When Adolescence's co-creators Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne started working on their hit four-part Netflix series in March 2024, they could've had no idea of the cultural impact it would have. One year ago, the re-election of Donald Trump for the second time seemed unlikely for many on the Left and Andrew Tate, dubbed the 'king of toxic masculinity' who describes himself as a misogynist, had been arrested. If hitting misogynystic rock bottom were plausible, surely we had already slammed into it. The only way was up, or so we thought.
The way the tectonic plates of misogyny have shifted since then; Donald Trump is back in the White House, and Andrew Tate has been released from detention. The manosphere — the catch-all phrase used to reference online misogynistic communities — has been largely credited with helping to bolster support among men for Trump in the November 2024 US presidential election. Men, and toxic men at that, are back.
Then Adolescence appeared on March 13, 2025, seemingly out of nowhere, slipping into the Netflix slipstream and snowballing to become something close to an overnight sensation. It tells the fictional story of a 13-year-old boy Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) who's arrested for the murder of a classmate, and the fallout that ensues. At the core of Adolescence, and really what makes it the arresting watch that it is, is how it dances around justice. The truth of who murdered who isn't the point. It's not so much a whodunnit, but a whydunnit; it focusses on the cultures that have created environments where misogyny can metastasize.
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Adolescence tells the story of what it is to be a modern teenager today in the age of technology, where the click of a finger, or the deployment of a certain type of emoji, can amount to waging a bullying campaign against somebody. It is dark in a way that resonates and whispers to the concerning rise of misogyny within society.
Yet it wasn't so much the simmering misogynistic undertones that struck me most forcefully while watching the series, but rather the show's depiction of an emotionally repressed family, and how symptomatic Jamie's behaviour was of the environment he was raised in. The fourth and final episode focusses on the fallout of Jamie's arrest for the Miller family, and how they are coping 13 months after the police first raided their home. It shows Graham, who plays Eddie Miller, trying — and largely failing — to celebrate his fiftieth birthday while his son awaits his trial in a detention facility. Jamie calls Eddie half way through the episode and tells his dad that he'll be changing his plea to guilty. Yet, there are moments of repressed masculinity throughout the episode that, as a viewer, I found myself wondering why Eddie didn't tell his son that he loved him, or that he was also in the car with Jamie's mum and sister. I wondered why Eddie didn't tell his wife, Jamie's mum, Manda Miller (Christine Tremarco) that he was sad or struggling. It felt like these depictions in the final moments of Adolescence provided the answers that the show didn't actually intend to; they suggested that Jamie had grown up in an environment with repressed masculinity, where it was normalised for men to feel embarrassed of, say, not being good at football — which Eddie admits feeling when Jamie played as a little boy.
In the UK, we are raised to not talk about our feelings. Many of us — nay, most of us — were raised with women deferentially excusing poor male behaviour by saying 'men will be men.' And it's that combination of a deferential female figure within a home, and a dominant and emotionally constipated male figure, that provides an environment in which toxic male behaviours, like Jamie's, are allowed to thrive. It's little wonder that Sir Keir Starmer called for Adolescence to be shown in schools; it's only when you see an uncommunicative family dynamic at play that you can decipher how stifling it can be for young boys and girls.
In Adolescence's third episode, Jamie is seen verbally abusing and attempting to physically intimidate a child psychologist (Erin Doherty). When Jamie erupts and shouts, there are whispers of Eddie's anger in the final episode. A parent is a mirror, and along with the very real concerns of digital influences, it is that reflection that feels most arresting. Adolescence is a warning, and it's one that families across the world ought to take heed of.
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Naomi May is a seasoned culture journalist and editor with over ten years’ worth of experience in shaping stories and building digital communities. After graduating with a First Class Honours from City University's prestigious Journalism course, Naomi joined the Evening Standard, where she worked across both the newspaper and website. She is now the Digital Editor at ELLE Magazine and has written features for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue, Vice and Refinery29, among many others. Naomi is also the host of the ELLE Collective book club.
