There’s a mystery of violence swirling in and amongst the kids these days. Especially boys. What could it be? Snapchat? Video games? Andrew Tate? A hit Netflix series points to issues, and policy. But is it pointing in the right direction?
Today we’ll look at “Adolescence”: the origin story, the strengths and liabilities of its one-take technique, and its deceptively conservative messaging. Should it be shown in Parliament? Schools? Does it tell us much about the kids it is worried about? Does it offload responsibility for misogyny and violence onto ambient internet chaos, when there are so many other causes closer to home? And why, if it is a meditation on violence committed by boys, do we learn so little about the girls who are harmed?
Show Notes
Brief: Tate Crime
Teachers Warn That Misogynist Andrew Tate Has 'Radicalized' School-Age Boys
180: Is This the Next Andrew Tate?
Stephen Graham shares the heartbreaking stories that inspired Netflix's Adolescence
'Adolescence' Becomes Netflix's Most-Watched Limited Series in First 2 Weeks With 66.3 Million Views
Elon Musk blasted for spreading 'concerning' misinformation about Netflix's Adolescence
Netflix’s Adolescence makes TV history in the UK
“Netflix hit Adolescence has lessons for us all” says Northumbria PCC Susan Dungworth, as she welcomes PM backing for it to be shown in UK Schools
Netflix's Adolescence inspired by true story of Croydon girl's horrific murder - MyLondon
UK experts warn of dangers of violent content being readily available online | Southport attack
Croydon schoolgirl Elianne Andam stabbed in ‘white-hot anger’, court told | UK news
Hassan Sentamu sentencing remarks
Sentencing Remarks: In the matter of the murder of Ava White
Crime in England and Wales: year ending September 2024
The facts about firearm violence
Firearm Violence in the United States | Center for Gun Violence Solutions
Online gangs of teenage boys sharing extreme material are ‘emerging threat’ in UK | NCA (National Crime Agency)
Beyond the Headlines 2024 Summary | Youth Endowment Fund
Spotify takes down Andrew Tate ‘pimping’ podcast after complaints
Kyle Clifford watched Andrew Tate videos before triple murder
The Terrifying Truth Behind Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’
Stephen Graham Netflix series Adolescence inspired by two real-life crimes
"Objective realism," ethnographic cinema, and the classical model of visual-anthropological research
PACE Code C 2023
GCSEs harm our young people. Ministers should have the guts to abolish them – and start again
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
We are on Instagram and threads at conspiritualitypod, as well as individually on Blue Sky, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just the bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
Conspirituality 252, Netflix vs.
Andrew Tate via adolescence.
There's a mystery of violence swirling in and amongst the kids these days, especially boys.
What could it be?
Snapchat? Video games?
Andrew Tate?
A hit Netflix series points to the issues and policy, but is it pointing in the right direction?
Today, we'll take a closer look at adolescence.
Adolescence
Hey Julian, so we will get deep into this series.
I'm looking forward to this.
Yeah, I mean, everybody is covering this right now.
I think we may have some takes that at least some listeners will not have heard yet.
We have published on Andrew Tate many times.
The Manosphere's top G rose to infamy on the back of his violent and also vapid misogyny coaching, marketed through thousands of YouTube shorts and TikToks that were made viral by an army of bots, but also by
battalions of tween and teen boys competing for affiliate fees to get customers signed up for Tate's pimping hose degree or PhD, in which he gave pointers on his confessed profession of entrapping young women,
some of them girls, into the webcam sex trade.
And at his peak, he was jailed along with his brother in Romania on sex trafficking charges, but somehow the Trump administration has sprung them both from jail, welcomed them to the U.S., and folded them into the MAGA swamp of cabinet-level sex assaulters.
Now, you've probably also encountered many attempts to track the trickle-down Tate effect.
In 2022, major articles in Jezebel and other outlets ran articles on what high school teachers were reporting from the trenches, how Tate and Tate-adjacent manosphere and evo-psych ideas like the 80-20 rule, in which 80% of women are
said to be attracted to 20% of men who are high-value, banishing the rest to solitude or incel status,
We're just part of lunchroom.
banter and harassment.
So we also tracked the Tate effect into a less misogynistic but also normalized manipulation zone by investigating the sales coach Iman Godzi, and we also tracked the lineage that brought all of these guys forward.
Now, the fictional Netflix series Adolescence has taken the baton of concern about the manosphere and to wide acclaim.
It was released on March 13th.
Six and a half million views in week one, 66 million views by the end of week two, 70 plus countries, 99% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, scoring 90% on Metacritic, major reviews talking about TV perfection, often referencing its technical and artistic brilliance,
which we'll talk about.
It's a big feature of this.
And also, Prime Minister Keir Starmer praising it in Parliament as a documentary, he said at first, but then a drama.
He's avidly watching it with his own teen kids.
Now, the writer-producer team of Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, who stars in the show, are now hoping that it becomes part of secondary school curriculum.
And local police and crime commission officials, so these are policing ombuds people in the various regions, are also endorsing that view.
And it's a bit of a paradox because in response to some of the plausibility, political, and accuracy issues we're going to look at, Graham and Thorne assert that they have made...
This is what you would expect from dramatists.
They say they've made 100% a work of fiction.
Thorne says this in many interviews.
He says things like, we don't have answers.
We are dramatists.
Very honest about that.
Now, it's this slide from fiction into policy, however, that I'm super interested in because that's the structural pattern of the moral panic or the conspiracy theory that we tend to cover here.
And the crude version of that is QAnon metastasizing to the point of staffing the Trump cabinet.
But I think the subtler version of it is any form of compelling storytelling that morphs into a mass diagnosis of a constant.
Julian, I was thinking maybe you could do like a bullet point synopsis of the series for the people who haven't seen it.
Like a quick episode rundown.
And, you know, maybe your comments on, you know, is it a good conversation starter?
Yeah, so as you've said, Adolescence is this riveting TV miniseries, which everyone listening will already know, just four episodes.
