I realise I’m late to this particular cultural post-mortem, but last week I watched Adolescence, the much-discussed Netflix drama centred on a 13 year-old white boy accused of murdering a female classmate at his school and the emotional fallout that follows.
Contrary to the usual refrain – I watched it so you don’t have to – I think, in fact, you probably should.
Whether by marketing design or pure coincidence, the show arrived amid a great deal of outrage: accusations that it distorts the demographics of youth violence, that it stokes panic about alienated boys, or that it offers up yet another heavy-handed morality tale in prestige-drama packaging.
Unquestionably, it isn’t in any way an authentic portrayal of the reality of youth knife crime today. But I can’t agree that Adolescence is merely a didactic tract – it’s something else entirely.
Whatever the creators had in mind, the series is too well-constructed – too well-written – to be dismissed as a vehicle for narrative compliance. If the aim was simply to echo regime orthodoxy, it failed – and in failing, succeeded. What Adolescence delivers is a searing portrait of post-liberal Britain: atomised, emotionally barren, culturally incoherent.
Liberalism’s last reflex: caring loudly, doing nothing
The series captures the idea that in contemporary Britain meaningful ethical or cultural frameworks have been abandoned, and in their place, we now have shallow institutional gestures: cold bureaucracy, therapeutic language and surface-level sensitivity – all designed to manage symptoms, not address causes.
It isn’t only the family that suffers – though it’s clear they do, especially the father, who moves through the story in a state of subdued collapse. It’s everything around them – the state institutions, the police, the schooling system – all functioning with a kind of procedural emptiness. At times, the bleakness shades into what might be dark comedy – whether intentional or not is hard to say. What lingers is the tone of a flat, affectless, decaying society, drained of meaning.
One needn’t engage in some rarefied, counter-textual reading to see this, nor am I the first to say so. Carl Benjamin of the Lotus Eaters podcast has also made salient observations on this point. The drama offers glimpses – faint and passing – of what once counted as moral authority or adulthood. But they appear only as fragments, cultural remnants without a present to inhabit. It is difficult to believe the writers were entirely unaware of what they were doing. But who knows?
Yes, the show’s writers and producers were – probably – foolish to accept invitations to Downing Street, and to be coopted into Keir Starmer’s agenda into “rethinking adolescent safety and how to prevent young boys being dragged into [a] ‘whirlpool of hatred and misogyny’”. Such politically loaded phraseology instantly puts one on guard that the show is promoting regime talking points. In doing so, they have done – possibly – a disservice to themselves. You’ll notice the ‘probably’ and ‘possibly’ qualifiers here. We’ll return to that point later. But for now, it’s worth resisting the instinct to dismiss the work by association. What matters is what’s onscreen – and what’s onscreen is unflinchingly damning.
The point is: the one thing Adolescence definitively does not do is reaffirm liberal pieties. It is highly subversive of them. It anatomises their collapse. It presents a society not merely incapable of guiding its children but apparently puzzled as to why it ever imagined it should, and if anything opines for a lost tradition of moral certainty. It is, in that respect, a perfect metaphor for the exhaustion of liberal Britain at the end of history.
So, with apologies for any spoilers, let’s get to it. There’s quite a bit to unpick.
Of riot gear and raisin bran: the rituals of a hollow state
The cultural subversion – the satire, even – is apparent right at the beginning of episode one, with a ludicrously heavy-handed police raid on the boy’s suburban home. A dozen police vehicles, officers in riot gear and stab vests, descend upon a well-kept, modern, lower-middle-class new-build estate, battering down the door with illogically disproportionate force.
If that isn’t enough to signal the destabilising, absurdist, undertones, consider the dead hand of bureaucratic police procedure exerted on Jamie, the young murder suspect. Hauled away in a deeply distressed state, he undergoes an almost performative procedural booking in process at the station: being read his rights, asked if he wants a solicitor and breakfast – all delivered in a manner suited for an adult, not a 13 year-old child who clearly cannot comprehend any of it. He doesn’t really understand what’s happening – and that’s the point. He is an adolescent.
And if you watch closely, the camera lingers – just long enough – on the face of the main police character, Detective Inspector Bascombe. In one brief moment, a flicker of doubt passes across his expression. It’s subtle, but unmistakable: a hint that even within the machinery of the state, someone recognises the absurdity of treating a terrified child as though he were a hardened criminal, and that something more serious in society has gone, or is going, horribly wrong.
