“Adolescence” Is a Great TV Crime Drama. But the Problems Facing Young Men Are More Nuanced.

A hit Netflix drama has upended British politics and regaled audiences worldwide. Let's not confuse it for a documentary.

Photo by Jorge Rosal on Unsplash

EDITOR’S NOTE: This column includes moderate spoilers for the Netflix crime drama “Adolescence.”

The worst, most intense pressure I ever felt — where every day I woke up and felt like I was the defendant in the most high-stakes trial you can image — had nothing to do with my long career as a political journalist. It wasn’t when top aides to the former American president were targeting me personally or when I would be in a combative interview with the Saudi ambassador to the United States.

It was in middle school.

The kind of pressure you feel as an adolescent boy is like nothing I have felt since and probably will never feel again.

Every day, everyone I knew was judging me. The clothes I wore, the words I used, the way I carried myself through the hallway — every bit of it was under the most searing spotlight you could imagine. I was the target of relentless bullying for being scrawny, for having a funny name, and really just for existing.

And my experience was hardly unique. Every teacher will tell you that they deal with the worst behavior from students who are hitting their teens in middle school and high school. For adolescent boys and girls alike, life becomes a contest to see if you can fit in and keep your head above water or whether you’ll be mercilessly ridiculed by your classmates until nothing is left.

Cliquishness defines your life: get in with the right crowd, and you might survive. If you try to be different in any way you’ll quickly end up as shark food.

I was reminded of all this — how much being a young boy can just suck — as I watched Adolescence, the new British crime drama that premiered on Netflix last month.

The show revolves around the story of Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old British child who the British state claims killed his classmate Katie Lennard.

In the first of four episodes, we’re introduced to Jamie in the most jarring way imaginable: British police burst into his home, guns drawn. His parents are positively hysterical as they’re informed that young Jamie stands accused of murder.

Jamie initially comes across as bewildered by the accusation. He’s a rail-thin child with a soft voice; he wets himself as police barge into the room and read him his rights. He assures his father he didn’t do what he was accused of.

But by the end of that first episode, we see that the police have Jamie dead to rights: a video captured him stabbing Katie repeatedly, leading to her demise.

The rest of the series provides us with Jamie’s motive. He’s increasingly alienated from his classmates, and he spends far too much time cooped up in his room on his computer, where his mind is poisoned by odious figures like Andrew Tate and the Manosphere.

In one particularly gripping scene, Jamie explodes in rage during an interrogation by a forensic psychologist named Briony Ariston. The little scared little boy turns into the image of someone more like an abusive husband. He starts screaming at the (female) psychologist, telling her that she doesn’t control him.

“You do not tell me when to sit down….look at me now. You do not control what I do in my life. Get that in the fucking little head of yours,” he tells her.

Inspiring a British government response

Parliament and Big Ben. Photo by Marcin Nowak on Unsplash

The show has been embraced by an army of British politicians, who feel that Adolescence is less a television drama and more a documentary.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer worked with the school system and Netflix to provide screenings of the show for free to students in secondary schools.

“It seems like the whole nation is talking about ‘Adolescence’ and not just this nation,” Starmer said. “As a dad, I have not found it easy to watch this with children, because it connects with the fears and worries that you have as parents and adults.”

For Starmer, the message of the show is clear: misogyny and especially online misogyny is a plague on the English-speaking world. Adolescence is a call to arms against it.

“There isn’t one single policy lever to pull. It’s actually a much bigger problem than that,” Starmer said. “And that’s the devastating effect that the problem of misogyny has on our society.”

The risk of oversimplifying the problems faced by young men

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Adolescence is great television. It’s much-better produced than an episode of your typical American crime procedural — the acting is gripping, the cinematography is top-notch, and it’s neatly edited down into four short episodes, a testament to the brevity of British TV.

But we have to remember that it’s a fictionalized drama. It is not a documentary. And even if it was a documentary, you can’t really craft social policy based off of a single case.

Take, for instance, Jamie’s trajectory. We meet a boy who experiences common social pressure and bullying and toxic material on the Internet and ends up a murderer. Seeing Adolescence as a rallying cry risks creating an atmosphere where we look at British — and American — young men as threats rather than our classmates, students, brothers, husbands, fathers, and sons.

Much of the online chatter around Adolescence is about how we the audience find it so hard to believe that Jamie is guilty until we see the video of him stabbing Katie at the end of the first episode. Might this reflect our inner misogyny, our inability to see men as violent and controlling? This Reddit comment is representative takeaway:

Men kill women. They always have done. This kid is a cautionary tale, maybe if I do EVERYTHING right my son won't kill somebody.

It just doesn't work that way.

Every man lurking this sub? We're scared of you.

But is that really true? Doing everything right by a child may not guarantee that they don’t turn into a rage-filled murderer, but it can’t hurt, right? And while abusive men certainly exist — read my story from last year about the helpline that fights abuse by working with the abusers — it’s just not true that inside every man is an abuser, let alone a murderer.

