Netflix's 'Adolescence' Has Been Hailed "Perfect" by Critics - but They Made One Big Mistake

What we're missing in the exploration of rising trends in misogynistic violence among teenage boys

Netflix

Update (3/26/25): I have changed the settings on this story so that only paid subscribers can comment, due to the influx of racist and misogynistic messages.

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In just six days, it took the internet by storm. Netflix’s miniseries, Adolescence, premiered on March 13th, and in less than a week, I’d seen so many rave reviews that I decided to watch it.

They weren’t wrong - it’s about as close to perfect as a series can get. The artistry that went behind filming each episode in one, long, unbroken shot was incredible on its own. I cannot even imagine the level of choreography that must have gone into that or the amount of rehearsing they had to do to make that possible. That alone is a standout achievement of the series.

But let’s not forget the most important aspect of the show - its subject matter.

This series (spoiler alerts ahead!), which takes place in northern England, opens with police raiding a suburban home in pursuit of a murder suspect…a suspect who turns out to be a skinny, shy 13-year-old boy.

It’s hard to reconcile the severity and force of the search and arrest with this meek little boy, and it makes perfect sense that his parents assume a mistake must have been made, particularly when more details of the crime are revealed. Stabbing a female classmate to death with a kitchen knife? That kid?

But it doesn’t take long for the police to pull out CCTV footage that chillingly reveals that yes, 13-year-old Jamie Miller absolutely did stab a female classmate to death, even though he continues to deny it after watching the footage that proves his guilt.

What happened? The usual assumptions don’t seem to fit. From the beginning of the series, it seems clear that Jamie comes from a relatively loving family, and appears to have a devoted father. How could such a young boy with caring parents commit such a heinous act?

It eventually comes out that Jamie has been radicalized by misogynistic content on the internet.

It’s a compelling story, and one that we need to talk about now more than ever.

But despite all the praise for this show being “complete perfection,” there’s one important flaw that needs to be addressed.

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I’m sorry to share that this series is based on a real life event. Actually, it’s based on real life events. Yes, that’s right. Plural.

The show’s co-creator, Stephen Graham, who also brilliantly portrays Jamie’s father in the series, said he was shaken by a recent news story about 17-year-old Hassan Sentamu who stabbed a girl to death in London.

And then it happened again - only this time, a mass stabbing that feels like a scene out of a horror film. Seventeen-year-old Axel Rudakubana crashed a summer dance workshop for girls between the ages of six and eleven and stabbed eight of the attendees, along with the teacher and an adult male who were trying to protect the girls. Three of those girls did not survive the attack.

Graham says he found himself determined to understand it all. He started wondering, “What’s going on? What’s happening in society where a boy stabs a girl to death? What’s the inciting incident here?”

These are questions we all should be asking, considering the fact that male-on-female violence has increased by 37% in just five years in the U.K., while the rate of femicide in the U.S. is 2.2 per 100,000 women, “one of the highest reported figures among high-income countries,” and representing a 24% increase from 2014 to 2020.

Further, male-on-female violence is statistically much more violent than when men kill other men. The latter typically involves firearms, whereas the former is most frequently accomplished by strangulation, vicious beatings, or stabbings. (Although in the past three years in the U.K., most teenage victims of homicide were killed by stabbing, representing a sharp increase in knife homicides among teenagers, regardless of gender.)

This represents the endpoint of a longer pattern of abuse that is almost always present when femicide occurs. Most men who commit femicide have abused women multiple times before they escalate to murder.

You can see a lot of this play out in the cases Graham mentioned that inspired him to create this series. The perpetrators had a history of violence, some of them specifically targeting young women. They had already been caught wielding knives and making threats of violence to others, and their explosive anger issues had been reported to various authorities, but there were no follow-ups.

It was inevitable that young girls were going to lose their lives in the absence of any intervention.

And what was the motive for these murders? The case involving Sentamu seems to have been inspired by misogyny (you can read the details here). However, it’s difficult to make sense of the other case, both due to its scope, brutality, as well as other factors, including the issue that Rudakubana had been victimized as a child by merciless racially-motivated bullying at school.

This is exactly the information Graham seems to be seeking when he asked the same thing about these crimes: “What’s the inciting incident here?”

He clearly wants to understand this alarming increase in violence better, and Adolescence illustrates that curiosity perfectly, giving us what one could argue is four hours worth of conversations trying to find out why such a young boy would commit such an unspeakable act of violence against a defenseless classmate.

And this is exactly where I think Adolescence made its one glaring mistake.

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The second episode in this series has the audience following the authorities in charge of the investigation through the school that Jamie and his victim had attended. We see several acts of bullying (particularly between male students), as well as a general sense of apathy in response to the brutal murder of a fellow student.