We start off with a dramatic arrest of the young boy, Jamie.
It's early in the morning.
Police break open the door.
We are led to understand that the forcefulness of their raid is because he's accused of murdering a classmate named Katie.
Episode one is all about the arrest and the booking and how the police and lawyers deal with the boy and his family, who are in shock.
They're trying to make sense of what has happened.
By the end of that episode, we see the security camera footage that shows Jamie is in fact guilty.
So this is not going to be a whodunit, more of a why did he do it?
Right. The second episode then takes us into Jamie's school.
Looking for answers, we find rebellious kids, unruly classrooms, teachers who can't maintain control, generally bad behavior.
The lead detective, Bascom, who has a son in the school, and the son clues him in on the pervasive influence of manosphere culture on the kids.
More drama ensues in this episode as Bascom chases one of Jamie's classmates who has information on the murder weapon.
Then we get to episode three, which is taking these two established threads.
Jamie killed Katie, and the school kids are immersed in toxic red pill internet culture, and then exploring the connection between the two via a tense and really brilliantly acted psychological evaluation.
I think this is the episode that gets the most acclaim.
An interview between the boy, who's been locked up for seven months now awaiting trial, and forensic psychologist named Bryony.
The climactic moments here...
Are all about Jamie's aggressive intimidation tactics, how he can flip from being a vulnerable and clueless 13-year-old boy who doesn't want to answer certain questions, he's looking down at his shoes, into then adopting a super-threatening posture toward this adult professional woman.
He throws things, he stands tauntingly over her as she sits, he faints like he's going to hit her to see if she flinches when he does that.
What comes out in the interview is him accidentally confessing to the murder, which then makes him enraged again and try to take it back, as well as the story of humiliation that led to him committing the crime.
The final installment, episode four, is about Jamie's sister and his parents grieving, struggling to make sense of what has happened, taking refuge in one another as they face community shame and personal guilt, as well as the loss of the son.
And the brother, but it's a very explosive episode and there's controversy here in terms of what is being represented, which we'll discuss.
In this episode, we hear about how Jamie was always alone in his room for hours and you just don't know what they're getting up to on the internet.
And then there's this indirect reference to Andrew Tate that we heard also earlier from one of the police officers as having showed up in a video on Jamie's dad, Eddie's phone when he was just looking for content about the gym.
And how Andrew Tate was talking about how men should treat women and how men should be men and all of that shit.
Yes. So we're left with this sense of like, what went wrong?
We were imperfect, but we did our best and we didn't know what was going on with him.
And the implication seems to be it was the internet.
It was people like Tate.
It was the manosphere that caused this terrible tragedy.
Yeah. And that's why I think we should talk on...
How the writer-producers visualized and understood this drama and where it started.
So here's Stephen Graham on the initial idea.
I read an incident in the paper and it was about a young boy killing a young girl, stabbing a young girl to death.
And then not long after that, I saw on the news, on the television that, you know, it happened again in a different, completely different part of the country.
And a young boy had stabbed a young girl.
And if I'm really honest with you, both of those incidents really hurt my heart in a way, and it just made me think, what's going on?
Why? What's happened in today's society where a young boy, and they are young boys, feel a need or this age or whatever it may be, you know, I'll never understand it, to kill a young girl.
To stab a young girl to death.
So Graham hasn't named the two incidents specifically, but the consensus so far is that at least one of the murders he's speaking about is the September 2023 murder of 15-year-old Eliane Andam as she got off a bus in Croydon on the way to school.
Her assailant, Hassan Santamu, had just turned 17. And the confrontation that morning is reported to have escalated when Andam's friend, Sentamu's ex-girlfriend, asked him to return some personal items,
including a teddy bear that she'd given to him.
Now, he's been convicted of murder and sentenced to 23 years.
You have taken the life of a precious child.
You have devastated the lives of those who knew and loved Elian Andam, a bright, So that's the judge at the sentencing hearing.
Now, getting wind that Graham was inspired by this story has enraged the racist sector of the Manosphere, because Sentamu...
is an immigrant from Uganda, but Jamie Miller, the perpetrator in adolescence, is a white kid from Liverpool.
And so they are saying that the story is race-swapped and therefore inaccurate to what's actually happening on the ground in the UK.
But Thorne says that they did not want to make a story about race, but about the violence of boys against girls, regardless of race.
And we'll hear from Thorne a little bit later and how he gets more specific about that.
Now, the other story that Graham is probably talking about is that of Ava White of Liverpool, who was killed in November of 2021 at the age of 12 by a 14-year-old boy after she asked the boy and his friends to delete a video he had recorded of her and her friends at an outdoor Christmas tree lighting event.
That confrontation was over Ava not consenting to be videoed.
The perpetrator, the murderer, has not been named because he's still a minor.
But he's been sentenced to 13 years in prison.
Now, in both cases, the boys had carried knives to the scene.
And in the sentencing remarks in both cases, the judges noted the precipitous rise in general UK knife violence.
So that's a big background context here.
And so the stats on knife crime coming from 10 to 17-year-olds in the UK that were,
They're numbering over 3,000 in the latest reporting year, which reflects a 20% increase over the past decade.
But it also represents less than 20% of total knife crime.
There were 55,000 attacks in total in 2024.
Now, for perspective and scale, deaths by knife violence in the UK are in the mid-200s each year.
While, let's just compare to the US, in 2020, there were over 45,000 deaths by gun violence and over 73,000 gun-related injuries.
Yeah, some people who argue against gun control will say, well, if you look at the UK, they have this terrible knife problem because people don't have access to guns.
They're still going to commit violent crime.
And, of course, that completely falls apart when you start talking about school shootings and mass killings.
I looked it up.
Of course, it's a much bigger country, but there were also 50,000 knife crimes in the US in 2024.
So it's not like we get rid of the knife crime in exchange for gun crime.
It's all still happening.
Now, whether we're talking about boys or men, Over 90% of knife crime offenders in the UK are male, but it's also true that 90% of knife crime murder victims and those hospitalized with knife injuries are male as well.
