Netflix’s gripping new crime drama explores male violence and incel culture in the context of an English school.
When a 13-year-old boy, Jamie, is accused of stabbing his female classmate to death, police, parents, and educators search for answers in the wake of this shocking tragedy. Over the course of four episodes, each filmed in one continuous shot, Adolescence raises critical questions about incel culture, male violence, and the pressures of social media.
According to the United Nations, an estimated 736 million women—almost one in three—have been subjected to violence, physical and/or sexual, or both, at least once in their lifetime. With that information in mind, Adolescence’s creators, Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, hope the show can be implemented as an educational tool.
“I want it to be shown in schools, I want it to be shown in Parliament. It’s crucial because this is only going to get worse,” Thorne told the BBC. “It’s something that people need to be talking about, hopefully, that’s what drama can do.”
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What happens in Adolescence?
The series opens with police breaking down the door to Jamie Miller’s home, a 13-year-old boy is arrested for the stabbing death of his classmate, Katie. Jamie insists he’s “done nothing wrong, but as the episode concludes, security footage from the school shows that he absolutely did.
As investigators look into the school and the events leading up to the horrific incident, they uncover social media exchanges between Jamie and Katie; he tried to ask her out after a photo of her topless was sent to classmates via Snapchat, appearing to do so to help her feel better. “I just thought that she might be weak,” Jamie says. “I thought when she was that weak, she might like me.”
But she rejects him and proceeds to send him messages on Instagram with emojis accusing him of being an “incel” or involuntary celibate, referring to an online subculture of men who are angry at women for not having sex with them. Jamie admits to seeing value in Andrew Tate’s “80-20 thing,” as he calls it, the idea that “80 percent of women are attracted to 20 percent of men.” Jamie’s violence is obviously detestable, but Katie isn’t completely innocent, as her online bullying of him feels entirely uncalled for, as well.
“This is a show about a kid who does the wrong thing and causes great harm. To understand him, we have to understand the pressures upon him,” Graham continued to the BBC.
“Jamie has been polluted by ideas that he’s heard online, that make sense to him, that have a logic that’s attractive to him, that answer the questions as to his loneliness and isolation and lead him to make some very bad choices. We have to understand the things he’s been consuming and that means especially looking at the Internet, the ‘manosphere’, and incel culture.”
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Is Adolescence a true story?
While Jamie’s story told in Adolescence isn’t based on a single incident, it does draw influence from a handful of real-life reports of young boys involved in knife crimes. In March 2023, there were almost 18,500 cautions and convictions made for possession of a knife, and 17.3 percent of those offenders were between the ages of 10 and 17, per the House of Commons library.
“It shocked me. I was thinking, ‘What’s going on? What’s happening in society where a boy stabs a girl to death? What’s the inciting incident here?’ And then it happened again, and it happened again, and it happened again. I really just wanted to shine a light on it, and ask, ‘Why is this happening today? What’s going on? How have we come to this?’” Graham told Netflix’s Tudum.
“We could have made a drama about gangs and knife crime, or about a kid whose mother is an alcoholic or whose father is a violent abuser,” he continued. “Instead, we wanted you to look at this family and think, ‘My God. This could be happening to us,’ and what’s happening here is an ordinary family’s worst nightmare.’”
Indeed, a simple Google of “boy stabs girl” yields a horrifying number of news results, with many of them involving romantic rejection. In Hexham, England, in 2024, 15-year-old Holly Newton was stabbed repeatedly by a then-16-year-old boy who she alleged was “stalking” her, the BBC reported. In 2023, The Independent reported that a 17-year-old girl was stabbed to death in south London after she “refused flowers from a boy” as she and her friends made their way to school.
This is an issue that’s certainly not isolated to the UK. In Oklahoma City in 2018, a 14-year-old boy stabbed his 14-year-old female classmate during a school assembly at Luther High School. The Oklahoman later reported that the boy and victim were friends, but he wanted a romantic relationship. “She said … she liked him as a friend, not anything more and that they remained friends,” Luther police chief David Randall said.
Jonathan Law High School in Connecticut was the site of a similar tragedy in 2014 when 16-year-old Maren Sanchez was stabbed to death by her classmate after she turned down his invitation to junior prom, the New York Times reported.
The timing of Adolescence is certainly poignant, coinciding with the rise of the “manosphere” and the radicalization of young men and boys by figures like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson. “[This] could happen to anyone and that’s not saying anyone is capable of being Jamie,” Thorne told the BBC. “It’s about parents that didn’t see him, a school system that let him down, and the ideas that he consumed.”
