those few words he captures the tragedy of modern childhood; of a generation whose parents have no comprehension of what they get up to in the privacy of their own smartphones; of children who no longer grow up under the wide-open skies of possibility, but behind closed doors, in the flickering light of a computer screen.
The tragedy of a generation exposed far too early and far too casually to the perversions and pressures of the adult world; of immature minds lost down the rabbit hole of social media, cannon fodder for the big tech bros and their billion-dollar empires, prey to the ideologies of toxic ‘influencers’ such as Andrew Tate and the temptations of OnlyFans.
This particular story is one which has become depressingly familiar in recent years: a child killer who is himself a child.
Eddie and Manda’s son Jamie, 13, is arrested in a dawn raid on suspicion of having stabbed Katie, a schoolmate, to death.
The family are blindsided by the arrival of gun-toting officers at their home, breaking down the front door, rushing into the child’s room, with its wallpaper covered in planets, pulling the baby-faced suspect from his bed so harshly he wets himself. Filmed in one long, intense take, the sense of panic and confusion is relentless. The emotions are real.
I felt my hackles rising during the opening scene, sharing Graham’s character’s outrage as he tries in vain to assert control over the situation.
The coldness of the police officers, the sight of this small boy alone in the back of a police car, a scene of nightmarish intensity where the camera focuses on Graham’s face as he listens to the sounds of his child being strip-searched by two officers: it is all unflinchingly raw.
There is something of a baby-faced Jon Venables about the troubled character Jamie’s dark hair and soft cheeks, writes Sarah Vine
Jamie is played by Owen Cooper in a performance of astonishing depth and range.
He somehow manages to be both child-like and menacing, innocent yet sexually threatening, a confusion of perfectly pitched mixed signals that unsettles and chills. Later, in a scene alongside Erin Doherty, who plays his psychiatrist, he stands over her, seething with misogynistic malice.
There is something of a baby-faced Jon Venables about his dark hair and soft cheeks.
Pretty soon the realisation comes that Jamie is, in fact, the killer. Katie had mocked him online and rejected his advances, and – addled by all sorts of notions acquired in the ‘manosphere’ – he exacted his revenge. There is CCTV footage of him stalking Katie before violently stabbing her to death in a car park.
Confronted with the undeniable evidence in an interrogation room, his child by his side, Eddie’s life collapses before his eyes.
He hugs his son, sobbing. It’s heartbreaking. But also disconcerting: this is, after all, a murderer. Why should we care about him or his dad? It is his victim we should be feeling most sorry for. Her and her grieving parents.
And yet we never see either; the only one mourning her is her best friend at school, who is even portrayed as something of a troublemaker herself. In a post-#MeToo world this strikes me as an incredibly daring approach, and one which may well attract some criticism from victims’ organisations.
Indeed, there is even a whiff of what one might term ‘victim blaming’ in the script, as it transpires she had accused him of being an ‘incel’ (involuntary celibate). She had also sent nudes of herself to another boy, who had circulated them around the school (slut-shaming?), and later is revealed to have been something of a bully.
This could easily be seen as a twisted perspective. But perhaps that’s the point of it: to show just how confusing and twisted this world our children inhabit really is.
Ultimately, that’s why this is such a brilliant piece of drama. It does not shy away from the realities, however unpalatable.
Stephen Graham wrote the crime drama and stars as Eddie Miller, the father of a young boy suspected of stabbing one of his classmates
The writers do not simplify these issues into two-dimensional black and white, good or bad. They allow for the complexities of this adolescent universe to be explored without censorship.
By presenting the story from the perspective of the killer and his family, they show us the all-round tragedy of the situation.
The message here seems to be that Jamie, too, is a victim, of a culture that fills our children’s minds with hatred – and turns them into monsters.
It’s a notion that many will struggle to accept. Society tends to have little sympathy for child killers, or their families, who are often held responsible for their offsprings’ crimes.
But in a world where parents are no longer fully in control of their children’s lives, where social media, fake news and hardcore porn have been allowed to act in loco, do they have any real agency? It is not parents who shape their children’s minds and actions now; it’s the likes of Meta, TikTok and YouTube.