So stabbing incidents in the UK are overwhelmingly male-on-male, and when girls or women are the victims, there is little direct evidence that online content is causal.
Online influence is part of this world, but it's not the smoking gun.
And so here's a moral panic red flag that neither the cases said to inspire adolescence nor the real world stats point to the influence of Andrew Tate or the manosphere in knife violence transformation.
Yeah, and that's really important because these are awful cases that you just cited, but the impulse to find an explanation for how something so awful could possibly happen can easily latch onto generalized intuitions.
Race. Video games, social media, incel culture, the kids today.
It's the lack of religious discipline, the demise of the strong father.
And in that understandable reaching for answers, I think so much can get overlooked regarding other factors as well as really asking ourselves, do we have evidence for causal connections here?
And I think we have to be totally clear if we're not already that none of this parsing does anything to diminish the fact that Andrew Tate is a violent and dangerous piece of shit who should walk into the ocean.
and never come back.
Agreed. And that the manosphere should be ground to dust and that the internet can be a dangerous place and that social media can have really bad effects on youth mental health.
I don't think anybody thinks there's anything controversial about any of that.
Yeah. We also can't say that there's no strong evidence for the internet provoking some extreme acts.
There was a case in the UK, very famous, still very raw, the South Asian teen who knife murdered three little girls at a dance class in Southport in January of this year.
This is the incident that instigated actually anti-immigrant rape.
That kid, he was 17 years old.
Axel Rudacabana.
He had dark web gore material in his search history.
And incidentally, he was another focus of the race-swapping conspiracy theory about the show because Q adjacent influencer Ian Miles Chong posted that Thorne and Graham had based the show on Rudacabana and Elon Musk bumped that post with a wow,
which is his typical way of just bumping something without really saying anything about it.
Yeah, I mean, it's shitty analysis.
I don't know if I go so far as to say it's a conspiracy theory, because these are the big events that have been in the news, and it does just so happen that the perpetrators don't match the profile of the kid who's in the show.
Well, yes.
I mean, in the sense that they have to make up that this is the writer's intentions, was to make actual real-world incidents and actually flip them around.
So we'll get to their intentions in a bit.
And it is true that there's a legitimate Tate effect that impacts in real life domestic violence and partner crime in the UK.
There was a case in July of 2024.
A 24-year-old former soldier named Kyle Clifford murdered his ex-partner, Louise Hunt, along with her mother, Carol, and sister Hannah at their home in Hertfordshire.
And court proceedings revealed that Clifford had watched up to 10 Andrew Tate videos along with pornography within the 24 hours before committing the murders.
This is a much clearer case, causal relationship case, than anything that Adolescence is pointing to.
And I'm going in this direction because my concern, at least, is that when it comes to kids, if you overweight for Tate or other social media or information I think?
kids, you don't have to look for other causes of resentment, alienation, mental health stress, misogyny, or rage.
And you may wind up leaning into policy solutions, and Thorne is out there right now promoting mobile phone and social media bans that may continue, if not even deepen the problem.
So the bottom line for me on the origin story is that Stephen Graham was really moved by
Not very closely related tragedies.
And then he became aware of the violence of the manosphere, and as artists do, he connected them together in a moving story that put his acting chops at the center of it all, including his past expertise with this single-take format,
which he worked with first in a restaurant drama called Boiling Point in 2021, which is actually a really great movie.
Now, Graham and Thorne It's clear, earnestly, they want to answer these deep questions of who is responsible for this and where have we all gone wrong.
But they've begun, unfortunately, I think, with a weak correlation to build a piece of art.
And that's fair, because it's art.
And maybe it's worth telling a cautionary tale that the Tate effect is so powerful that any suburban white kid in the UK can be turned into a knife murderer.
But what do you think, Julian?
Look, online radicalization is just such a I think all of it is worth looking at very carefully, figuring out how to do good content moderation, and yeah, sure, how to protect minors from exposure and exploitation.
I think having certain kinds of rules in schools makes sense.
I don't think some of the rationales are necessarily well substantiated.
Clearly, as we've covered here for five years, digital disinformation has real-world impacts.
But these don't happen in a vacuum.
I think being indoctrinated into hateful beliefs or misled by pseudoscience and conspiracy theories requires some kind of pre-existing vulnerability.
And that could include economic precarity, loss of community or loved ones, mental health crises, or already having some beliefs, some cognitive vulnerabilities and emotional convictions that rhyme with the new content.
But I think the teenage or pre-teen boy who would Stab one of his classmates to death.
I just am not sure that's a creation of the manosphere.
Rather, the boy with those kinds of tendencies, with that kind of pathology or terrible trauma history of his own, and therefore rage, might be drawn to that kind of content because of what's already going on inside him.
The thing is, plenty of other boys are drawn to that stuff too, and they don't end up committing murder.
So I see some similarities here, Matthew, to moral panics around heavy metal music and violent films and video games and now social media.
But one difference here is that people like Tate actually do advocate emotional, verbal, and physical abuse of girls and women in order to get them to submit.
Like Judas Priest wasn't actually saying anything like that when there was that moral panic in the 80s around this.
This double suicide that happened.
The matosphere does espouse a model of masculinity and control and wealth building and therefore status building that is about treating women like property, manipulating them, degrading, and then in Tate's case, sex trafficking, something that he's been charged with.
So in this way, I see Tate as a little more similar in terms of online radicalization to groups like ISIS or Al Qaeda.
Because of the explicit glorification of and then instructions for how to enact violence within an indoctrinating worldview or belief system.
And as we know, it's a small number in both of these cases who have all of the other factors in place that then make them take the most extreme actions.
And that's true of these white supremacist boards on 4chan, for example.
I should add that Tate is not telling anyone to kill.
I don't want to get sued for that.
Andrew Tate has not told you to kill anyone.
I'm more concerned actually with a generalized set of attitudes that some boys may be learning about relationships and sex and girls from people like Tate and the rest of the manosphere.