Empathy without authority, multiculturalism without morality
What is going wrong becomes evident to DI Bascombe in episode two, when he and Detective Sergeant Misha Frank visit Jamie’s school to gather information about the murder of Katie, the young victim. The officers traipse timidly through the school and have rings run around them – particularly by Jade, Katie’s black friend – whose contempt for institutional figures is unmistakable. Bascombe and Frank elicit no deference; whatever standing they once may have enjoyed as police officers has long since dissipated. (Does this seem familiar, perhaps, to us onlookers who now also regard the UK’s police with much the same disdain and hollowed-out confidence?)
This atmosphere of dysfunction is mirrored by the school itself – chaotic, noisy and rudderless. The staff are little better. Mr Malik, a Muslim teacher, is portrayed as feckless, drifting in and out of the classroom with no clear purpose. Mrs Fenumore, the senior teacher, is all toxic empathy and no moral authority – well-meaning but useless, adrift in the disorder. Her self-confessed verdict – “just absolute chaos” – lands as another pupil lobs obscenities down the corridor.
Jade is no comforting stereotype, either. She is portrayed as sullen, aggressive and seething with barely concealed rage. When she attacks Ryan – Jamie’s friend – he is subsequently questioned by the detectives. He emerges as articulate and unusually perceptive, a stark contrast to the caricature often expected. It’s also revealed that Katie had been cyberbullying Jamie – branding him an incel and mocking his awkward but benign attempts to connect with her after being rebuffed.
The drama thus refuses easy moral framing. There are no glib multicultural platitudes or gendered clichés. Even a passing reference by DS Frank to Andrew Tate and the spectre of violent incels is never developed – an ephemeral gesture toward a broader cultural anxiety, offered and discarded in a breath. It feels like a grasp at something external to explain what is, in truth, a deeper social rot – one that cannot be diagnosed by moral slogans or pinned on internet villains. In its refusal to flatter prevailing narratives, it is in fact, highly dissident.
Welcome to the holding pen: a policeman in the post-authority age
The figure of DI Bascombe is especially interesting. That he’s played by a black actor is, in this context, immaterial to any claim that he’s some liberal archetype. In fact, it makes his role more pointed as he is presented as an entirely normal, well-adjusted, integrated citizen no more equipped than anyone else to make sense of the bizarro world around him. In dramatic terms, he is the everyman: wandering through the desolate social landscape of post-ideological Britain, lost among feral school children, impotent teachers and collapsing adult authority.
Even his own family eludes him. The show makes it clear that he barely understands – let alone influences – his own son, a pupil at this same unravelling institution.
In one of the show’s most telling moments of dialogue, Bascombe turns to DS Frank, and exclaims:
Do you know what? I honestly… I just can’t stand this fucking place. Does it look like anyone’s learning anything in there to you? It just looks like a fucking holding pen. Videos in every class.
Most assuredly, then, this isn’t a paean to multicultural harmony or the heroism of teachers. It’s an indictment. And it sets the stage for one of the moments of noirish comedy: Ryan, Jamie’s friend, flees the school through a classroom window to avoid further questioning. Bascombe gives chase, weaving past teachers, administrators, even a man strimming the lawn – each a theoretical figure of authority, yet in practice passive, helpless and bewildered.
There is no moral messaging here. If anything, liberal good intentions are treated with withering detachment, while the police are rendered in part well-meaning, but also agents of a system long since detached from the reality it was meant to oversee.
Clipboard empathy: to be assessed, not understood
The theme of emotional sterility and atomising bureaucracy is highlighted in the following episode, where we meet Briony, a forensic psychologist tasked with preparing a pre-trial report on Jamie’s mental capacity. The setting is a youth detention facility, several months after the murder. What follows is an excavation into Jamie’s inner world – his unpredictability, his intelligence, his suspicions.
He believes Briony is trying to manipulate him into talking about his father and grandfather, nudging him toward some prescribed reflection on masculinity. She insists she only wants “a conversation”, but of course, she’s not there for idle chat. Her job is to draw him out, to categorise his thoughts on men, women and feelings – as if a 13 year-old boy might credibly navigate the adult vocabulary of identity and emotion. When he begins to open up, Jamie speaks about girls, sex and status with surprising candour, and we find ourselves in the bleak terrain of Snapchat, Instagram, topless selfies, and a kind of pre-packaged adulthood no one is equipped to manage.
Jamie, for his part, seems to think he’s formed a connection with Briony. But from her perspective, this is just another professional interaction – methodical, extractive and necessarily detached. At the close of their final session, Jamie, sensing the end, asks if she likes him. Briony hesitates, then replies that it’s not her job to like him, only to assess him. And so yes – he has been tricked, in a way. The moment shatters. Jamie lashes out, is restrained by a guard, and is dragged from the room shouting.
