#Adolescence

[keirahknightley]

Adolescence (2025) - Episode #1.4

[discord1895]

What this makes me think of, is how so many people-including women- always think of the “men and women can’t be friends” discourse only in thinking of cheating, if it’s disrespectful to your partner to have friends of opposite sex, in “friendzone” conversations, etc. and we really are missing the boat in how continuing to think this way contributes to the on-going dehumanizing of women.

It is not equal, it doesn’t dehumanize men in the same way, due to the overwhelming culture of degrading women. Even if you try and say “well both aren’t having friends of the opposite sex equally” the impact isn’t even close to the same. We need to model and achieve friendships without gender or sex being a component.

If you are perpetuating opposite sexes can’t be friends, you’re perpetuating woman being seen as objects.

Episode 3 as a whole is a punch to the gut, but I believe one of the most important parts of it to me was the way they perfectly portrayed how violent men and boys will take advantage of “not perfect” victims to try and rid themselves of any responsibility for their violence.

Even at 13, Jamie is aware of that, subconsciously or not. He uses words like “bitch” and “slut” to refer to a 13 year old girl—a child he killed. He brings up her leaked photos again and again, talks about her comments and her treatment of him as if any of that should exempt him from his crime.

He already knows he has an advantage, for being a boy and having hurt a girl who’s not perfect and “pure”. The show drives this point home when that store’s employee tells Jamie’s dad he suports his son and talks badly about Katie. He says there’s more people who agree with him.

Because there are. The whole time, Jamie brings up “Katie was flat”, “she took nude pictures”, “she rejected me”, “she bullied me”. He still tries to paint her as the villain when he was the one who admitted he only pursued her because she was fragile and he wanted to take advantage of that.

He even claps himself in the back because he didn’t sexually assault her after he murdered her, as if that makes him a good person. (When he did in fact commit a sexual crime by looking at her naked pictures without her consent).

I think that’s the most vital part of the show. The way Jamie can’t comprehend what he did was wrong because he doesn’t view Katie as a person, not even in death. That’s his understanding.

[hamliet]

Adolescence Review (by someone who used to work in child protection)

Recently watched Netflix's Adolescence and it was probably the best TV series I've seen. It's superbly acted (how was this Owen Cooper's first role?), fascinatingly filmed (every single episode is shot in one take), and brimming with empathy and nuance.

It also resonates personally with me. Once upon a time, I worked in child protection for a year. I've worked with kids like the main subject of the series, Jamie Miller. I can't and won't give details, but this series probably captures the heart-wrenching, soul-crushing reality of what it's like to work with kids who do horrific crimes.

Episode 1 is an excruciatingly detailed account of the dehumanization of arrest and imprisonment, and that's even with everyone doing their best to be kind to Jamie because he's a child (13, but looks younger). I guarantee you most cops don't try to be nice to most intakes.

There's really only one moment where a cop is cruel until the interrogation, and that's when Jamie's being strip-searched. The man conducting the search tells his father, who asks, in essence, "how would you feel if you were thirteen and strangers wanted to do this to you?" that "I was never accused of a crime." Well, bully for you, jerk-face.

Yet the viewer also understands the cruel necessity of having to conduct such a search, while also wanting to throw up. I do think a lot of the discourse around juvenile criminals resorts to "throw away the key" without considering what that means, and what humiliation and abuse kids go through when they're arrested (rightfully or wrongfully). The show following each and every motion and forcing the viewer to observe the father's face rather than the actual search forces the viewer to face their own thoughts on juvenile justice (especially because, at this point, you don't know whether Jamie did it).

But at the same time as Jamie is dehumanized in this way, you're confronted with the reality of how much he's dehumanized his victim at the end of the episode, when you see that he absolutely, 100% did do it. This thread of how Jamie dehumanizes women in particular continues in Episode 3.

Episode 2 is easily the weakest of the series. It's still great and offers, via a chaotic school with checked-out adults who can't care anymore and adults who do care completely overwhelmed and limited by their own humanity, a symbolic picture of what teenagers face. How can they learn when they aren't willing to listen? At the same time, how can they learn when no one is teaching? How can people teach when they are drowning themselves?

