Netflix’s “Adolescence” Has Heart But Doesn’t Understand Its Subject Matter

Certain there’s been a mistake, they beg for some clarification, only to be informed that their son is being arrested under suspicion of murder and just as quickly whisked away to the police station. Left in their wake is a giant hole in their front door that might as well be a giant hole in their hearts. Though they’re left dumbstruck by the whole ordeal, they maintain their resolve that it’s a colossal misunderstanding that will work itself out. 

The first episode documents the order of procedures that would follow an arrest: the holding cell, the collection of medical tests, settling legal protections for minors, the inner turmoil of his father acting as his Appropriate Adult trying to keep it all together for him. The episode builds sympathy for Jamie, a scared, urine-soaked little boy who’s been ripped from his home, accused of a horrific crime that runs antithetical to the image we’re looking at, and subjected to invasive strip searches and medical tests. By the end, however, the mystery of “whodunnit” is over. It’s conclusively proven that Jamie has fatally stabbed his classmate, Katie Leonard, seven times, as captured on CCTV footage. The video evidence is undeniable: this little boy is a cold-blooded killer. The show shifts into a whydunnit, slowly unraveling his family and social life, the interior of his mind, and how this case has affected everyone around him.

How could this happen? Did they do something wrong raising him? Is this all just a bad dream? The show is interested in investigating how a little boy who comes from an otherwise “normal” West Yorkshire family could commit such a crime. What were his motivations? Could it have been prevented? Are we direct products of our upbringing, or are there things beyond our control? If Jamie’s parents had just monitored him more closely and ensured he wasn’t consuming toxic content online that fed into his fantasies of revenge and resentment, would this have happened at all? 

The Show’s Take on the Manosphere & Digital Bullying

Episode two takes place three days after Jamie’s arrest and shifts its focus away from Jamie and his family onto the police detectives tasked with solving the motive for this crime. CCTV footage revealed in episode one that Jamie had fatally stabbed Katie Leonard seven times, but they didn’t have a murder weapon. The detectives spend the day at Jamie’s school investigating a potential motive for Katie’s murder and clues on how to locate the knife. Detective Bascome’s son pulls him aside to let him know the comments Katie left on Jamie’s Instagram aren’t friendly; they’re passive-aggressive coded messages calling him an incel. At first, Bascombe’s son intuits that his dad isn’t listening and wants to leave. "You want to go dad, you want to go to gym or work or something, the door’s right there,” he quips. This scene comments on the absent father relationship Bascombe has with his son due to his job.

When he tries to explain what the red pill is and how it represents seeing the truth, his father chalks it up to coming from The Matrix. He understands the origins of the reference, but not how it’s evolved in contemporary culture. His son explains it’s “a call to action by the manosphere.” This line felt clumsy and revealed an unsophisticated understanding of the subcultures that the show attempts to deconstruct. I’m guessing what he’s getting as the “call to action” is to recognize female nature for what it is: shallow and hypergamous. He also explained that the 100 emoji was a reference to the 80/20 rule, telling his dad, “80% of women are attracted to 20% of men and that you must trick women because you’ll never get them in a normal way." 

80% of men are invisible to women (a completely fake statistic derived from a single blog post on dating app data, by the way), and the 100 emoji is referencing that statistic to imply that he’s part of that 80%—an incel. His father scoffs at the idea of 13-year-olds weaponizing involuntary celibacy against each other, “He’s 13. How can you be involuntarily celibate at 13? Who isn’t celibate at 13?” he says. This is the most realistic commentary on contemporary social dynamics between adolescents featured in the show. Bullying is often digital, covert, and facilitated through double-speak so that the animosity is translated to its targets while providing them plausible deniability with adults and authority figures who don’t understand new slang. 

At the end of episode two, we see how this case affects Detective Bascombe. The show hinted at his son being bullied in school. After his son tells him about the bullying going on with labels like “incel” being weaponized against unpopular boys and arresting Ryan for supplying the knife, he makes a decision to play a more active role in his son’s life. He asks if his son is hungry and wants to get something to eat, and his son initially tries to blow him off like he always does. The father says, “Look, I’ve got some free time, I want to spend it with you because I love you,” and his son responds, “Yeah, I can be hungry.” They drive off to get food, and the father asks him about his day. This case has scared Detective Bascombe and made him realize that his son could fall down the same rabbit hole of toxicity if he’s too busy and uninvolved to notice. 

Conflating Incels with Manosphere & Red Pill Content

When the detective relays the double-speak through emojis to Detective Misha Frank, a teacher who’s confused, the term “incel” is part of the conversation. Detective Frank explains, “It’s the involuntary celibate stuff; it’s the Andrew Tate shite.” At this point, it was obvious that the show writers were making a majorly sloppy conflation of two completely separate online communities. They aren’t just different but hostile to one another. Andrew Tate is considered “manosphere”content, which is closely associated with red pill communities that tell men women are hypergamous and shallow. If you want to get women, you need to make yourself desirable by getting jacked, loaded, and dominant. It’s prescriptive in a hopeful, but obviously toxic self-optimization sort of way. 