Yeah, absolutely.
I do think they need to be educated about why all of that is grotesque and they need to be supported in developing more emotionally healthy ways of relating.
If this story That is highlighting really sensational violence goes some distance towards having those conversations happen more so that we do get better support and education for kids.
I think that's a good thing, but we're sort of betwixt and between here.
Thank you.
So getting deeper into the analysis here, I'm going to argue that the politics of the show are deceptively conservative.
And the aesthetics actually both express that and also cover it up.
And I don't think this was intentional at all, because this is what Thorne told a screening audience.
This is in an article.
Everything's linked in the show notes, by the way.
But Julian, this is what he says.
One of our main aims is that beautiful saying, it takes a village to raise a child.
We didn't want to point the blame at anyone specifically or in particular.
We wanted to say that we're all accountable in many ways for this kind of thing, be that parents, teachers, government, society, community.
Well, he left out police and politicians, so we'll get there.
But clearly, I think he aspires to a holistic view, or he tried to develop one after the train left the station.
Because here's something crucial about how this came together.
It was on the basis of the technical success of Boiling Point's one-take method that Graham and Thorne had been asked to produce a series using the one-take method.
They didn't start with the idea.
They were casting around for a subject, and then Graham saw these stories, they felt compelling to him, and then this is what Jack Thorne told the publication The Wrap.
I didn't want to make this easy and blame the parents.
I want to create a complicated portrait, he explained.
After a female colleague suggested he explore incel culture online, Thorne soon realized he had a starting point for Jamie's radicalization.
It's an interesting use of the word radicalization.
You used it above to describe categorizing Tate within the sort of structural framework of what do online cultish groups that drive people towards violence do.
When applied to Jamie, I don't know whether he's radicalized or not, right?
It's totally unclear.
Anyway, both of these guys know how they are going to do this thing, but they don't know what it is.
And they're going to learn on the job.
On one take, I guess you could say.
And so I want to talk about that single take technique.
How did it strike you, Julian?
Yeah, it's very engaging.
It gives the seamless sense of being right there in the scene, in that world.
You're witnessing these events without the interruptions of edits or fades in and out, and so there's this immersion in what's going on.
Yeah, it's extraordinarily compelling, and I don't think it would have done as well without it.
And it's a technique that goes back about 70 years, actually.
It goes by a number of names.
Not necessarily one take, but the principle of the least amount of camera intervention or editing intervention possible.
So the objective realism technique focuses on the detached observer.
There's a principle of direct cinema, which strives for Just minimal filmmaker intervention and then surface realism or getting the details just exquisitely solid.
And what all of these genres have in common, however, is that the inner lives of the characters are hard to access.
In some cases, purposefully obscured by this concentration on surfaces so that the viewer is really prompted to kind of make armchair decisions of what's going on.
And people have been doing that very much so.
Yeah, it also makes me think of that whole Lars von Trier dogma kind of movement that was going on, I think, in the early 2000s or maybe the late 90s, where it's all about just wanting to show exactly what's happening.
They usually didn't use music at all.
It was like, we're just going to be there and move through the subject matter.
Right. So what I have found after watching this through a few times is that even when the camera is able to stay with the framing of the character and with the emotions of the character, there's one big exception at the end where Stephen Graham is the focus.
As a viewer, I'm already detached and I'm ready to move on with the flow of surfaces and actions because the camera is always on a steadicam.
It's always on a track.
It's always going to be passed off to some other person.
So there's this constant motion that follows clumps of characters at a time.
And that tends to mean that I can't really invest in a single human being, really.
It's a very passive feeling.
It's interesting because the emergence of the Steadicam technology means that it takes us away from the old cinema verite where it would have been a lot more shaky because the cameraman's moving around as everything is happening.
It's fascinating analysis, Matthew, because it does start to sound a bit like some of what we and other people have talked about in terms of the endless scroll of frictionless social media.
Frictionless is a great word, actually.
There's nothing...
That apparently gets in the way between the camera and the character, but that comes with a price because there's a real problem in adolescence when we never get clear internal access to what makes Jamie as a 13-year-old murderer tick,
which is what you would do with a camera with portraiture or internal monologue or any of the other tricks that have been developed over 100 years.
I think.
from the outside, but he's never allowed to speak in a context of receptivity and trust.
Like the camera can watch him and surveil him, but it doesn't engage with him.
And the internet influence, therefore, that everyone is saying is at the heart of this show is
Becomes this sort of offstage hearsay.
You can't really show it anyway, right?
You couldn't use the one take and really go into people's phone histories or whatever.
And the hearsay is then coming from uninformed adults making passing comments until Adam tells his dad, Luke Bascom, the detective inspector, just the basics that the Instagram emojis left by Katie and her friends on Jamie's posts of Instagram lingerie models.
Point to Tate-adjacent terms like incel or the 80-20 rule or the red and blue pills.
Luke thinks that's a Matrix reference to begin with.
That's how out of touch he is.
We get the barest amount of human detail from this technique, and yet everybody wants to leap to causes and solutions.
Yeah, hearing you say it that way makes me also reflect on how the internet then becomes this mysterious world that we're only hearing about.
It's not something that's ever shown.
None of the adults are really familiar with it at all.
Yeah, it's a fascinating thing.
And the contrast with everything you're describing about this one-take technique would be a more novelistic kind of filmmaking where you go in and out and back and forth and you show what's happening with different characters at different times.
And there's more of an opportunity to reflect on the inner lives of the characters and on how the story is experienced by everyone involved, right?
Well, the screen also in contemporary filmmaking that involves sort of internet culture also becomes like an interface screen, right?
Where the texts begin to appear on the screen, where you have, you know, bubbles and whatever.
There's all kinds of ways of doing that.
But actually, there's this perfect usage of this technique to represent the absolute cluelessness and alienation of the adult world from the internet, which is depicted as though it's some kind of like, you know, Yeah,
And so even though it's a film about this horrific influence on these kids in terms of how they frame it, we as the viewer are never actually given an experience of what that's like.
