Adolescence: It’s her fault!

13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested and accused of murdering a female classmate. 

The show is only four episodes long, each one boasting a kind of one-shot take on filming style, and is based in the UK. The concepts presented are thought-provoking, and conversations are being held about the issues raised in the show in political circles all around the world, prevalent especially today in this brave new world of 2025, so make sure your alibi is airtight and let’s dive into this! 

Despite being centered around the actions of young Jamie, the show actually begins after the act has been committed, with the adults coming to arrest Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) in his home. His parents, father Eddie (Stephen Graham) and mother Manda (Christine Tremarco), and older sister Lisa (Amanda Pease), are all, of course, completely traumatised and do their best to keep Jamie calm as the arresting officers do their jobs. DI (Detective Inspector) Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) is the lead arresting officer, and while of course Jamie is provided with an advocate on the way to the station and the intake sergeant insists that Jamie needs an “appropriate adult”, for whom he of course chooses as his father Eddie, Jamie is largely treated gently but firmly by the police. Each and every action on Jamie’s intake is explained clearly and carefully, sometimes more than once, so that no officer can be accused of mistreatment, but also because Jamie has been accused of a crime that could get him charged like a full-grown adult, all the cops have to walk on eggshells and basically hold their breath just to do their job. 

The treatment of Jamie’s family by the arresting officers is called into question, but by and large, the arrest and incarceration of Jamie himself were done as by-the-book as they could possibly make it and still be mindful of a child’s sensibilities. DS (Detective Sergeant) Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) sits in with Bascombe for Jamie’s intake arrest interview, and it’s clear both officers are entirely bothered by this case and how hamstrung they are, yet still required to perform their jobs as normally as possible. Bascombe, especially, having a son around Jamie’s age, Adam (Amari Bacchus), who actually ties into the next episode, struggles trying to separate the fatherly role from the Detective requirements of his job. 

So Paulie Barlow (Mark Stanley) has been appointed as Jamie’s Solicitor (the UK version of his lawyer), Bascombe and Frank are informing Jamie that he’s been accused of killing his classmate Katie Leonard the previous night, and even producing CCTV footage that shows Jamie doing the deed. We the audience never get to see whats’ on the tape, but the mere fact of its existence is plenty damning enough. And that’s more or less where episode 1 ends. 

Episode 2 begins some three days after the murder, with Bascombe and Frank visiting Jamie’s secondary school to hunt for motives and possibly the murder weapon itself. At school, the

fellow classmates are understandably outraged, most especially Katie’s best friend Jade (Fatima Bojang), who accuses Jamie’s friend Ryan (Kaine Davis) of getting Katie killed while she’s assaulting him in her tearful rage. And it turns out that yes, Ryan is somewhat involved, at the very least because, well, the knife used in poor Katie’s murder belonged to Ryan, who apparently lent it to Jamie. Ooops. But the real clincher behind the look into potential motive comes from Bascombe’s own son Adam, who wearily informs his dad of a whole other culture amongst younglings, involving cyberbullying, secret emoji language (you wish I was kidding), and accusations of acting as incels. 

For those of you out there who might not be familiar with the whole incel culture, and it’s hard to believe that’s even an actual thing at this point but whatever we trudge on, incel stands for ‘involuntarily celibate’ and is basically an online community of young men who consider themselves unable to sexually attract women, and are actively hostile towards women because of it. That’s a very broad, generalized definition, but it is in fact the plot point of the entire show Adolescence, and please bear in mind that the lead character who did the awful deed, as we are reminded a whole bunch of times, is all of thirteen years old. 

Indeed, episode three of the show finds us seven months after the murder, back with Jamie in a juvenile detention facility, undergoing an evaluation from forensic psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty) to determine his understanding of the circumstances around his particular case. As the two of them delve deep into Jamie’s toxic incel existence and discuss instances of disseminating topless photos of his female classmates, bullying over purported virginity or lack thereof, Jamie’s attitude toward women in general but especially the supposedly vulnerable Katie, Jamie’s mood fluctuates wildly between friendly, defensive, and sharply aggressive. Briony is clearly disturbed by Jamie’s responses but manages to hold it in and do her job beautifully, though the presence of a clearly capable woman doing the questioning seems like it could be a micro-agression in response to this whole poisonous incel mess. All of episode three could be considered a test, actually, everything from gauging Jamie’s response to being offered a sandwich he doesn’t like when he’s clearly hungry, to his plaintive questioning of if Ariston herself likes him after being informed this is their last session, as Jamie’s dragged away. And to my mind, at least, every single last response Jamie gave to try and explain what led up to the murder of his classmate, just isn’t good enough. Episode three of Adolescence is almost downright sickening, and that is in no small part due to the stellar acting from Cooper as Jamie. 

The final episode of our exploration of this whole mess finds us back with Jamie’s family some thirteen months after the initial murder, on Jamie’s father Eddie’s birthday, no less, a day where it seems everything that can go wrong will. Wife Manda and sister Lisa are trying desperately to just live, to work around the giant hole Jamie knife-carved into their lives, and to keep father Eddie from just exploding in his understandable rage and sorrow. Except people are still buttholes and still paint rude things on Eddie’s van, weird incel-adjacent fellows offer to help Eddie unsolicited in the hardware store, and all the Millers left free just can’t figure out how to continue without some kind of catharsis. When it finally comes and all three of the free Millers have some kind of tearful breakdown, we, the audience, can’t help but sympathize with them, of course, but I, for one, was seriously angry too. Poor sister Lisa will carry the stigma of her

brother’s actions forever, no matter where they are, as she points out to her parents, and that just totally blows chunks. But mother Manda and father Eddie, as they sit together and sob rivers of reminiscence and wonder where they went wrong in the raising of Jamie, almost the entire scene was an exercise in transference of blame, and that should not be. Jamie himself told his father that he was changing his plea to guilty, and while that’s a tiny step on the road to punishment and redemption, it’s only a single step. As Eddie, wracked with misplaced guilt grieves his sorrow onto Jamie’s teddy bear and whispers they, his parents, should have done more, we the audience are left wondering why his parents are the ones to ultimately bear the blame. Where were the school authority figures? What about the parents of the other incels and bullies in school? How did we as a society let this sort of toxic masculinity nonsense become a whole culture? (Which is likely why the show is right now being discussed in the Halls of Parliament in the UK and various places around the world, but also especially in America.) 

The one person we never hear from in the entire series is poor Katie, though it was pointed out in an interesting behind-the-scenes recently that actually, we do hear from Katie in the show, sort of. The haunting song played out at the very end of the show, a child’s choir cover of Sting’s 1987 hit ‘Fragile’, the main female voice soloing in there happens to belong to the actor who played Katie in the show, Emilia Holliday. And that, my friends, is some devastatingly brilliant directing on the part of Barantini and Stephen Graham, who played Jamie’s father Eddie and co-directed the show. 

Catch all the guilt and decide how you would disperse the blame in Adolescence, on Netflix now!