Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’ Taps Into the Latest Moral Panic

As we learn by the end of the first episode, 13-year-old Jamie has viciously stabbed a female classmate. But while his culpability is clear, his motive isn’t. The adults around him look for answers in the world of social media, including his possible bullying by the victim for being an “incel” and the ideas that he’s absorbed from influencers who hate women—all among “fucking impossible” kids, as one teacher puts it, who are constantly on their phones.

That depiction has made the show, set in the U.K. and released on March 13, powerful ammunition in the political and cultural wars over childhood worldwide, which range from Australia’s total ban on social media for under-16s to calls by U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer for the show to be shown in schools to fight “toxic masculinity.”

It is a striking work of art, which means that it’s worth thinking twice about what it claims about the world.

Kaine Davies as Ryan Kowalsky and Ashley Walters as Detective Inspector Bascombe in Adolescence. Netflix

Pulling off the single take required the actors to have the material down pat, including extremely good, naturalistic dialogue. (The word “mate,” for example, is deployed in everything from genuine friendship to mild hostility.) I particularly admired the depictions of teenagers as both aspiring adults and hurt children—and the different levels of skill in dealing with them by authority figures such as police, psychologists, and teachers.

The depiction of the police and justice system is also excellent. British law is careful in the handling of the young, and Jamie and his parents are walked through a patient and gentle series of questions, checklists, and interviews once in custody.

“So, what’s going to happen now—we’re going to take some photos, then we’re going to take some samples, and then we’re going to search you, OK? Let’s get you over here, shall we, facing that camera on the wall, just to take some photos. So there’ll be a bit of a flash, alright?” one policeman reassures Jamie.

The creators of Adolescence have said that it was inspired by recent knife killings by teens in the United Kingdom. Online misogyny has spurred several killers, most notably incel mass murderer Elliot Rodgers—but so far, at least in the U.K., they’ve been adults.

But the killing that looms over the Netflix show is a far older one that long predates social media. No story has had quite the same impact as the 1993 abduction, torture, and murder of 2-year-old James “Jamie” Bulger by two 10-year-old boys in Liverpool.

The incident lingers in Adolescence, consciously or otherwise, from the naming of Jamie himself to his parents’ both being from Liverpool (despite the show being set in West Yorkshire). Bulger’s murder sparked a national debate over where such evil could come from, and whether such young children could be redeemed—or needed to be punished.

The first shot of Jamie in Adolescence, childish and terrified, reminded me strongly of the mugshot of Jon Venables, one of the Bulger killers, that was plastered on every newspaper’s front page.

The U.K. sets the age of criminal responsibility at just 10, unusually low by European standards—in Germany, for instance, a 13-year-old is not the business of the criminal courts. But until 1998, children under 14 were assumed to be doli incapax – incapable of fully forming criminal intent, unless shown otherwise. The prosecution had to show that they knew their actions to be truly wrong. In the aftermath of the Bulger case, that assumption was abolished. But the question of just how responsible Jamie is for his actions is a big one, and one that the show allows to remain deliberately ambiguous.

Two of the episodes turn on the astonishing performance of the actor who plays Jamie—Owen Cooper, in his first filmed role—moving between fear, uncertainty, deceit, rage, and malice. Cooper was 14 when the show was filmed, but small-framed and baby-faced, he looks even younger than his character. Small and shivering, he’s also intelligent—described as a “bright boy” and capable of responding sharply to the police—and manipulative. But he lies like a child, shifting stories and denying until the last moment even when directly exposed.

While it’s open-ended about the degree of Jamie’s moral guilt, the show places blame almost entirely on the social media landscape that he inhabits. Other adult fears lurk in the background, like the specter of child abuse—raised as a possibility and then dismissed. His parents are rarely anything but sympathetic, caught in a horror they never expected.

A scene from Adolescence. Netflix

In the second episode, a police officer played by Ashley Walters has to turn to his son for an explanation of the mysterious world of emojis. But worries that the codes used by the young conceal moral corruption are not new. Most people, I think, do not remember their childhoods well, but children have always existed in a stew of playground falsehoods and cruelties that their parents barely glimpse. Children smeared their peers long before they got phones.

I will not confess to anything that I believed as a child. But my grandfather, born in 1923, was taught by his peers that Asian women had horizontal genitals and that a girl who crossed and uncrossed her legs was “gagging for it.” The Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, born in 1913, returned in several novels to his shock of stumbling into a world of dirty rhymes and cruelties inflicted on frogs as a sensitive child sent to a rural elementary school. (Animal torture, once a staple of adolescence, has mercifully largely disappeared from our world.)

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And as compelling as Adolescence is, the terrible minds of teenage boys are not new territory in art, having captured attention from Lord of the Flies onward. (Richard Hughes’s 1929 novel A High Wind in Jamaica predates William Golding’s book, but its depiction of the callousness of childhood is split between the genders.) The Netflix show’s picture of the school world as one governed by cruel rules barely perceptible to adults reminded me of Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, repeatedly challenged in school libraries.

The 1999 massacre at Columbine High School and the wave of school shootings that followed it produced many works, from Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk About Kevin to Gus van Sant’s film Elephant.

Much of this literature exists because teenage boys are, in fact, awful, as anyone who has been one, or known some, can testify. The one-two punch of testosterone and insecurity leaves few boys unbruised. But nevertheless, most awful teenagers grow up into halfway-reasonable men.

The Bulger case also inspired William Sutcliffe’s razor-sharp 1996 novella Bad Influence, which takes on the unpalatable role of moral luck in such murders. Sutcliffe’s protagonist avoids becoming a murderer largely by chance. The Bulger killers, as David James Smith showed in his study, The Sleep of Reason, probably did not set out with any plans to murder a toddler on the day they skipped school together; they came to it step by dreadful step.

Amari Jayden Bacchus as Adam Bascombe in Adolescence.Netflix

Yet as Smith showed in his book, killings by children have occurred at a steady, mercifully rare rate dating right back to the start of British legal history. Violent misogyny is also not a new force, or one that necessarily needs the internet to inspire killings.

And yet, the anti-social media case goes beyond just murder, real or imagined. Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book The Anxious Generation struck a nerve with many parents and teachers, but also received hearty criticism. Data on the political gender gap among the young is mixed but indicative of a radicalization to the far right among young men. Banning phones in schools has become common policy in many countries—but not in the United States, where only nine states have rules about it, thanks in part to parents’ fear of not being able to reach their children during school shootings.

The case for social media being bad for kids seems strong. But it’s questionable whether adolescents are exceptionally susceptible, or if social media is good for anyone. The fear of children’s exposure to social media may really be a proxy for adults’ own worries. An audience of American boomers eats up artificial intelligence-generated Facebook slop under a CEO who has promised aggressive masculinity while cozying up to Trump. Mobs beat people to death in India in 2018 because of WhatsApp rumors.

The 78-year-old president of the United States both absorbs and produces social media disinformation, while his 53-year-old hatchetman spreads far-right conspiracy theories. (Elon Musk has also latched onto racist and false claims about the production of Adolescence itself—rumors that were started by a far-right Malaysian social media influencer.) The 71-year-old head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, meanwhile, has been promoting toxic nonsense since before social media existed.

You should watch Adolescence, an exceptionally well-acted and written show. But if you’re an anxious parent, you might be better off with an older British show, The Inbetweeners. It’s a depiction of teenage boys being inept, sex-obsessed, and constantly cruel to each other.

But it’s also very funny—and closer to reality for most adolescents, since nobody murders anybody.