It makes men paranoid about women’s intentions and reduces male and female relationships to conquerors and the conquered, but it certainly isn’t blackpilling them as the incel community does. Tate and the broader manosphere look down on incels for their fatalistic worldview, which lacks agency, indulges in self-pity, and is riddled with nihilism. Incels tend to have pessimistic explanatory styles and believe the world is out to get them and that women will never find them attractive because they’ve had bad experiences in the past. They rationalize, “I must be so ugly that women will never like me. I might as well not try.” So, they wallow in resentment-fueled incel communities (people who are involuntarily celibate) where they whine about how alone they are and how superficial women are, but it’s just bleak descriptive philosophy with no solution; there’s no self-improvement. If anything, they view self-improvement as futile. 

Incels get frustrated with Tate and the manosphere for dismissing their gripes and lack of success with women, while the manosphere thinks incels are weak betas who deserve their lot in life if they don’t do anything about it. They’re polar opposite ideologies, though they have similarly pessimistic ideas about women. They exist in adjacent online ecosystems that occasionally overlap, but they are certainly not one and the same. This is just as silly and self-defeating to the point the show is trying to make as Olivia Wilde’s “Don’t Worry, Darling,” which modeled its hero to the incels cult leader after Jordan Peterson. When a character drops a line like that, it’s a big tell that the writers aren’t really interested in distinguishing between these communities; it’s all just a hodgepodge of vague toxicity. But those distinctions matter, especially if you want to critique the societal machinations that radicalize boys and want to craft public policy on the basis of said critique. 

The Psychology of Jamie Miller & Incels

The third episode is a masterclass of storytelling. The writing, acting, tension,—everything peaks in this episode. It’s a push-pull between a psychologist evaluating Jamie seven months after Katie’s murder. Awaiting trial for murder as a minor, the psychologist is tasked with establishing whether Jamie understands the gravity of his actions, is fit to stand trial, and screen for possible mental illness.

During her conversation with Jamie, he switches between defensive vulnerability and attempts at asserting dominance. He accidentally confesses to murdering Katie and makes disgusting comments about how he “could have done anything” to her body because he had a knife but didn’t, as if he deserves an award for not sexually assaulting her. We get a clearer picture of his dynamic with Katie and how he views women. Katie was being bullied in school because revenge porn of her body was being circulated around the school, and she was embarrassed. Though Katie hated Jamie and called him an incel, he admits that he thought she would be sufficiently weak while the whole school was calling her a slut because of her pictures so he asked her if she’d go to the fair with him. But she said that she wasn’t that desperate. Even at her “weakest,” she wouldn’t give him the time of day. 

The show conflates incels with the manosphere, and Jamie’s profile doesn’t map onto known incel archetypes, let alone the most murderous ones.

This is something one of the world’s leading researchers on incel subcultures and psychological profiles of incels, William Costello, has confirmed is a real tactic used by incels and low-value mates to help them secure or keep a girlfriend. However, he pointed out some of the ways the show gets the prototypical incel profile wrong. For one, one of the trends to come out strongly in the research is a high level of autism. “For all intents and purposes, the incel in the program Adolescence, he seemed a fairly popular kid, he had friends, he was socially adept, he was good in school,” Costello noted. However, roughly 30% of incels in their research sample would qualify for an autism diagnosis from an expert clinician. That’s a major overrepresentation, considering only 1% of the male population in America qualifies for an autism diagnosis.

The psychologist has to sit through remarks made by a murdering misogynist about a dead girl and how she was “flat-chested,” afterwards turning to the psychologist and saying “no offense” as if it applies to her as well. He attempts to dominate the psychologist multiple times, throwing his hot chocolate on the ground (symbolizing his rejection of childhood innocence) and trying to mimic adult bravado. He even pesters her about how it’s embarrassing that she got shaken up by a little boy. He oscillates between defensive vulnerability and aggression, especially when the psychologist doesn’t reassure him. He makes up a story about sexual encounters he’s had with women, then admits it’s a lie. Then he recounts being rejected by women because he thinks he’s ugly and shifts his attention to what the psychologist thinks of him, whether she thinks he’s ugly too or how she perceives him. 

He’s both desperate for her approval and stewing in resentment and humiliation. He draws attention to her being pretty as a way to make her self-conscious and to suggest that her life has been easier as a result. In this long-winded, emotionally turbulent scene, Jamie weaponizes his resentment, insecurity, and shame and tries to inflict that sense of powerlessness onto the psychologist, then tries to embarrass her for getting shaken up. Jamie gets confirmation that he isn’t invisible when he makes the psychologist flinch. If he can’t be desired, he’ll be feared. When the psychologist ends the session and informs him that it’s their last session, he has an outburst. When Jamie leaves the room, the psychologist can finally let down her guard and let the weight of the interaction overcome her. She’s so disgusted that when she goes to touch the sandwich she initially brought for Jamie, she nearly vomits. Her hope for any innocence left in this child is gone, and the weight of what he’s done and the lack of remorse he shows is devastating.

Could This Have Happened to Anyone?

