Netflix’s Adolescence Speaks Directly to Parents’ Fears

In this way, the show converges with a pair of other flashpoint cultural texts that have recently studied, and proposed discrete solutions for, this particular gut feeling. Richard Reeves’s 2022 book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It describes how, as girls’ educational outcomes have markedly improved over the past number of decades, boys’ educational outcomes have actually cratered. He suggests solutions as sweepingly structural as universal pre-K3 and pre-K4 and solutions as makeshift and patchy as redshirting boys at kindergarten by holding them back a year. Likewise, Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book, The Anxious Generation, argues that the cause of everything from worsening mental health to increasing loneliness among young people is the ubiquity of smart phones. Haidt’s policy solution is a straightforward ban on phones in schools. These books have resonated with readers because they both express and explain the feeling that something’s seriously off with the kids.

Perhaps predictably, Adolescence itself has jump-started a campaign, led by series co-creator Jack Thorne, for a social media ban in the U.K. for everyone under 16. But, as even Thorne has admitted, the show itself does not land on social media as the sole culprit, nor does it really offer a strenuous argument in any one direction. But technology is clearly the vector through which the series understands the problem. In the school episode, there’s a scene in which the detective, Bascombe, is educated in social media lingo by his teenage son. Bascombe is in possession of Instagram posts from Jamie’s account that appear to show Katie replying with positive, even amorous, emojis to the boy’s photos. He’s thus been asking around about a possible relationship between the two. Bascombe’s son Adam sets him straight: The emojis would be legible to any teen, especially Jamie, as teasing, not positive attention. She’s not saying she likes his picture; she’s calling him an incel. Katie was bullying Jamie online. Even this, though, is a bit of a red herring, as we later learn that Jamie had drawn Katie’s attention in the first place by propositioning her in a particularly grotesque way. The other detective, Frank, later mentions “that Andrew Tate shite,” but the show doesn’t delve into the content of the Manosphere so much as throw it out there and move on.

For Adolescence, however, the point of this interaction isn’t Katie’s cyberbullying or Jamie’s YouTube watchlist. It’s Bascombe’s ignorance. The scariest thing, scarier even than motive or misogyny, is the not knowing. The problem of the phones, in the show’s accounting, is that teens speak a language within them that we don’t understand, and they do so outside of our knowledge. While Thorne’s crusade and Haidt’s recent notoriety have led viewers to organize around phones, Adolescence evokes a generalized panic, not a problem with an easily identified cause. The show is not all that interested in external factors. But neither is it all that interested in internal factors, so spooked as it is by the idea that, after all this investigation, Jamie is ultimately, tragically, frighteningly unknowable.