Is Netflix’s Adolescence flawless?

According to one gushing review it is the “most brilliant TV drama in years.” And that is at the mild end. Others have called it “flawless,” “complete perfection,” while it has achieved a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the TV and film review website. If you haven’t watched Netflix’s Adolescence yet, you are almost certainly being implored to do so by friends, relatives, or – oh, the irony of it, as will become clear – by online peer pressure.

The four part mini-series, which tells the story of a 13-year-old schoolboy, Jamie Miller, who kills a classmate, certainly deserves many of its accolades. Owen Cooper, a 15-year-old who plays the lead part puts in a tremendous performance – all the more remarkable when you read that each episode was filmed in a single take. Stephen Graham, who co-wrote the show with Jack Thorne, is thoroughly convincing as the miscreant’s father. Overall, the series is directed with great intensity. In an ago when TV schedules scream with more murders than the Lower Bronx in the 1980s, many of them in the artificial and stylized format of a Whodunnit, Adolescence brings a refreshing realism. You really do see it as if you were a fly on a the wall in the midst of a family trauma.

But flawless? When you read those kinds of words you know that reviewers have lost a sense of objectivity. Adolescence is very far from perfect. For one thing there is the gaping gap of the victim’s family. What are they thinking, how are they reacting to this cataclysm? We never find out because we never see them. We do see her best friend, briefly, but she seems mysteriously untraumatized – unless you interpret her impossibly gobby behavior towards her teachers, police officers, everyone, as a symptom of shock.

Adolescence isn’t just a TV drama; it verges on being a morality play. It strikes so hard at the national moral panic over children, social media and the internet that I fear reviewers are failing to ask the questions which need to be asked about the very straightforward plot – namely, does an otherwise seemingly well-adjusted 13-year-old boy really knife to death a female classmate in cold blood because he has been offended by an emoji suggesting he will never find a girlfriend?         

Stephen Graham says he was inspired to write the series after a spate of news stories involving teenage boys who had murdered teenage girls. One of these cases would appear to be that of Hassan Sentamu, a 17-year-old who murdered a friend of his ex-girlfriend in Croydon in 2023, for which he was sentenced to life in jail earlier this month. But then he had a long history of violent and threatening behavior, sparked, it has been suggested, by abusive behavior towards him while he was growing up in Uganda. At the age of 12, by then living in Britain, he drew a knife in his classroom and threatened to kill himself. By the time of his crime his behavioral issues, and autism, had led him to be educated in a special school. His crime does not seem to have a lot do with social media or the internet; rather the trigger for his act appears to have been a group of girls making fun of him and spraying him with water the day beforehand.

Or there was the case of Logan MacPhail, a 16-year-old of low IQ who killed his ex-girlfriend in Northumberland, for which he was jailed for life last October. Again, there does not seem to have been much an element involving social media; he had, though, fantasized about becoming a sniper while attending Army cadets. The murder was a grubby tale of jealousy and revenge which could have happened in any age.

Children do, of course, sometimes kill classmates without any obvious reason – in the US it seems to happen every other week. Moreover, it has been going on since well before the internet and smartphones. In spite of an entire episode of Adolescence being dedicated to an interview between Jamie as one of the two psychologists sent to assess him, we never really do get to the bottom of the deep traumas which turn him into a killer – all that we learn is that, for no great reason, he has severe anger management issues and a problem with girls. The series is constructed very determinedly in a way to make middle class parents feel guilty about giving their children smartphones and allowing them to chat online in the privacy of their bedrooms, where they are exposed to all kinds of incel conspiracy theories. It was Andrew Tate wot did it, in other words – along with those nasty US tech firms. Indeed, Jack Thorne has this week called for smartphones to be banned for the under-16s.

Adolescence is still a good series, but were I reviewing it for Rotten Tomatoes I am afraid I would be dropping one of those five stars. For me it becomes just a little too preachy.