My criticism here is that the school appeared not exactly unrealistic, but also slightly hyperbolized. I think they could have stressed the struggles of trying to care when there's too much to care for even more than they did via an additional episode, an episode I think the second one almost introduced and then left dangling--one that focused on Katie's loved ones.

We hear about Katie's mom, and we meet Jade and see her rage over losing her best friend. We even see one detective voice how frustrating it is that Jamie will be remembered but Katie won't be. I wouldn't quite call this lip service because I do think the aim of the show isn't quite about this, but I do think the show should have spent an episode on Jade and/or Katie's family.

We know Katie isn't perfect as a victim, but that doesn't mean in any way that she deserved to be stabbed to death (or to have her pictures leaked). In fact, the show makes this emphatically clear. But I still think they missed a chance to make her more human, to show the loss through her loved ones.

If Episode 2 is the slightly-less-than-the-others episode, Episode 3 is the standout. The psychologist examines Jamie and he vacillates between inappropriately flirting with the psychologist to childishly requesting more hot chocolate to terrifyingly screaming in rage to sobbing in fear like a child in a nightmare to condescendingly mocking her like a rabid fan of Elon's would to desperately trying to wrench away the reality of what he did and trying to talk himself out of facing reality. And Owen Cooper, the child actor, makes all of this believable.

The reality is that the cruelty of what Jamie's done sinks in during Episode 3. He tells his psychologist that most other guys who have assaulted their victim, but he didn't, so he's better, right? And then he screams and sobs minutes later begging for someone to tell him that they like him, anyone. I found myself wanting to grab the psychologist and beg her to say that she "cared" (something I said in a similar moment during my work doing child protection). But I also understand why she didn't--not just professionally, but in terms of Jamie having to realize that he can't be entitled to people liking him when he's so cruel to women.

The psychologist also asks Jamie if he understands what death is. While he says all the right words to show he does, everyone over the age of 20 knows that he doesn't, and the show knows it too. I genuinely think that, until you get older, you cannot fully understand what it means for someone to be gone from this earth.

And therein lies the paradox of the show: Jamie doesn't fully understand what he's done. At the same time, what he's done has permanent, gruesome, irreversible consequences for everyone around him--and beyond that, because of the internet's influence beyond local boundaries.

Episode 4 is an episode I would call beautiful in a lot of ways, despite the fact that it's jagged and raw. We follow Jamie's family (dad, mom, and older sister) as they try to celebrate the dad's birthday about a year after the crime. We see how they're wrestling with the fallout and agony of knowing they raised Jamie--but they also raised Lisa, who is kind of an awesome kid.

And while Episode 1 actually has detectives musing that the parents might be abusive and that might explain it, this episode removes any doubts: Eddie and Amanda, Jamie's parents, are good parents. They are not perfect. Eddie has a temper. Amanda should have monitored his computer use more. But also? No parents are perfect. Arguably, the detective who interacts with his son in Episode 2 is a worse parent than they are. Yet his son is great, and Lisa is great.

There simply isn't a good explanation. Jamie was hurting, yes, but his pain can't be pinned down to a singular cause. The internet hurt him and gave him messages about masculinity that were harmful to say the least. But he also got those messages at school, even if he wasn't on the internet. And he got love at home, as well as some flawed interactions with his parents.

So who is responsible for Jamie's actions? Jamie himself. He chose.

Yet, the series also acknowledges that Jamie is a child, and he is not just "born bad." We see how other kids, like Jade punching Ryan, and Ryan loaning Jamie the knife, and Tommy joking around, and the bully leaking Katie's pictures--they have no comprehension of the extreme ramifications of their actions... but some of them also don't appear to care to learn. Normally, society would demand they care to learn, but that's not happening.

So then what? If society creates these kids, then what does society owe them? That's a question the series wants viewers to walk away contemplating, rather than giving a simple answer.

And there is some hope: Jamie deciding to plead guilty and accept responsibility. In that, we see how kids are supposed to be able to make mistakes and learn and grow. Yet Jamie's "mistake" is so shattering that Katie will never get to grow beyond it because of him, and to what degree Jamie can after pleading guilty isn't clear either. And in an era where their every action is captured online, can they ever really grow beyond?