But in the final scene the camera lingers on Briony’s face – shaken, unreadable. Has she merely escaped a volatile boy’s fury, or has something deeper registered? We’re left uncertain. Perhaps Jamie’s predicament – that he’s still just a child, and one bullied, by girls no less – has struck closer to home than she’s prepared to admit.
Despair in aisle five
The final act in this tragedy takes place a year later, on Eddie’s birthday – a day that begins badly and only worsens. Eddie, by all accounts a good and kindly father, is beginning to crack under the strain. He finds his work van disfigured with graffiti: the word ‘Nonse’ scrawled across it – misspelled, misdirected and unconnected to Jamie’s crime, but damning all the same. His wife calls the police, calm but flat: “We’ll need to take photos of the offending word.” It’s a moment of deadpan despair –petty vandalism delivered with casual ignorance and met with procedural formality.
What follows is a family trip to Wainwrights – a stand-in for B&Q – to buy something to clean off the “offending word”. It is one of the drama’s best calibrated scenes: a darkly comic interweaving of domestic routine and private collapse. The checkout assistant asks whether Eddie has a discount card, oblivious to the slow-motion family breakdown unfolding in his purview. In the car park, Eddie spots the teenagers responsible for defacing his vehicle and, in a moment of rage, hurls the contents of the paint tin across the van. A security guard appears – not to intervene, but to ask if Eddie plans to clean up the mess.
Later, Jamie calls from detention to wish his father a happy birthday – and to say he intends to plead guilty. At home that evening, Eddie and his wife talk quietly, almost absently, about what they might have done differently. Could they have stepped in sooner? Should they have monitored the children’s phones more closely? Eddie, hollowed by grief and guilt, reflects that he never took his father’s belt to his kids – never ruled by fear – and yet, what did the softer approach achieve?
The drama offers no answer to that question. To the show’s credit it doesn’t try. But in the father’s closing line – “I should’ve been a better dad” – we are gently steered toward what might be the closest thing the series has to a moral centre: not a sermon, but a faint, regretful echo of traditional parental authority, lost and perhaps half-mourned.
You can’t always get the message you want: but sometimes you get the one that hurts
In the end, people will see in Adolescence what they want to see. If you’re looking for a parable about incels and online radicalisation, that’s exactly what it will become – regardless of the deeper, more unsettling subtexts running throughout, which, I would argue, are plainly visible to anyone willing to look.
You won’t find any mention of those in the Guardian or its epigones. Instead, expect lavish praise for the acting, followed by the usual liturgy about toxic masculinity and digital safety. Likewise, if you’re determined to view it as nothing more than regime propaganda – painted in stark moral binaries and slathered with populist slop to keep you on the outrage train – so be it. But don’t expect to learn anything. You’ll come away nourished only by your own certainty.
As I say, I have no idea of what was in the minds of the show’s creators or if they are fully paid-up members of Leftwing Luvvie Liberal London La-La Land, or if a vision of modern dysfunction is the one they wished to portray. But even it if wasn’t, sometimes the best of art escapes the intentions of its makers and becomes something else. And that something else, in this case, is deeply interesting.
Fair enough if you believe I’m overthinking all of this. But if nothing else, I hope I’ve offered a few tools for those inclined to attempt a counter-reading of Adolescence. What does seem especially risible, however, is the proposal – floated in Westminster – that this show be rolled out in schools nationwide. You must be catastrophically detached from any kind of reality, as our MPs always seem to be – or simply an utter clod – to imagine that most secondary school students will sit enraptured through van-bound monologues about takeaway orders and the tonal subtleties of A-ha. They will not be spellbound. They will be bored out of their minds.
More seriously, if I were Sir Keir Starmer, this is the last thing I would want shown in the classroom. It dismantles the last vestiges of a multicultural, therapeutic, post-liberal order. Before watching Adolescence, I was expecting late-stage post-totalitarian propaganda. I was wrong. I also assumed Netflix was simply burnishing its progressive credentials by offering it free to schools. Perhaps they are. But it’s just as possible that – intentionally or not – this is one of the most subversive cultural acts in recent memory.
Sometimes the sharpest elegies for a failing order arrive unannounced.
Michael Rainsborough is a writer and academic living in Australia. He is author of Terror in the Western Mind: Cultural Responses to 9/11 (2021), and is editor of A Front Row Seat at the End of History: The Untimely Essays of David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith, 1999-2024 (2025).