Eventually, we find out from Detective Inspector Bascombe’s son, Adam, who also attends school there, that Katie wasn’t a friend to Jamie as the authorities had previously believed. Bascombe’s son points out the emojis Katie had left in the comment sections of Jamie’s Instagram posts - messages the police had interpreted as friendly conversation.

Adam alerts his father that the emojis are related to manosphere content, claiming Katie had been publicly calling Jamie out as an incel.

Here, we encounter a host of problems, not just as an audience, but as a society reckoning with the rise of male-on-female violence.

For one thing, we don’t get the full story about how these two ended up in this conflict. Jamie, as we come to find out, is a deeply unreliable narrator, and Katie is no longer alive to give us her side of the story.

We get a better picture, however, when in Episode 3, Jamie admits that his friend had asked Katie to send him a topless photo of herself - which she did - then he passed the photo around to all his friends, including Jamie. Distributing or sharing nude photos or videos of others without their consent has been illegal in the U.K. for the past ten years, just to put the gravity of that act into context.

But to make it worse, all the boys bullied her for being flat (remember, this is an act of mass sexual harassment against a 13-year-old girl), which then inspired Jamie to ask her out even though he didn’t like her. He said he believed she would be “weak” after enduring so much bullying (the correct term is sexual harassment), making it impossible for her to reject him.

Yet she does - which presumably precipitated her Instagram assertions that he’s an incel.

Though I have a lot of questions about this part of the story, the series seems to want us to believe that Katie was absolutely bullying Jamie, using manosphere-coded emojis. In other words, she was publicly attacking his masculinity.

I believe this part of the storyline was included with good intentions, to show us how widespread this dangerous ideology is, and to emphasize the omnipresent pressure even very young boys are under to meet impossible standards of masculinity.

But statistics show us very clearly that Katie wouldn’t have had to bully Jamie for him to have killed her. Just her rejection of Jamie’s advances would have been enough.

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As much as I love this series and am so happy to see a story like this inspire more conversation about the radicalization of young men in the western world, I fear the revelation that Katie was bullying Jamie does a major disservice to this topic.

Male-on-female violence often happens for no reason other than the misogynistic dehumanization of women. There’s nothing more to it than that. And that’s the reason why this growing trend of violence is so dangerous.

Men aren’t being goaded into violence by women’s behavior - they are being goaded to violence by other men.

We all need to be curious, like co-creator Graham, about why this is happening, or as he put it, What’s the inciting incident? But when we’re considering that, we have to think bigger than a single circumstance. Not incident, but incidents. Better yet, let’s rephrase the question entirely: What factors inspire a teenage boy to violently attack and kill a young girl with a knife?

When this series suggests that Jamie snapped because he’d been bullied by Katie, the deeper issues become obscured. For one thing, this revelation de-emphasizes the bullying and toxic behaviors that play out between Jamie and his friends and classmates, including the illegal solititation and distribution of the naked photo of Katie - and the fact that the reason he would be humiliated by being called an incel is not because Katie found him undesirable, but because of how he and his male classmates would interpret that rejection as a failure of Jamie’s masculinity.

Further, Katie’s Instagram bullying will play out as a dog whistle to anyone (of any gender) watching who hasn’t yet examined their own misogyny. I can already hear the comments now: “Of course he snapped - she humiliated him,” or “He was only responding to violence with violence.”

We shouldn’t have to say this, but there is no justification for murdering a woman. And the fact that we do have to say that is just more evidence of how much we need to have this conversation in the first place.

This series should have written it as it would have happened in real life. Katie should have been killed not because she called Jamie an incel, but because she said no to him.

Or for no reason, at all.

Because when it comes to male-on-female violence and the growing influence of radical online misogyny, a woman’s mere existence is all it takes for some men to snap.

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I admire Graham for what he accomplished with this series. It’s realistic, sincere, and top-notch. The nuanced layers of Jamie’s father and the way he portrays that as an actor are incredible. I cannot praise him enough for his explorations of masculinity in today’s society, as well as within heterosexual nuclear families.

It’s amazing, and something I think everyone should watch.

But next time, let’s take it another layer deeper. Let’s dare to remember the scariest part of all of this - that a woman just existing is enough to inspire homicidal violence in radicalized men. And that we can’t tell who has been radicalized until it’s too late…

We’re not going to solve this problem if we aren’t brave enough to face how very random the violence is and how deep the hate runs. It’s so much easier to try to package it in seemingly reasonable motives.

That, however, isn’t how the violence inspired by dominance hierarchies works. Whether we’re talking about gender or race or sexuality, it doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. The violence is senseless and arises without provocation.

Jamie was always going to kill Katie, no matter what she did or did not do. So is every young man who is on the road to this same kind of radicalization.

Telling that truth is the only way we’re going to get to the bottom of this.

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