No. We're not taken on to an Andrew Tate forum.
No. We're not seeing what is going on with the girls in terms of the social media bullying or what.
Right. So I want to get to that.
That's where I want us to end because I think that's the biggest hole.
I want to turn to three fiction choices that they make, that I think Thorne and Graham make, that play to their strengths, which are considerable, and I admire the filmmaking.
But they also muddy the water of this discussion about a piece of media that is ultimately interpretable because it is observant, because there's no evidence.
Right. So the first thing is that the whole first episode is this propaganda-style meditation on policing proceduralism.
And the one take technique kind of suggests that there's an inexorable process to things.
Like one thing has to follow another.
There's going to be no forks in the road.
Everything is, I mean, it mimics the sort of like relentless process that you would go through very effectively.
It's purpose-built to this Perfect procedure that has to unfold in a certain way.
So I really had the impression that the detectives and the intake officers and the social worker and the nurse and the strip search guys and the barrister were all doing highly refined and sensitive work to protect Jamie's dignity during his arrest intake.
And the technique was part of that.
Absolutely. I had a sense that all of these procedures were very carefully calibrated to protect the rights of the prisoner, especially of a child in an adult setting.
I remember thinking the English are probably significantly better at this than Americans.
There's a real sense of civility and service within the tight constraints of a kind of respectful policing.
Yeah, however, it's a treatment that sets the tone for the rest of the series that kind of presents the policing and legal systems as a last line of institutional defense in a culture where parents and schools are checked out and useless.
Not because they're overworked or that schools are chronically underfunded, but because these days the kids are hopelessly feral and we just don't know why.
It must be the phones.
The thing, the problem with the fiction here is that I, like you, had this impression that, oh, they're doing this really well.
They're really following the book.
However, Bascom breaks a fuckton of rules throughout the show.
And the most egregious one is that he hides crucial evidence from the lawyer before the interview.
And this is actually a violation of the UK's Police and Criminal Evidence Act.
Basically, the lawyer went into that interview blind, and he couldn't really protect his client.
Later, Bascom waylays one of Jamie's friends at school about the murder weapon.
But doesn't tell him his rights and he winds up chasing him down the street and into an alleyway and forcing a confession and then a snap arrest.
Now, secondly, Bascom is allowed to break the rules, I think, because somebody has to.
Things are really bad.
And we see this in episode two when we visit Jamie's school and there's this nightmare of noise.
You described it, bullying.
There's stolen lunch money.
Evidently zero rules about mobile phone usage.
Endless classroom and schoolyard taunts and teachers who are, there's one exception here, and it's actually the woman who plays Stephen Graham's wife who sits with Jade.
They're completely checked out, they're enraged, or they're teaching kids by running in-class videos.
Yeah, there's this general message throughout that we are dealing with something new and that the phones, the social media, the Tate effect is this, this is the ingredient X that's causing all the problems and it transcends everything else.
This is a way in which we could see adolescence as perhaps, I don't want to be unfair here, but it's a little bit like an updated Wii for Madness or Go Ask Alice or Geraldo scaring the crap out of TV viewers in the 80s about satanic ritual abuse.
There's this powerful out-of-control phenomenon.
It's sweeping across the land.
As Graham says, it happened in one place and then in one completely other community.
The same thing.
What is going on here?
It's a miasma.
Yeah, and then you hear it too when Keir Starmer is speaking in the House of Commons.
You hear other, if you watch that longer video.
You hear people talking about something is driving our young men to commit knife crime, like to commit horrific violence in this way.
What is it?
We have to understand that there's this out-of-control phenomenon.
It's turning kids into monsters across the land.
The teachers can't handle it.
Parents are clueless.
The brave cops have to break some rules in order to try and restore order.
I don't get the sense that the filmmakers deliberately leave out political or socionomic factors.
It just seems that they...
don't weight those as being interesting or important or pressing when compared to incel culture and online bullying.
And they might not know much about that stuff.
I mean, they're already sort of learning on the job about incel culture.
And I agree about intention.
The thing is, if your mandate as an artist is to go with your instinct for compelling story making, you're going to follow your conventions.
You're going to follow your own skills, your own values.
You're going to follow what the Netflix algorithms demand.
And
I think the truth is, earnestly leaning into one path is simply going to close other pathways off.
So about school, the school scenes, on one hand, I was swept up in this whole sort of Lord of the Flies pathos.
But I'm also the kid of two lifelong high school teachers.
And I got these creepy, familiar feelings that the school and the teachers were getting stigmatized as ineffective.
I'm very used to that.
And it's true that shitty schools exist, but so much of it is about luck and resources.
I think what we're given in adolescence is a middle or lower middle class suburban school, predominantly white, but racially mixed.
And this objective realism style, plus not naming the town, gives the impression of this is a generic school and conditions are really bad pretty much all over.
So I think a big question here is Jamie's school, typical, is it's standing in for big school.
Thorne describes how he worked in a school as a learning support worker.
Stephen Graham's wife, who appears in the show, she was actually a teacher.
Maybe that's why she did that role so well.
He's been getting emails from teachers saying, yes, bang on.
But I think we have to be careful with this because schools are variable in quality.
In a lot of social media comments, you'll see teachers say that the depiction was bang on.
But I've also found a lot of pushback.
And I spoke to one veteran teacher, 15 years in several London schools, and they told me that the Netflix school scenario was plausible, but they weren't personally familiar with it in several different schools.
If you had really bad administration and terrible luck in the teaching pool, also, if unemployment was super high in the town, there could be this perfect storm.
But then they also said that the notion that there was no controls on mobile phone use is just crazy.
Because in the schools that he knows of, mobile phone use is pretty strictly prohibited.
Some schools even offer daytime phone cubby lockers.
And then they have these pastoral care teams who do a ton of counseling around online safety because most of the conflict that they have to actually mitigate happens in online chat groups between themselves outside of school hours.
