Review of Adolescence Season 1

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

About a year ago (at the time of typing this) I quit my job as a professional film critic to explore what was out there in the world when it came to publishing about the movies and books I wanted to see, not just what was popular in the moment. Digital media and working within it can be fun and all, but it can be grinding when you’re just chasing after all the latest trends and clicks for SEO.

I started this blog four years ago, during the pandemic, but never really took it seriously beyond the occasional post here and there about what I was up to. In 2023 I began to realize the impact this blog was having on me, and other people were reaching out about reading it, so I expanded. Once I quit my job, I decided to focus on the blog more while job hunting, as I do make a few pennies here and there from the display ads on the screen.

Since the job hunt after graduate school really took longer than expected, it meant that I was going to have even more time than anticipated to go through and watch all of these shows I wanted to. I also read a ton of books during this time, which means I have such an incredible backlog of book reviews I need to plough through the rest of the year.

Television has been something I’m really catching up on during this period, as television shows require quite a bit more commitment than a movie for me. You can’t also really take a break from them somewhere in the middle of a season, as then you’ll completely lose interest or forget the entire plot. When I do that I try not to review those shows, as my review is a bit more unreliable.

I’d been hearing about Adolescence on Netflix and thought that this sounded right up my alley in terms of the kind of shows I wanted to watch, so I pressed play when my schedule was wide open and decided to watch it over the course of three days. This isn’t a long series at all, as there are only four episodes, so if you wanted to break it up over the course of a few days, you might need to in order to think and decompress what exactly you just watched.

Let’s get into the review! I know I’m rambling already. Please note there are some spoilers for the show discussed below.

When a schoolgirl is murdered in an English town, one of her classmates is the prime suspects.

As I mentioned in the previous section, there are only four episodes in this entire series. In the first episode, we meet our main characters and get a feel for their intentions. When the police come into the home of a teenage boy, Jamie Miller, they take him out of his bedroom and put him under arrest.

His family is shocked by what’s happening. His charge? They think he murdered a fellow classmate: teenager Katie Leonard. Her murder was unexpected and brutal, but as we see throughout the course of the series, there were several missteps to how exactly they tried to cover up the murder.

Jamie is thirteen and already the top suspect for this crime. While his family and he assert the fact he’s innocent, the evidence throughout the course of the series is mounting against Jamie. In one episode, the officers go around his school and see how the children are acting out in the classroom.

While that happens, Katie’s best friend is lashing out, no one listening to who she thinks is the killer is and what their motives are. It’s through talking to one of the police officer’s estranged sons that they start cracking the code in the case, revealing that Jamie is a part of a toxic masculinity mindset.

Online he was heavily involved with accounts and commentary that promoted men first and put down women. Katie and her friends would call Jamie slang for incel, which is the right term to describe the attitudes he was putting out there and absorbing through the Internet, which put him on the spiral.

We see more of Jamie’s reasoning and psyche in the later episodes, as he denies what he did for a long time. It’s kind of obvious early on that he did it, especially once we start going to the other students and their opinions of him. His best friend is the one who ultimately becomes a key piece of evidence with a confession, which leads to his own arrest.

Overall Thoughts

I’m going to stop with the plot with the above statements for the sake of this review, as then it’ll just become a summary of the entire show. I think what this show does best is depicting how this young boy was radicalized through the Internet and delved deeper into hateful ideologies against women, which led to him commit an awful act of violence.

It also does an excellent job showing the fallout on his family. His parents and sister had no idea what he was doing online, so when he murdered this girl, they couldn’t fathom how he could do such an act of extreme violence. It was a jarring contrast to the little boy they knew.

On a different note, everyone in the show does an incredible job with the acting. I was most impressed with the child actors, especially the one who played Jamie, and was pleasantly surprised to read online after the fact a lot of these students were drama students at local arts high schools in England.

We want to see more of that in shows! That’s how we find the next generation of talent beyond the nepo baby pipeline (although there’s something to be said about arts schools sometimes, especially ones you have to pay to attend). I’ll be happy if more US shows do this.

Go watch this one if you haven’t already. I think it’s worth picking up, even if you slowly get through the series since it’s only four episodes.

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