Take knife crime, which is the most common form of homicide in the UK, where guns are strictly regulated (couldn’t be America).

While these crimes are tragedies, there are actually very few youth knife homicides across the country:

In 2022-23, 42 young people aged 16-19 fell victims of knife-enabled homicides (His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation, 2024). Last year, in 2024, 57 persons under the age of 25 were murdered with a knife or sharp object (Office for National Statistics, 2025).

Compare those numbers to the total number of people in the United Kingdom under the age of 25, which is well over 17 million. So maybe the reason we initially find it hard to believe Jaime is a murderer is because the vast, vast majority of young men aren’t. We’re being perfectly rational.

When you put crime numbers into perspective, you can be sure you will step on some toes. People of all political persuasions have incentives to accuse you of minimizing crime (the right) or in this case misogynistic crimes (the left). But understanding the scope of a problem can be key to tackling it.

If the story told in Adolescence was common — if there was an epidemic of youth knife crime — then it would necessitate more than screenings of a Netflix crime drama and more discussions in schools. You would need, first and foremost, a policing response. But waging a domestic war on misogynist terrorism for a problem that, numerically, is actually quite rare would be inadvisable.

So what does helping young men and reducing misogyny look like?

Photo by Japheth Mast on Unsplash

OK, so maybe we shouldn’t treat Adolescence like a documentary (a mistake made by one very confused British TV presenter). Am I saying that means there are no problems faced by young men across the West? And there’s aren’t any issues of misogyny towards women?

That’s a no on both counts. As I’ve written here before, men across the United States and other Western countries are facing a hard transition into a knowledge economy where their traditional skills and attitudes are proving to be less useful. This is creating a crisis of self-esteem and purpose for a lot of men who used to find a place in the nuclear family as the stable breadwinner.

Meanwhile, something Adolescence is right about is that the gaping hole of purpose that many men feel is being filled in with absolutely venomous rhetoric from Tate and fellow travelers, who have developed followings in the millions by encouraging men to treat women as objects rather than equals. It doesn’t help that the conservative movement has more or less abandoned its religious and traditionalist roots and allowed people who disregard family values to rise to its highest ranks.

How we approach these issues requires a lot more nuance than a television drama can offer. It means diving deep into social psychology research and listening to civil society leaders who work with men on a daily basis to understand what ails them and how it can be addressed.

There’s no reason to be fatalistic about things. If you roll back the clock to the 1990s, the murder rate was twice as high. Teen pregnancy and drug use was exploding. We live in a much safer country today than we did then.

But we should at least acknowledge that solving problems is difficult.

One of the best books I’ve read about human behavior is “Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst” by the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky.

Sapolsky spent decades of his life studying the human brain and working as a primatologist in East Africa. The book is one of the many Sapolsky’s attempt to figure out what makes us tick.

He cites probably thousands of studies of human behavior and our brains, looking at what tends to promote prosocial behaviors — like supporting your family or aiding the poor and disadvantaged — and what tends to promote antisocial behaviors — like exploiting people, hurting them, or killing them.

Sapolsky’s big takeaway is that it sort of depends. Human beings are super complicated and it’s hard to find a silver bullet for every human behavior. We know some things are generally good — a stable upbringing and a nurturing environment — and other things are generally bad — an impoverished upbringing and an environment that promotes greed or violence.

But it’s one of the most complicated questions to ask, and sometimes there are no easy answers.

As Starmer and many British politicians are pointing their fingers at Tate and the Manosphere and the ubiquitous presence of smart phones, it’s worth recalling that we spent a decade blaming Mortal Kombat for youth violence, up to and including Congressional hearings.

After all, kids are playing games where you get to brutally murder someone. That has to have some kind of impact on them, right? It turns out that there’s almost no evidence that it made the nation’s youth more violent.

Personally, I’m less interested in the rantings of losers like Tate and more interested in what might lead a young man to look to him in the first place. I have no interest in watching a misogynist brag about his antisocial behavior. But if I lacked a job, a family, strong male and female role models in my life, maybe I would turn to a gangster like him to find fulfilment.

I doubt that we can censor our way out of this problem because alienated men will always have someone to serve as an unhealthy inspiration, even if it’s just the drunk at the bar or the screwup they work with at Costco.

And ultimately, oversimplifying this issue may lead us to blame people for things that are far out of their control.

I think back to the last episode of Adolescence where Jamie’s father Eddie sits on his bed and reminisces about the life his now-arrested son had led.

As he tears up, we can hear him whimper.

“I'm sorry son, I should've done better,” he says, both to his son who is sitting far away in the British carceral system and to himself.

Is there anyone in the world who has not said something like that at some point — anyone who hasn’t felt they had let down their family, their coworkers, their community, their country?

But sometimes things go awry even after our best efforts. Not everything horrible a young man is an indictment of a father, family, or society.

We should learn to tackle these problems with determination to make things better without succumbing to a moral panic that leads us to wrongly suspect all men as homicidal maniacs.