ADOLESCENCE. (2025) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.


ADOLESCENCE. (2025) CREATED AND WRITTEN BY JACK THORNE AND STEPHEN GRAHAM.

DIRECTED BY PHILIP BARANTINI.

STARRING STEPHEN GRAHAM, OWEN COOPER, CHRISTINE TREMARCO, ERIN DOHERTY, ASHLEY WALTERS AND FAYE MARSAY.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

It’s about six in the morning and a little housing estate somewhere in England is still slumbering peacefully. Suddenly, a convoy of police cars and vans pull up outside one of the houses. A cohort of masked, heavily armed men dressed in black and toting huge guns emerge from one of the vans and start to break down the front door with a battering ram.

The family of four inside are terrified as they are shouted at to stay still or get on the floor. Upstairs, a thirteen-year-old boy who looks much younger is revealed as the reason for this early morning raid. He’s told he’s being arrested on suspicion of murder, though he’s not told of whom and strangely, no-one in his family thinks to ask.

It’s a shocking opening to a well-plotted and well-acted four-part drama series that dropped on Netflix only last week but is already being hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread by both the critics and the public. It’s even being praised in the governments of both Ireland and the UK and cited as something that should be compulsory viewing in schools and homes.

It slowly transpires that the young boy, Jamie Miller, has killed someone with a knife and that that much-bandied-about phrase, ‘toxic masculinity’ is somehow to blame. Social media bullying and being called an ‘incel’ or ‘involuntary celibate’ by a girl from his school are what has triggered Jamie Miller to commit murder.

Social media ‘influencer’ Andrew Tate gets a mention too and that’s how we know that things have gotten deadly serious. If little Jamie Miller and a whole generation of his peers are being influenced and radicalised online by despicable characters like Tate, a self-proclaimed ‘misogynist,’ then it’s something we all should be very, very worried about.

(The two Tate brothers, Andrew and Tristan, have just returned to Romania after a sojourn in America courtesy, I believe, of the Whitehouse. I actually thought they’d never go back, because in Romania they’re facing charges of rape and sex trafficking and I thought, like I’m sure others did, that, once they’d skipped town, as it were, that’d be it.

But no, they’re back in Romania, loudly proclaiming their innocence and saying that they’ll be available to any judge who wants to talk to them, because ‘innocent men have nothing to hide.' Well, all right, okay then. We’ll await developments, so…) 

Jamie’s parents, brilliantly played by Stephen Graham and Christine Tremarco, want to know if they should be blaming themselves. Did they pay Jamie enough attention when he was growing up or not enough? Should they have done something about all the time he spent upstairs on his computer, sometimes till the early hours of the morning? Remember, he was only thirteen at the time the crime was committed.

What was he doing? To whom was he speaking? What were they teaching him…? Whose fault is it, if it’s anyone’s, that this appalling thing has happened? I think that’s what they’re really asking with this show. Whom should be held accountable? Kids, their peers, parents, teachers, social influencers, politicians or all of the above? Whom do we blame…?

The show is very informative on what happens when a minor is arrested. We learn about everything from appropriate adults to free legal aid. In the third episode- each episode unfolds in real time- we see Jamie having a session with a psychologist who is preparing a ‘pre-sentence’ report for the judge to read. Erin Doherty, aka Princess Anne in THE CROWN, is excellent as the young psychologist who grows increasingly alarmed at Jamie’s disturbing outbursts of bad temper.

We clearly see the effects of Jamie’s actions on his family, each of whom are destroyed by what the youngest of them has done. Kids spray-paint the word ‘nonce’ on dad Eddie’s work van, the mum Mandy longs to move away and start over and her husband says no because it would change nothing, and Jamie’s big sister Lisa’s life has been turned upside-down and she’s depressed all the time now. Even little Jamie has probably learned enough tricks in the remand centre to fuel a life of crime for many years to come.

Stephen Graham gives a masterclass of acting here as the father who both blames himself and doesn’t know if he should blame himself. When he’s bawling his eyes out in the last scene in his lost son’s bedroom, kissing the teddy bear on the forehead and tucking him tenderly into bed, my daughter and I were bawling our eyes out. My son, on the other hand, was mooching for food. Let’s not waste the opportunity to talk about just what our kids are doing online. Let’s get that conversation started.

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