So these are professionals who are very familiar with all of this material.
Now, another source that I talked to said that the feral school scene seemed outdated by a number of decades.
And these days, there tends to be a lot of centralization, a lot more sort of control and disciplinary work, a lot of work prep as well, and then sharply increased academic pressure through a reformed program called the General Certificate of Secondary Education Exams,
which started in 2017.
And actually, there are education critics in the UK who report that it's actually this heavier discipline, which has been dubbed by some the cult of the exam, is causing its own mental health spikes in the high school population.
So secondary schools in England are good or they're not great.
Some might be bad.
Some might be lucky.
Some might be unlucky.
But what we do know is the following.
Between 2009 and 10 and 2019 and 20, Secondary school spending per pupil decreased in the UK by 9% in real terms, marking the most significant reduction since Thatcher's 1980s.
There have been some attempts to reverse this, but funding levels have not returned to their 2010 peak.
That's 15 years ago.
Also over the past decade, UK secondary school teachers have seen a 13% reduction in their salaries compared to 2010.
15 years ago, 13% less than what they were making in 2010.
Recruitment and retention are in the tank.
Nearly a third of teachers who qualified in the last decade have left the profession.
In December of 2024, the government proposed a 2.8% pay increase for all public sector workers, including teachers.
Major unions said the offer was shite given the cost of living rises.
That is a big part of the context.
And we're not going to get any of that from a piece of art, but I wanted to make sure that it's out there because we have all of these ideas about what institutions are doing.
And especially given my own family background, I'm very, very particular about, okay, well, if you're going to depict schools in a particular way, where are you actually going to assign some kind of responsibility?
Okay, the third thing I wanted to bring up in terms of the fictional choices issue is the third episode, which I think, Julian, you said that it was the most lauded or the most noted.
And it is riveting.
It's super painful.
The psychologist's name is Bryony Ariston.
She's hired by the family to hopefully bolster Jamie's not-guilty plea.
However, to do it, she has to contrive a therapeutic alliance.
She has to, I would say because she knows that the task is limited, she only has like five appointments or whatever, she has to pretend to be attuned to his needs instead of assessing whether or not he's incompetent.
And from my reading, I think he can feel it.
And it scrambles him to the point of confessing and aggressing.
And raging at her.
And she winds up playing a kind of symbolic surrogate mother figure, like the one parental figure in the institutional complex that could possibly do something for him, except that she's not ultimately responsible for his care.
And I think we're meant to understand a lot about Jamie from this interaction.
But he remains a black box, partly because of the film technique, but also partly because she has very specific answers that she needs.
And she's not really going to go that far with unfolding his inner life.
She has some cueing questions, but they're really about reality testing.
And so I think he remains in a black box except for the betrayal and abandonment he shows when she cuts it off, which is really horrible.
I mean, he knows that it's going to be over and it ends with, you know, but how do you actually assess me?
What do you think of me as a human being?
Am I okay as a human being?
Do you like me?
And she cannot answer.
She has to go.
She has to go.
And so here's my problem with, we're going to talk about whether or not this series You just blackpilled them.
Well, I mean, what is on offer there?
Except a sort of, I don't know, engaged and apparently warm extension of the surveillance state.
Like, what is actually going on there?
It's supposed to feel like caregiving, and it can't, because she's testing.
She's testing him.
And that's all we see.
I mean, maybe he's getting good therapy, you know, in other regards at the detention center.
I don't know.
But yeah, it was very, very sort of chilling to me.
What did you think of that one?
Well, you know, reflecting on it right now as we're covering it, it is the most sustained depiction of how a female experiences the misogyny and aggression that the boy has been.
We're led to believe, right?
Indoctrinated into.
So that's interesting.
But yeah, I'm absolutely right there with you.
It is a procedural kind of legal interrogation dressed up in therapeutic clothing, and it's uncomfortable.
comfortable.
So Julian, in our last segment here, I want to I hope it's the beginning of a discussion.
And listen...
We don't have any answers here, and we're not saying this is some sort of documentary that takes you inside.
What we wanted to do with this drama was pose a question, and we wanted to understand violence towards girls by boys.
Specifically, I'm saying not men towards women, boys towards girls.
And we wanted to get inside that problem, and we wanted to...
Make it as complex as possible.
Okay, I think it's really interesting that they really want to look at violence towards girls by boys and not men towards women, because I think that actually the backdrop of their sort of causal suggestions is violence of men against women in general.
If they want to connect it to the manosphere, then that's what they have to do.
And I don't feel like we learn that much about how the Tate or Manosphere content is absorbed and weaponized within this kid group, and against whom, because it goes in a couple of different directions.
The writers almost send us in a really interesting direction by having Katie instigate the humiliation.
She's the one that suggests that Jamie is an incel in the Instagram comments.
And the reason that I say that that's interesting is...
Absolutely not to suggest that somehow she is to be blamed or something like that, but to imagine what it would be like for a 13 or 14-year-old girl to actually flip that language back upon the aggressor and to use it in a defensive manner.
But they don't really explore that.
They leave that hanging.
Thorne says in an interview that they didn't want to fall back on the trope of the perfect victim, and they didn't, but...
They also didn't give her a voice at all.
We have no idea what was going on for Katie or for Jade.
Yeah, and as we've already covered, the connections they're making are very tenuous.
They're not supported by the evidence.
They're not reflected in real-life events that they point to being inspired by.
So a lot of the choices are more reflective of their dramatic intuitions.
As we'll discuss, perhaps their personal biases or limitations.
Right, which then gets reflected in the sort of online discourse, right?
It's a fascinating kind of media event that way.
Yeah, yeah.
And I'll just say too, in preparation for this, I watched one of the British morning TV shows and they dedicated at least 30 minutes, excuse me, 30% of the segment to discussing which emojis should parents be on the lookout for if they want to understand how dangerous the online space is for their kids.
And that is utterly, utterly hopeless.
Because whatever the emoji vocabulary is right now, it's going to change next week.
