‘Adolescence’ (TV)
Directed by Philip Barantini
There are moments in Adolescence so quiet you barely realise your fists have clenched. So ordinary you almost forget you’re watching the most harrowing television event of the decade. And then it happens: the full weight of the horror — not just the crime, but the construction of it — hits you like a crowbar to the gut.
Let me say this clearly: Adolescence is not just a TV drama. It is a national reckoning.
The Premise
The show opens in the sterile aftermath of unimaginable violence: a 13-year-old boy, Jamie, has murdered his classmate Katie in a brutal, planned attack. The public scrambles for motive. The show already knows the answer.
Jamie is not possessed. Not psychotic. Not a caricature.
He is ordinary.
He is ours.
And that is what makes this show so unbearably powerful.
The Radical Stillness of the Show
Stephen Graham plays Eddie, Jamie’s father — a man so riddled with guilt and disbelief that every muscle in his face seems to be holding back a scream. And to his credit, Graham does not beg for empathy. He radiates a kind of broken masculinity rarely allowed to exist without redemption.
The show’s format — four episodes, each in a single take — creates a claustrophobia that no amount of pacing can relieve. There are no cutaways. No exits. No sanitised flashbacks to explain or justify. Just grief, disbelief, and the unbearable slowness of confronting what the internet has done to our children while we were busy scrolling ourselves.
What Adolescence Understands That Most Prestige TV Doesn’t
This show does not centre Jamie's violence. It centres the world that shaped it:
– The forums that radicalised him
– The school that saw the signs and blinked
– The well-meaning, overwhelmed father who thought “he’s just quiet”
– The screens, the algorithms, the ambient misogyny so commonplace it barely registered
This is incel indoctrination, rendered not as a headline but as a daily habit.
Adolescence dares to say what politicians and talking heads refuse:
This isn’t fringe anymore. This is infrastructure.
A Word on Katie
Katie is not a prop.
She is given space. Breath. Family. Friends.
Her absence is not just a device — it is felt, and fought over, and spoken around, exactly as real loss is.
She is not a lesson.
She is a person.
And the show’s refusal to aestheticise her death — or to use it to humanise the boy who killed her — is one of its greatest strengths.
What We’re Really Watching
What Adolescence shows us — ruthlessly, relentlessly — is that evil doesn’t always wear a mask.
Sometimes it wears a school uniform.
Sometimes it sits at the dinner table.
Sometimes it’s a search bar.
A forum.
A “funny video” shared between boys.
And no — that’s not comfortable.
But comfort is what got us here.
Final Thought:
This is not a series you enjoy. It is a series you survive.
And when it’s over, if you’re not shaken — you weren’t paying attention.
Adolescence is the bravest thing I’ve seen put to screen in years. It’s art as warning, as elegy, as an indictment of our digital decay.
And if you still think this is “just a one-off” — check your son's browser history.
