By Andrew Glazzard
The acclaimed Netflix drama Adolescence, released on Netflix in March 2025, has generated exceptional volumes of commentary about what it says about being a youth in the technologically enriched Britain of the 2020s. Kate Cantrell and Susan Hopkins, in an article written for The Conversation and republished on the VoxPol blog, summarise much of that commentary when they describe Adolescence as an “unflinching portrayal of a radicalised misogynist-turned murderer”. But does this work of fiction, designed to entertain, have anything to tell us about the real phenomenon of online extremism?
Let’s take Adolescence as if it were a real case. Jamie Miller is arrested at age 13 for the murder of his classmate Katie Leonard. CCTV evidence clearly places Jamie as the assailant, while his social media history, including misogynistic comments on Instagram, supplies a potential motive: the police discover that Katie had responded to these Instagram posts with emojis suggesting that Jamie was an Incel. Jamie’s parents take themselves to task for not seeing the signs of Jamie’s radicalisation, including his habit of staying up late on his computer alone in his bedroom, and one of the police detectives wonders whether Jamie has fallen victim to “that Andrew Tate shite”. Jamie’s immersion in toxic masculinity appears to be confirmed when he reveals to a psychologist appointed by the court that he has taken the “red pill” (a reference to the film The Matrix to mean the process of becoming aware of the true nature of reality) which has revealed truths about women, such as the “80-20” rule (i.e. that 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men). Incels, misogynistic influencers, a secret internet language of symbols and pop-culture references – all this supports the view that Jamie is emblematic of the white male youths radicalised in the ‘manosphere’.
This, though, is a highly selective summary of the case. One of the strengths of Adolescence is that each of its four episodes tells a different stage of the story while also, crucially, shifting the point of view. In the first episode, the camera follows Jamie; the lead detective is the witness in the second; the third episode is told from the perspective of the psychologist; the fourth follows Eddie, Jamie’s father. These multiple perspectives enable the writers and director and actors to enact how our understanding of events and people is always a partial one. Indeed, ignorance of the people closest to us is a theme of Adolescence: the lead detective has to have his own partly estranged son explain to him how teenagers speak and behave; Jamie’s parents admit they have no idea about what went on behind the closed door of Jamie’s bedroom; the relationships between the various teenagers we meet in the second episode remain mysterious. This should caution us about being too certain about the show’s social implications. We can, moreover, piece together other pieces of evidence, internal and external, to present a different view of the case.
The internal evidence first. Jamie is experiencing a difficult puberty, attracted to girls – including, clearly, Katie – but, as he confides to the psychologist, he’s worried that he’s unattractive. He has an apparently normal and loving family, but his father Eddie reveals that he was beaten by his own father and therefore vowed to do better himself. Has Eddie, to paraphrase Philip Larkin, inadvertently filled his son with a different set of faults to the ones he had? The performances suggest that this father-son relationship is not a straightforward one, such as when Jamie reveals in the last episode that he will plead guilty, and Eddie withdraws into aggrieved silence. And Jamie is hardly a passive victim of manosphere influencers: with the psychologist, he veers from polite acquiescence to unbridled fury; he is manipulative, then submissive, and sometimes openly contemptuous. He may be a child, but his inability to control his emotions is as pertinent to the case as his online browsing history.
The external evidence centres on whether this case is representative. We know from comments by the show’s co-writer and star, Stephen Graham, that it was inspired by some true cases of young male violence against young women. But the statistics for murder in England and Wales reveals the sad but important truth that most female murder victims are killed by a relative or current or former intimate partner. Murder remains a very rare offence (571 cases in 2023-4); nearly three-quarters of victims are male; teenagers (aged 13-19) account for just 11% of victims; most under-16 murder victims are killed by a parent or step-parent; only 8 under-16s were convicted of murder in 2023-24 (5 male, 3 female). Clearly, Jamie Miller is an outlier.
In coming to terms with a shocking act of violence, the major characters in Adolescence seize on technology and malevolent influencers as its cause – just like the politicians and pundits in real life who have been so fascinated by what Adolescence appears to be saying. However, while dramas of this quality can hold a mirror up to society, they can also model its complexities, and show how a slight shift in perspective reveals a different explanation of events. Adolescence doesn’t deny that how we live and think are being changed by technology, that extreme ideas which once would have barely existed can now spread at speed and volume across the globe, or that toxic masculinity is a problem among some young people in the West. But by dramatizing an unthinking rush to blame such forces for a cruel, shocking but highly unusual act, the drama contains a warning. A case like that of Jamie Miller is always likely to be the outcome of a complex combination of dynamic factors in a particular circumstance. If we treat such individual cases as representative, and use them selectively as evidence for our diagnosis of social problems, we will fail to understand the specific and complex nature of extreme events.
Andrew Glazzard is Professor of National Security Policy and Practice in the Protective Security Lab at Coventry University.
IMAGE CREDIT: PEXELS
Want to submit a blog post? Click here.