As an actor, Graham has built a reputation as a man who is not afraid to tackle difficult, morally ambiguous subjects head-on, and this is one of his hardest yet, and perhaps the one which will resonate most widely for the simple fact that it will touch a nerve with parents and families everywhere.
For what could possibly be worse than being the parent of a murdered child? Being the parent of a child murderer? How many of us would rather our children were dead than guilty of a terrible crime? It’s that sense of utter hopelessness that really resonates in this story of a family facing the unthinkable. A hopelessness that seeps beyond the confines of their own lives, and into the lives of the community around them, seen in the harshness of friends and neighbours, in the cruelty of the other children, in the inability of the authorities to comprehend or cope with the scale of the problem. But it’s also a hopelessness that touches us all.
The effects of a toxic social media on children and young people is an issue that has been endlessly debated by politicians and pundits – but this drama brings them all so vividly to life, and in such a devastatingly human way. Watching, you just can’t help thinking: ‘There but for the grace of God.’
But it also asks some incredibly pointed questions about boys in particular, and how, either through neglect or ignorance, we are failing to teach them how to navigate an increasingly hostile world where sexual and moral boundaries are ever more blurred and where traditional male traits are often scorned.
What, for example, is your average 13-year-old boy to make of someone like Bonnie Blue, or any one of her many imitators, who travels around colleges offering to entertain ‘barely legal’ males?
How can any young boy be expected to act in a respectful way to women and girls when bottom-feeders like her are feted and rewarded with vast wealth?
The show captures the tragedy of modern childhood; of a generation whose parents have no comprehension of what they get up to in the privacy of their smartphones, writes Sarah Vine
Just recently, she posted on social media about her new custom-made Ferrari, numberplate ‘P4ORN’. Forget toxic masculinity: that’s toxic femininity at its absolute worst. And it would not be possible without the internet.
I think most parents don’t truly understand this new social media landscape. Like Eddie and Manda, it would never occur to them that their child might be involved in anything like that. It’s like a foreign language to them.
Again, this is skilfully illustrated when the officer in charge of investigating, DI Bascombe (Ashley Walters), is taken aside by his son, also a pupil at the school, and enlightened as to the true meaning of seemingly innocent emojis posted by the victim on Jamie’s Instagram account.
A kidney bean is the symbol for an incel; an exploding red pill is a reference to the film The Matrix, where taking a red pill reveals the horrifying truth about the real world, in which humans exist only to feed the machines that keep them trapped in a simulation.
A whole new vernacular opens up, and the extent of this hidden world of online bullying comes to light. It’s a world most adults don’t even know exists, let alone understand, a digital Lord Of The Flies where the range and scope of cruelty knows no bounds.
By contrast, the real world of teachers and parents seems weak and ineffectual. Jamie’s school is a place of utter chaos, run by feral children in defiance of teachers who have neither the authority nor the appetite (with a few exceptions) to impose order. The problem is they simply don’t know or understand what they are up against.
The same is true of most of our politicians and policy-makers. For far too long society has buried its head in the sand about the realities of online porn, uncensored social media and toxic online propagandists masquerading as ‘influencers’ (there are several mentions of porn in Adolescence, and all dismiss it as completely normal, as when Jamie confesses to his psychiatrist about being attracted to Katie – ‘Everyone sees porn’).
Everyone’s been far too interested in taking advantage of this new media landscape for their own gain, with zero regard for the social or cultural repercussions. The result: a dystopian reality from which there is no coming back.
One of the striking things about this show is that it’s made by Netflix, and not the BBC.
We have in this country a lavishly taxpayer-funded public service broadcaster that, in its heyday, produced some superb social realist drama (which is what Adolescence is): the Play for Today series, Cathy Come Home and countless more.
Nowadays it spends most of its time and resources covering up its own internal dramas, or commissioning the relatives of known terrorists to make one-sided propaganda documentaries, all the while patting itself on the back for its commitment to diversity.
The fact that a streamer like Netflix would take on such a relentlessly bleak subject in such an unflinching way not only puts the BBC to shame – and, arguably, renders the case for the licence fee redundant – it also shows that the power of drama does not necessarily need to be dimmed by commercial imperatives.
Although beautifully written and directed, and with an all-star cast, Adolescence is by no means an easy watch. But it is one that every parent should see.
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