When Adolescence launched on Netflix a week ago, its timing felt uncanny. This hard-hitting series about the malign influence of the online “manosphere” arrived just as news broke about a story that had been making UK headlines for nine months: that of notorious crossbow killer Kyle Clifford, who raped and murdered 25-year-old Louise Hunt last year after she ended their relationship. The latest update showed that Clifford had searched the web for Andrew Tate’s podcast mere hours before killing Hunt, her sister Hannah and mother Carol at their family home in Hertfordshire.
The show’s star and co-creator Stephen Graham was originally horrified by a spate of violent incidents across Britain in which teenage boys committed deadly knife crimes against girls. The actor said these shocking stories “hurt my heart” and asked of him: “What’s going on in our society where this kind of thing is becoming a regular occurrence?” He teamed up with screenwriter Jack Thorne – a regular collaborator who has worked with Graham on such acclaimed British dramas as This Is England, The Virtues and Help – to create a potent drama interrogating this distressing trend. Thorne says they wanted to “look into the eye of male rage”.
The series tackles the devastating and sometimes fatal consequences of toxic masculinity. The manosphere and Andrew Tate are name-checked in the script but the central character, says Thorne, has been “indoctrinated by voices a lot more dangerous than Tate’s”.
Jamie has fallen under the spell of misogynistic influencers and suffered cyber-bullying for being an “incel”. His parents admit that he would shut himself in his bedroom and be on his computer long into the night. They assumed he was safe but he was secretly being radicalised. His story highlights the corrosive impact of social media on impressionable minds and has resonated profoundly with audiences. Parents of teenagers have been watching rapt, heartbroken and horrified in equal measure – with the show clocking up an astonishing 24.3m views in its first four days of release, four times more than the number two show. It tops the Netflix ratings in 71 countries, ranging from Chile to Vietnam. One British police force has even said it should be a “wake-up call for parents”.
Labour MP Anneliese Midgley has called for the series to be screened in parliament and in schools, arguing that it could help counter misogyny and violence against women and girls. PM Keir Starmer backed the idea, praising Adolescence and saying that he’d watched it with his own teenage children. Starmer added that violence against girls was “abhorrent … a growing problem … we have to tackle it”.
While I agree that it’s a good show, it really only scratches the surface of the manosphere. I think it gives the impression that a caricature like Andrew Tate is the kind of influencer to look out for when it’s guys like Petersen & Shapiro who are truly insidious. Adolescence is a decent enough introduction to the problem, but it doesn’t even begin to illustrate how ugly a problem it is.