I don't know that I have an answer to that. I've seen some kids I worked with grow up to be awesome. And I've lost touch with others, particularly those whose cases were more serious. There is no agony like seeing a child who has done something horrific and is suffering themselves and knowing you can't save them, and not knowing what the future holds for them. All you're left with is being able to hope that they'll learn to accept responsibility and grow, but in a system and society that makes that really impossible, is that even much of a hope?

[hertwood]

Adolescence (2025)

[nessa007]

seeing men throw tantrums over netflix’s adolescence claiming it’s painted men in a bad light and they think the male writers/producers have too much oestrogen is extremely hilarious

[potpourri-of-ecclecticism]

ADOLESENCE (2025) Episode 3 dir. Philip Barantini

[keirahknightley]

One of details that makes “Adolescence” so extraordinary is its camera work. Each of the series’ four hourlong episodes is a oner, meaning it was filmed in one shot with no breaks for editing. It’s a style of filmmaking that Barantini, who’s known for his work on the movie “Boiling Point,” has mastered. But the Stephen Graham-starring series doesn’t just use its one-shots as a cheap gimmick. Every minute the show progresses without cutting away from its cast, the tension of this high-stakes story racketing up another degree. So incorporating a drone shot into the mix is extra impressive.

According to a thread posted by Netflix’s U.K. and Ireland X account, the director of photography carried the camera and followed Jade (Fatima Bojang) as she walked to a traffic light, a shot that helped indicate that the school day had ended. That’s what the audience sees. But behind the camera, the team attached the camera to a drone before Jade crosses the road. That camera then flew roughly 0.3 miles to the murder scene where a second team was present. That team of grips along with a camera operator then caught the camera just in time to capture a close-up shot of Graham’s grieving father, Eddie.

“Easy,” the post joked. (x)

Adolescence (2025) - Episode #1.2

[pedro-reed]

Ashley Walters | Adolescence - Episode 1

[ahsshafahsa]

It's horriffying how he thinks he's better than others for not sexually assaulting her

I need some time to wrap my head around this scary shit.

🎥 : Adolescence (2025)

[fudgetunblr]

I watched adolescence on Netflix because my dad recommended it and I’ve had this thought and I just need to articulate it:

Jamie was caught so swiftly after committing the murder that a part of me doesn’t really believe that his initial intention was to actually kill Katie. Ryan admitted that it was his knife and that he thought Jamie was going to use it to scare Katie.

I think maybe that was his initial plan. He felt emasculated by her and probably wanted to extract some form of revenge, except, as we could see, she didn’t submit, she fought back — and in Jamie’s readicalised mind that would not fly, so he killed her.

Obviously the show never tells us exactly how it all went down, or Jamie’s exact motifs, what was going through his mind at the time — but I also think that’s sort of the point? Because it doesn’t matter. He still killed her and showed little remorse for it and I think it’s representative of how violence against women is often perpetrated.

Men will beat a woman to a pulp, and that final blow will take her life. They might defend themselves by saying: “I didn’t mean to kill her!” — but you still beat her. Still tried to exert power over her through violence because you think women aren’t subservient beings who should bow down to men.

Ryan gave Jamie a knife because he thought Jamie was going to use it to scare Katie. He didn’t think twice about the implications or to question it. Even if Jamie only used the knife to scare her, is that still acceptable behaviour? If he’d only harmed and not killed — does that make his actions less malicious?

Idk what I’m saying, just: something something violence against women doesn’t need to be planned out or calculated, it just takes certain resistance for men to feel like they need to use violence to exert power, and something something men who enable each others toxic behaviour are complicit in the fall out.

[nessa007]

netflix’s adolescence being low budget to produce vs the electric state having a $300 million budget but adolescence is the one everybody is talking about despite them both having almost the same amount of viewership, this really shows that a big budget isn’t everything

[lakesouperior]

yeah, I just kept waiting for Jade and Katie’s mum to show up, and when they didn’t I was just straight up confused.