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I can remember (just) the pearl clutching over the Teddy Boys. Then it was the Mods and Rockers, then the Punks. Other youth social memes were available. Many starred briefly in films, television plays, and editorials.
And yet we are still here, civilisation has not collapsed – even if it creaks a little.
A very interesting, provocative, and articulate article. Thanks.
I was struck by this phrase, though:
… the desolate social landscape of post-ideological Britain …
The British Establishment – decadent, degenerate, deranged, suffering from a profound death-wish – only clings on because it cleaves to ideology-as-such as its sole remaining claim to power. But the Establishment can’t disguise the fact that its ideology is a demented mix of “multiculturalism”, misandry, and anti-whitism. And it can’t disguise the fact that more and more people are waking up to the fact that our rulers hate us and want us gone from our homeland.
Anyway, thanks again for the article – I might just take the time to watch Adolescence.
This is where we are now. Well, when I say ”we” I mean you guys in the UK. This man is off his rocker. ”It’s bad for your mental health to live on your own, therefore you should think about taking in a young, male migrant, from an incompatible culture with views diametrically opposed to yours, of indeterminant age because due to him having no identification we could do no background checks, but he seems nice.” And where on earth does this guy live? A commune or a mansion?
“About 8 million people in The UK live on their own – many people are able to welcome a refugee into their home”
”Now Government Think Tanks & the radical Left want Asylum Seekers to live with people who have space in their homes.
This was always the next inevitable step.”
https://x.com/BGatesIsaPyscho/status/1916376474904363184
There is a vast difference between ‘able’ and ‘willing’ and as we know from the lying whore Pixie Balls Cooper who was going to take some Syrian refugees into her but well…of course….never did. Probably a lucky escape for the Syrians.
Um, no mention of the fact that “Adolescence” was based on the real-life murder of an Ethnic African teenage girl by an Ethnic African teenage boy in Britain.
Over a teddy bear, no less. Nothing to do with Southport, but scandalous “RACE-SWAPPING”, as usual on Netflix.
Elianne Andam murder: Hassan Sentamu jailed for life – BBC News
Fury as “race swap” Netflix teen murder drama Adolescence endorsed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer
“Anti-white propaganda” Netflix hit show Adolescence slammed for lying over real threat to UK women
Adolescence Exposed: The anti-white bias in media and how it will drive censorship – YouTube
Well one of the creators actually said what was on his mind:
”Speaking on BBC Radio 4‘s arts programme Front Row, Thorne stated that the two writers wanted to “look in the eye of modern male rage” and examine the influence of public figures such as Andrew Tate on boys.”
I am sure it’s the case that almost all violence perpetrated by 13 year old boys is done to other males- mainly boys of a similar age. The choice of the writers to have the protagonist kill a girl just seems to me like a “man bites dog” approach designed to attract attention.
Aren’t boys still playing Conkers then? Can you get ‘Conker rage’, do you think? lol Or even British Bulldog… Something I’ve noticed that’s far different today compared to when I was a kid is the amount of games we’d play in the playground at break time. You’d be spoilt for choice and the possibilities were endless, not just at school playtimes but at home, playing outside with your mates. Good wholesome fun which always involved being with others, as I can’t really recall any games that were designed to be played alone. Contrast time spent like that to now, kids often alone, stuck indoors with their eyes glued to a screen. Or even if they’re together, the dratted screen is always being obsessively stared at. They’re often interacting with other kids online ( Snapchat ) or gaming but it’s not a substitute for being in people’s company and having social contact, so important to child development.
It’s no wonder kids are influenced, led astray and bad things happen, or they have body image/confidence issues. Then there’s online bullying to add to the mix….But it’s like night and day, the contrast, kids now compared to when I was growing up. Even on rainy days we’d be at each other’s houses playing board games, cards, ‘hide the object’ etc. Kids had imaginations through necessity because they didn’t have screens and access to multiple devices around the house. Shows what a double-edged sword the advent of the internet was because you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
Our kids grew up playing in the street in our cul de sac with other kids from the neighbourhood but that was just before smartphones and social media really took off. They played loads of games, mostly the same ones that were played in the playground at my school. They also did lots of sport and dance so always out and about.
Talking to people with teenage kids now it seems more of a mixed bag and some of them do stay indoors more than ours ever did.
Violent teenage boys however were certainly a feature of life in my youth.