And it's not the fucking emojis, guys.
Okay, anyway.
We do have Jade, who is Katie's friend, and she is given good screen time.
But the camera only really records her despair and rage.
She's not in any position to offer any insight.
Like Adam, who's Bascom's son, she is so far from being able to trust the adults around her that it's hopeless to glean anything from the impassive camera.
Thorne did say in one interview I heard that he wished he'd had more time to spend on Jade.
And I really empathized when I heard him say that because I realized, oh, however you get into that business and however the budget shakes down and whatever the producers say you have time for, you're going to have to make really, really hard decisions.
So no girl, therefore, in the scenario is given space to tell us what that content feels like to them, what it does to the boys around them, and how they respond to it, and perhaps flip it around to use it in defense.
Yeah, and it feels like the only way they were able to put some of that in for whatever reason is we see how Right.
Yeah, so we have desperate rage from her.
And, you know, speaking of choices, I just think it would have taken about two minutes to script some description from her.
I think this is what the fourth episode does.
He could have easily picked some of that up from his dad.
I'll say more about that.
But this kind of ties into Thorne's insistence that he's focused on boys versus girls and not men versus women because I just don't think you can separate those.
Yeah, so I want to be cautious here because we don't actually see anything exactly like this from his dad that shows that level of menacing intimidation towards women, or do we?
Well... I definitely see in the fourth episode this barely controlled embodied rage that is so normalized that Manda and Lisa are obviously used to avoiding and pacifying it.
They have all kinds of strategies for sort of keeping him at a simmer instead of boiling over.
And their management of him is like the entire focus of the last episode.
And I think that's a...
So Thorne goes on to say the following:
Stephen had one stipulation right at the beginning of the writing process, which is, we're not going to blame the parents.
We're not going to do a drama which says someone does this because they've got an alcoholic father who hits them, or they've got a mother that controls them, or any of those sorts of tropes.
His belief, my belief, is that things are a lot more complex than that.
I think the ironies here are twofold.
First of all, I think it's ironic to talk about not blaming the family because Graham becomes the singular focus of the last episode driven by the weight of familial shame and guilt.
There are no scenes for institutional or structural consideration.
There's no meeting with the school pastoral care worker.
There's no interview or speech from a local politician.
I think with a one-take technique, you could probably have some official on television in a room as you were passing by giving some sort of analysis of the thing.
There's no confrontation with a manosphere influencer or tech administrator.
There's no conversations between, I think this is the most important part, just women and girls about self-defense and mutual aid.
So the focal point of episode four has to be the nuclear family, which, you know, they've been displaced from Liverpool.
They're far away from their extended family and their community.
They don't really feel at home where they are.
They feel like they are sort of Fish out of water in whatever this neighborhood is.
Now, I'm not saying that the writers would have to do any or all of these things, but they just make choices that I think don't line up with their intentions.
And then the second irony is that Eddie clearly has anger issues.
I've seen comments using terms like toxic, abusive, violent outbursts.
Lisa and Amanda have to do whatever they can to walk on eggshells.
They have to manage him the entire day to find the perfect activity.
They have to do their best to keep him together.
And I don't get the impression that this is the first time.
This is something that they're actually skilled at.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's a tough one.
I mean, we're talking about a character in a drama who's going through incredible stress and a family trying to...
Love one another and sort of stick together through that devastating loss.
The confusion, the guilt that they all feel, the social shame because then you have the sense that they're being singled out and the van is being spray painted.
I think what the filmmakers wanted to depict was a dad being emotionally distraught who doesn't have good tools to manage what has happened.
I don't think the filmmakers want us to see him as abusive in a way that played a role in the son's crime.
I feel like that's fairly explicit.
But I do get the critique that says, look, in real life, dads who act this way can be scary and they can have a really big impact on their families.
And I do hear the comment that says, well, who knows what's going on that we're not.
Well, I really think it's a Rorschach test for people's family experience and what they have radar for.
I think there's a certain gender divide between how this is viewed and how suspicious people are of Eddie's behavior.
I mean, people will have very different views on what a family trying to love each other looks like.
I do think that there's a good amount of feedback to show that there's a difference between what Graham and Thorne want and what comes across for many viewers.
I don't think if they looked at that in post and they said, wow, are people going to say that Eddie was extremely abusive and that that's the source of some of the violent outbursts that Jamie expressed?
I don't think they answered that question.
And if they had before shooting that last episode, maybe there would have been some other things thrown in.
I don't know.
So Eddie confesses his own history of intergenerational abuse.
And he also asserts that he's tried to do better than his own dad.
I think this is like a focal point.
It's like a touchstone for a lot of people who really want to maintain their...
Attunement with that character, their identification with them.
They want to say, I know people like that and they're not bad people.
But my question for the writers and for the people who love that sort of depiction is, what makes us believe that Eddie actually accomplished that or that he really drew down the intergenerational violence given the behavior that we see?
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, look, we've been offering plenty of critiques here, and I'm in alignment with a lot of what you're referring to.
I still think for me in the final episode, if Eddie had beaten his kid, if his character had beaten his kid, let alone abused him in the ways that nonce could imply, which is the word that gets spray-painted on his work fan, the rawness of the interactions were being shown.
...to me would have meant, just dramatically, just structurally, in terms of the story, that his wife or daughter would have yelled that to him in that moment.
It's just too powerful of a dramatic climax to leave it out if that was really the case.
So what we're given instead is this imperfect, working-class English guy who's likely never done therapy or any kind of personal growth.
He's a product of his society.
He's overwhelmed by massive stress.
And he's telling us very intensely that his dad beat him.
And he promised he would never do that to his kids.
So in this particular scene of this piece of fiction, I walk away believing that character, but I understand how triggering that probably is for some other viewers.
Well, and if you have that experience, you might not believe him to be a reliable narrator of his own sort of behavior.
Oh, and also, I didn't assume that Nance referred to Jamie as a victim.