The final episode takes place 13 months after the murder of Katie Leonard. It’s Jamie’s father’s birthday. The family tries to be resilient and keep trudging on despite the circumstances, but the community punishes them for their son’s crimes. They wrestle with guilt on what they could have or should have done to prevent this, and the final blow is when Jamie tells his dad that he’s changing his plea to guilty. He doesn’t even deny killing Katie anymore. The episode is brutal and heartbreaking. You sympathize with the family and wonder if they bear some responsibility for who Jamie grew up to be. They question it themselves, asking how they created Lisa (the sister), who’s a completely normal child. The mother says, “The same way we made him—with love, to the best of our ability.”

The show is overly simplistic in its conception of inceldom, how it maps onto antisocial behavior and crime, and who is really representative of that demographic, but it’s not all bad. It has heart, great acting (considering it’s essentially live theater), a riveting third episode, and sympathetic characters. You can certainly get something out of this show, even if you think its conception of the ideas it’s trying to deconstruct is overly simplistic or misses the mark. It is ultimately a work of fiction, though people’s criticisms are of some relevance here, considering the real events the creator has cited as inspiration include the stabbing of 15-year old Elianne Andam, committed by Hassan Sentam, a black man who immigrated to the UK from Uganda. 

However, it wasn’t the only case that inspired the show. Another case cited was the murder of 12-year-old Ava White over a Snapchat video. The perpetrator hasn’t been identified publicly due to legal protections for minors. Graham felt compelled to make the series after coming across a number of cases involving the perpetration of violence committed by young boys against young girls, as well as a sudden increase in violent knife crime in the UK. It’s worth pointing out that the show’s insistence that such a terrible crime could be committed by anyone, coming from any home, descended from any family, is not based in reality though. 

We have statistics on knife crime—the overwhelming majority of knife offenses in the UK are committed by non-whites. Black and mixed-ethnicity children are over-represented in knife offenses in England and Wales. Black children made up 14% of knife offenses in the year ending in 2024 despite making up only 6% of the population. Mixed-ethnic children made up 10% of knife offenses while making up 8% of the general population. And that’s just children. Despite London’s population being only 13% black, they made up 53% of knife crime perpetrators and 61% of knife murder perpetrators in 2022. The vast majority of people involved in knife crime come from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, not the middle-class suburbs, as these shows often try to suggest. Jamie’s family is depicted as working class but not poverty-stricken. 

And before you point out that it’s ultimately a fictionalized account of a slurry of contemporary issues, yeah I hear you. It’s not the end-all-be-all for me whether the protagonist maps perfectly onto the real-world circumstances. Still, the creators opened up a can of worms by referencing real-world issues like knife crime—a largely non-white epidemic—and specific murder cases that involved black individuals. The media then created a pile-on by insisting this is a young, disaffected white male problem, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Incels are racially diverse; nearly half of the community identifies as non-white, according to a recent study. Some of the most prominent and vocal content creators in the manosphere are non-white, and so are their followers. 

The media created a pile-on by insisting this is a young, disaffected white male problem, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

In fact, Andrew Tate is much more popular and liked by non-whites than whites. Recent surveys have demonstrated that non-white men, especially black and Asian men, tend to view Andrew Tate more favorably than white men. A 2023 Savanta survey of 1,214 people in the UK aged 16 to 25 showed that 41% of black respondents and 31% of Asian respondents viewed Tate positively, while only 15% of white men did. Liberal organization Hope Not Hate also polled young people in January 2023 and 2024 and found a 17% increase in support for Tate from Asian or Asian British young people while black or black British young people increased their support by 24%. 

Then, there’s the issue of fatherlessness. Boys raised in fatherless homes are more likely to engage in violence, be incarcerated, and lack impulse control. The show doesn’t really know what it wants to say about the role of fathers. Jamie had a good relationship with his father. His father was pretty present and took him to football games. He just didn’t monitor his internet use. They flirt with the idea that he should’ve done more, he should’ve been more emotionally available, they should have monitored what he was doing, but they also don’t know how they could have known he was capable of this. 

There’s also a component that’s being swept under the rug, which can’t be addressed by the mere presence or lack thereof of role models. Behavioral science researcher Datepsych said it better than I can, “individuals with antisocial personality traits - of which 50% of the variance is explained by genes - gravitate toward antisocial role models. Crime and degeneracy, in other words, is heritable.”

Final Thoughts

The show is designed and has been promoted in a way to scare middle-class white parents with the message, “Don’t get too comfortable; it could be your son.” However, that doesn’t bear out in reality. The show conflates incels with the manosphere, and Jamie’s profile doesn’t map onto known incel archetypes, let alone the most murderous ones. It’s being used to advocate for censorship and crackdown on content like Andrew Tate on the basis that it radicalizes young incels (a completely different camp) into murdering young women. While sexless young men have always posed a real danger for malevolence and violence, the majority of incels are more suicidal than homicidal. Young boys who watch Andrew Tate are more likely to grow up to be objectifying misogynistic douchebags obsessed with money and status than sexless murderers.