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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‘Town Crier Championship to be held in Silence’.
Servile surrender to the new puritanism, might as well write an essay about how you would win a game of football.
5 seconds of thought = Each Town Crier takes it in turn to do his/her thing from the town hall clocktower to the Socially Distanced crowd of the great and the good down below. Simples.
I thought that one had to be just taking the piss.
… but then I woke up, and remembered the last year of the piss being constantly taken.
‘Letter to an MP from a daughter’.
Clearly the author and her mum deserve our sympathies and let’s hope they go out walking again soon.
Going off topic, the letter says that her mum recieved a second vaccination ‘several weeks ago’.
“Despite all best efforts Covid did enter the home in January taking mums best friend .”
She does not link the two.
These care homes sound just like prisons. Better to take your elderly relatives out of them and bring them home to live with you, so they can have quality lives before they die.
‘Kier Starmer has betrayed a chilling truth about lockdown.’ Jonathan Sumption.
I saw Starmer being interviewed by the BBC after his fracas with the Bath hero publican and noted that he accused Rod Humphris of denying the Pandemic which he had not.
I was sure that I could remember Starmer further accusing him of ‘*spreading misinformation*’ about the well known negative effects of lockdown but could not subsequently find the clip, perhaps removed, so did not mention it yesterday.
I am grateful to Lord Sumption for confirming my memory.
I’m afraid Sumption betrays one or two fixed misapprehensions.
“Why has Sir Keir failed to live up to his initial promise?”
What initial promise? The recent leadership election was the first in which I couldn’t see a candidate worthy of any vote.
And then :
“No sensible person disputes that there is a pandemic or that it is serious.”
Sorry – but facts are facts. It is only a ‘pandemic’ because the WHO eliminated the part of the definition that related to unusually high mortality. In terms of ‘seriousness’, judged by mortality, this is at a lower level than a third of ‘flu seasons. And this in a country that has a relatively high rate!
Yes, and below the line I also pointed out to him that all of this evil is not just murderous and wilful ignorance – there is clearly a plan (Agenda 30 etc)…and he needs to re-analyse. Lord Sumption’s use of ‘limited/trimmed argument’ reminds me a bit of someone else…..
Kev’s response was basically ” He’s entitled to have an opinion, but I profoundly disagree with his opinion. So much so, that I got Big Vern to rough him up a bit”
The last year we’ve seen politician, after politician being caught in what would normally be career ending episodes and yet, not a single one has been kicked out.
Dan Wooton in the Màil also comes down in favour of the Hero of Bath, noting how he was bullied on Good Morning Britain the following day (worth watching btw).
Dan also says
“I believe what the government is putting us through to socialise is inhumane.
On Friday night I booked to see five friends in one of those outdoor dining pods. But it was rendered completely useless because the sides had to be left open to the buffeting winds thanks to another stupid state sanction.
I deeply resent having to sit outside in the freezing cold to see a loved one”.
Good. Now you know how smokers felt after the indoor ban with Council wonks worrying publicans about what constituted a ‘covered smoking area’ or what they considered to be an ‘enclosed’ one.
Not off topic because it’s all part of the same divide and control strategy.
Not at all like being a smoker, however (I was one). Smoking genuinely affected other people other people (as I came to realize).
My point was about forcing smokers not only to go outside, fair enough, but getting petty and vindictive about how little shelter they were allowed from the elements. Non smokers were not involved.
Probably just a limited trial run to gauge reaction for the big one.
There is a designated smoking area at my small regional airport. It consists of a bus stop shelter from which the perspex walls forming the sides have been thoughtfully removed.
If not the shelter is considered an ‘enclosed working space’ since someone has to clean it once in a while.
Hahahah….loved the pic of celebrity yachts spelling out shite. Who are they appealing to…. aliens or satellites?!
It’s a satire site.
By ‘they’ I was referring to the celebrities with their yachts….message seen from above!
I keep reading reports of
many people not wearing masks in supermarkets and putting staff in danger on e-news reports.
My wife and myself go shopping in our local Sainsburys at least once a week since mask wearing became mandatory and I have seen no more than 6 people (exempt) not wearing them in all that time.
So where are all these people who go to supermarkets that don’t wear masks?
Perhaps I live in a parallel universe?
I see a far higher proportion of unmasked staff with Exempt lanyards than customers and good for them.
Risk to their health from extended wearing is much greater, as we all know.
Agreed.
Our younger son is one of them.
Tim Spector in the ZOE app disparaging Vit D. He is however focussing on it’s ability to stop people catching Covid rather that it’s proven ability to enhance the immune system, which is designed to fight infection not stop it.
Although the App has done some good I believe Spector is a ‘tame critic’. He makes it look as if he’s standing up to ‘The Science’ but when it matters he’s totally ‘on message’.
That’s my impression, too.
Never trust any app especially if its collecting medical data.
Inspiring: Celebrities Spell Out ‘We’re All In This Together’ With Their Yachts.
Photoshop on steroids. I reckon that only six different yachts are used.
“UK Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove arrived in Israel Monday night on a fact-finding mission to see how the country is opening up from COVID-19 restrictions.
He and Jonathan Van-Tam, one of England’s deputy chief medical officers, met with Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi Tuesday morning.”
Be afraid. Be very afraid – wherever the state of Israel pops up its head.
The links between Israel and the black arts of the government, Cabinet Office, ‘security’ services and international affairs in general well known and documented, usually manifesting itself in the interference of what, for shorthand is called the ‘Israel Lobby’.
Never good news for democracy and liberty.
Just one word; Rothschild.
May 6th and a habitual Tory voter?
Then do this quick test:
1. Type Conservative into your search engine
2. If you are or ever have been a Party Member, please apply some critical thinking
3. Ding, dong the conservative party is dead, long live the WEF Great Reset party!
4. Cut up your membership card and join the resistance
Just a thought; if more than 6 people meet up/if you don’t wear a face nappy/ if you don’t eat all your meals outside/ if you don’t use a gallon of hand sanitizer each and every day then “You have blood on your hands and everybody is going to die”.
Thousands of unmasked football fans gather to protest, etc and ( unless I’ve missed something) there has not been a squeak from the government, heath experts and most of all the MSM.
It has occurred to me that the ‘spreading misinformation’ comments made by that idiot Starmer may have opened a door. They were made outside of the protected bubble of Parliament hence they are subject to the laws of slander/libel. If challenged in court he would have to prove his statements were true. At the very least this would provide a public airing of the arguments on both sides, something that the Government and MSM have suppressed up to now.
I for one would chip in to a Crowdfund for this. Maybe the FSU might take a look?
To be frank, you couldn’t build a viable court case on that issue – and trying to do so would cost a fortune. It’s not slander or libel.
That’s debatable. It’s an accusation of lying from a public figure. A statement that simply isn’t true and is intended to damage the reputation of the target.
Also known as oral or spoken defamation, slander is the legal term for the act of harming a person’s reputation by telling one or more other people something that is untrue and damaging about that person. Slander can be the basis for a lawsuit and is considered a civil wrong