That I thought that they might take a left turn into, oh, we're going to find out that there's something hidden about Eddie's life that people in the town are actually aware of and that they're trying to expose now and this is the way they're going to do it.
Oh, so maybe this is why they left Liverpool, right?
Exactly! And we can't go back there.
He keeps saying we can't go back there.
And so...
And then the other thing is when you say, well, they would have yelled that at him.
They would have put that back in his face.
Domestic violence can further suppress family members' capacity to speak.
Yes. In real life, yes.
I'm just saying in terms of what we're being shown, I would think that's too great an opportunity for one of them to break through and say, no, you actually are awful and you did do these things that you're saying you didn't do.
You didn't know it was going to be as big.
Why do you think it's become as big?
I think because everyone making it, and I accept myself from this, is very good.
So, you know, it's a well-made show.
It's tapped into something quite primal which is people's fears of what happens when teenagers' doors are closed.
And that is the key to it, isn't it?
It's the idea that they are in this hidden world.
It's not like they're down at the park playing football or with their mates at a chess competition or whatever it happens to be.
Well, you used to worry about your kid going out at night and now you worry about your kid staying in at night.
I agree with Thorne here that children have secret lives.
They always have secret lives.
Yeah, inevitably our children will have secret lives.
I still think it's worth saying that there is something new about the internet and social media and smartphones that amplifies an aspect of that secrecy in an undeniable way.
Well, okay.
As fellow children of the 1980s, Julian, maybe you're familiar with being out of the house for...
12, 14 hours at a time.
So I started riding the subway here in Toronto when I was seven years old.
So I could be downtown, 14, 15 years old.
My parents would have literally no idea where I was in the city.
There were payphones.
If I was in trouble, I had a quarter sewn into the hem of my pants.
I could use the payphone.
I find that...
You know, like, if I wanted to have access to pornography, I would steal myself into an adult bookstore and nobody would know, except the owner of the store who might kick me out.
So I don't know.
There's something about the surveillance culture for young people that's actually skyrocketed.
And yet we have almost an accelerated concern over what exactly are they getting into.
And I wonder if it's not a situation of We all know too much about what we ourselves are doing.
It's like, I'm taking in so much data, and it's bothering me.
I wonder how much my children are taking in.
But like you can at this point open a YouTube account for your kids with restrictions on it.
We haven't done that because they're quite restrictive.
But what we do do is that both of the kids are on my YouTube account, which totally screws up my algorithm.
But it also kind of cross-pollinates their algorithm because they'll get like documentaries on anti-fascism and stuff like that.
But like I can literally go through...
Yeah. Going back weeks...
To see what they have encountered in their world.
I don't use that in a suppressive way at all.
Occasionally, there's something to discuss, and I'll bring it up in some kind of surreptitious way.
But yeah, I don't really...
There's something about this that isn't checking out for me.
I hear you.
We have a lot of insight into what our children are doing, actually, more than ever before.
Because our kids are different ages.
We're at slightly different points in this journey.
My kid is just at the beginning because she's just about to turn seven.
I have all of that sense of trepidation about the unknown and how do we protect her.
You have kids who are a little older and so you have much more experience with regard to all of this, with the internet, with phones, with gaming.
And so it's actually really good to hear your perspective.
I hope I'm not hopelessly positive, but my experience so far is that the internet is part of the world and the same rules apply with regard to relating to your kids.
It's not some deeper mystery than we've really faced before.
There are more extreme cul-de-sacs, for sure.
There's no way that I could have accessed dark web content by traveling downtown with a quarter in my pocket.
But those are very sort of outlier, I think, examples and experiences.
But getting back to what Thorne is saying about the success of the series, he's saying that there's something really primal.
And I think that the primal thing is that I think it's much harder to locate violence in,
you know, I wanted to wrap up because I think it's worth engaging this series as a fiction,
as a piece of drama that has all of these Political and educational implications now.
Is it going to be shown in schools?
I think that's a bad idea.
Is it going to be shown to parliamentarians?
Probably not great either without a lot of, I don't know, guided discussion or something like that.
But because it's such a powerful piece of art, I was thinking, okay, well, you've complained enough about it.
What would you do in that last episode that would start to address these questions of especially how Do we understand teenagers' lives?
And if you're going to have a female murder victim at the center of the series, are you going to learn something about female girls?
Are you going to actually learn something?
And so I came up with this alternate episode four possibility.
It would have required different writers and directors.
But I think that it could have been a single take run through Lisa's day on that same Eddie's 50th birthday or around that time.
Okay, and this is the sister of the boy.
The sister, right, yeah.
So nobody has been in Jamie's room.
He's been away for 13 months.
She finally screws up her courage and she goes in.
She doesn't know what she's gonna find.
She knows that she wants to understand something.
She looks through his online history and begins to piece things together.
This is where we see what he has been looking at and what it means.
This is where we hear what does Andrew Tate say about women and violence.
This is where we understand how this stuff is networked.
Then she goes and tracks down Jade because she wants to learn more about what Jade was talking about with Katie.
And so the camera can follow Lisa to their meeting at a park.
She can ask Jade questions about how did Katie absorb the harassment because this whole thing started because a sexting photograph of Katie got leaked to the friend group and then she was harassed.
Did Katie have anyone else to talk to?
How did it feel for them as girls to be exposed to Manosphere content?
And then Lisa could take a bus.
To the detention center.
To visit Jamie.
They might talk quietly about what actually happened.
And I think she might be in the position for him to trust her.
Trust her enough to be transparent.
She knows who he is.
She's from the family.
And she can be some sort of bridge, I think.
And maybe that conversation motivates the guilty plea.
Maybe that's the climax.
You know, she leaves the prison.
Or maybe she travels home and we see her talking quietly with mom about everything that she learned.
So Netflix producers Matthew Remsky is available for Adolescence Season 2. I must say that he's contractually obligated to share his earnings from that with the Conspirituality team.
Very good.
Feel free to email us at conspirituality at gmail.com.
Yeah, so Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, wonderful artistic work.