Adolescence is a fantastic, albeit flawed, four-part limited series that delves into misogyny, into male violence, into toxic masculinity, into incel culture - episode 3 in particular is a brilliant study in this, every word, every movement, every facial expression counts and does indeed paint a picture into this thirteen-year-old boy's mind, yes, but also how these things look generally in action, in dialogue, in movement - (and the show touches upon the education system, the criminal system, etc.) and yet this series that takes great pains to explore Atwood's "Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them", it sidelines its female characters and most especially Katie. Like I get what they were doing, I get that the show was also illustrating how society can turn girls and women into footnotes or villains in their own tragedies and it does a great job in doing that but just because the show is framing, exploring, exposing, portraying the inherent misogyny and sexism, doesn't mean that the show itself also has to forget Katie, doesn't mean that we also have to be denied her story. I recommend everyone watch it, I do think we need to evolve past using a dead female character to nearly-exclusively explore the psyche of the male protagonist and in this case, a murdered female character and her murderer. Which again isn't to say that we shouldn't have gotten the exploration of Jamie, we most certainly should have, but we should've gotten an exploration of Katie too. Isn't that the point?

[foldingfittedsheets]

My coworker Astrid and I were chatting yesterday. I mentioned that I have this specific moment that I’ve always felt like was my transition from child to sapient being where I suddenly looked at myself and had the epiphany that my appearance mattered to others perception of me and I conceptualized myself as a person. It was really wild and being a His Dark Materials fan I’ve always been like, yeah, that’s when I got Dust and my daemon settled.

Astrid was fascinated and told me she hadn’t had that exactly but she did remember being on this one road trip through Kansas and she’d looked up at the clouds and suddenly, all at once, she could perceive them as being three dimensional. Even though conceptually she’d always known they had depth she could now perceive the shape.

She told me this in the slightly embarassed way that said she didn’t think this sounded impressive and she wasn’t expecting me to sit bolt upright and exclaim, “Me too! I had that too! It blew my mind!”

It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen clouds before but clouds were just up there in the sky, taken for granted and generally they just made flat shapes. But to realize the full scope and depth of clouds, to shift from thinking about them as a faraway background element of nature to seeing them as huge majestic three dimensional things had been awe inspiring.

“Right?! I just spent the whole rest of the drive overwhelmed with the beauty of the world, staring at the clouds!”

“When I try to tell people how profound it was they just act like I was high but it was like, this massive shift in how I saw the world right around adolescence.”

Slightly curious if anyone else had experiences like these as they stepped toward adulthood.

[vintage-tigre]

[lakesouperior]

at some places I had to stop and remind myself they were actors, this show really does not give you any sort of breaks or sugar-coating. there’s so escaping it, the reality of what’s been done and what’s happening. well-fucking-done.

never seen something so real on tv before, and then cried my eyes out at the ending, at Jamie’s mum and sister in the van while he talks to his dad. go watch adolescence, you won’t regret it.

[teashh]

Adolescence as a show is so incredibly well done. I'm currently working on a master's thesis that's looking at radicalisation of young boys in the era of influencers like Andrew tate. This is dangerous and it's not just because young boys are impressionable but because they're essentially in an echo chamber with no adult challenging their thoughts because adults themselves don't understand the extent of the hold patriarchy has on them.

The way this series shows Jamie's internalised misogyny is outstanding. You see, the fact of the matter is that Jamie is a young boy but the words he's parroting are those of people much more older than him. It's not just his fault. It's also the fault of people around. If Jamie's history teacher Mr Malik had TRIED to make him open up (and he would have opened up because Jamie likes history) If any ONE of the adults had taken notice, talked to him, been vulnerable with him; if any ONE of the older boys had taken a moment to call him out than cyberbullying him, if his father or his mother could have taken a moment of their time to teach him empathy and compassion and educated themselves on the discourses Jamie was being subjected to, this could have been avoided. And I'm not saying Jamie isn't to blame but we're as much a product of our nurture as we are of our nature. And this series shows that.

We need to take a moment, MEN need to take a moment and talk to the other men in their lives. Call them out. Make them take accountability for that they did. Hold your mates accountable. This is not just haha. Your group chat is not just a "safe space", a "locker room", it is a space where your friends are showing you who they are and what you do next, is incredibly important.