I think kids these days face a different set of challenges. Another one, which is entirely independent of the internet, is vapes. Kids doing it on the sly, kids doing it with their parents blessing ( yes, really! ), piling in to the toilet cubicle at school like it’s a group activity….Battling the ever-present attraction of the damned vapes is the latest challenge for any responsible parents. I mean, what became of just sniffing Tippex??
Different perhaps but in a similar category – we spent a lot of time and effort trying to get hold of booze from age 15ish and a lot of my friends at secondary school smoked weed and did mushrooms.
But they weren’t violent to teenage girls, were they?
They were violent to each other, fighting, preparing for manhood, preparing to defend their women and children.
Indeed
Whilst out walking yesterday, we came across a group of young teenage girls doing something akin to “Duke of Edinburgh”. Carrying large backpacks, all with maps & compasses. Mobile phones had clearly been collected and replaced by a walkie talkie. Was it cheating to ask us directions to a church? Probably but all I said was “South West” and left it up to them to read the compass.
But they seemed to be having a wail of a time and wondered how much of that was the forceable removal of the smartphone? Would be interesting to hear their thoughts after the weekend’s event and camping.
We adults though were using our mobiles of course but purely as a much more convenient replacement for paper maps and for snapping pics. Not much use of the phone during the day although everyone checked for messages at the pub stop. Is that a good use of Smartphone? Making sure no disasters back home?
I really am on the fence for the use of social media as an overall force for good.
Just for your future reference:
Idiom Origins – Whale of a time – History of Whale of a time
And paper maps really are better than “satellite navigation”, which has led many an unwary driver astray.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s a drama designed to attract attention. Click bait maybe.
Yeah, it’s an established technique. Just not one I’m fond of. I prefer my “art” a bit more subtle, so I believe that the creator was motivated by wanting to communicate some spontaneous emotions or thoughts they had, rather than trying to be “relevant”.
I still don’t believe that 13-year-old boys are under so much social pressure to have a ‘sex life’ that they can be meaningfully described as incels if they don’t anywhere outside the feverish, p0rn-overloaded fantasies of the authors of this show.
I’m sure there is the odd case but it seems pretty far fetched
Cathy Come Home for the 2020s. Procedural inhumanity is so everyday I guess we missed the point.
Perhaps in order to get made they had to have a few woke touch stones – no competent white men, white stabber, black central character etc. Bit like how all scientific studies need to add in a bit of guff about Climate Change in order to get published.
Very well argued case and I’ve watched some of the key scenes again. It’s not common for me to read a long DS article like this all the way through. Something niggled me after watching it early on and the line “It is, in that respect, a perfect metaphor for the exhaustion of liberal Britain at the end of history” certainly resonates. It’s emotionally draining and thoroughly depressing.
Yes, who wants to watch something that makes everyone feel miserable?
For a cheerful, wholesome taste of the English countryside, I’d rather watch “Shaun the Sheep” any day.
I also thought it was a satirical commentary on the state of the UK …. but not the one Two-Tier was heavily promoting.
The funniest part was the sweetest, best-looking 13 yr old boy in the country …. who would have had 12/13 yr old girls queuing up to be associated with him ….. declaring repeatedly that he’s ugly.
But (the autistic?) Two-Tier wouldn’t understand any of that.
Brilliant piece. Thank you.
Life imitates art.
That was observed when ITV screened the series The Sweeney. The real life detectives started to emulate the characters, calling their bosses ‘guv’.
Showing Adolescence in schools might just provide an example of how to do anti-authority better. Authority demonstrating that it has none in the mere showing of the drama to us kids.
Since managerialism emphasises process over product and is designed to take away agency from all those who operate the process, why shouldn’t it also divest them of authority and morality?
Depicting paramilitary police raiding an unremarkable suburban middle-class home as if it were the mountain lair of a Bond villain and his henchman is the liberal trope that such socially conservative ways of living only produce deviancy. The father’s lament at the end of the drama is a confession that he is just not progressive enough.
A great many of Netflix’s offerings depict a dystopia. But the author’s analysis is perceptive in that this drama inadvertently reveals the underlying nature of ‘liberalism’s last reflex’. Not a society at the end of history, but having turned history into a repeating loop of process; all the actors merely flotsam and jetsam in a Sargasso Sea of procedure.
The end of history would be a mercy. But an endless repeat that is software ossified into hardware; all grey skies above and greys seas below, is a miserific vision that is a bore. As if the Devil created a simulacrum of the kingdom of heaven where the torture was not fire and brimstone but rather a circular tedium of, as the author says, extracting information without benefit, ‘learning lessons’ without understanding, and therapy without cure.