One Sunday morning in October 2007, I woke up without having seen someone brutally stabbed for the last time. I was 16, and along with a few other friends, I had stayed over at my friend Peter’s house in east Midtown Manhattan. Peter’s father took us all out for breakfast at a diner on nearby 2nd Avenue and 35th Street, and as the scrambled eggs showed up, there was a commotion outside. Thirty-eight-year-old Lee Coleman, schizophrenic and bipolar, was on top of psychologist Susan Barron, 67, who had the leash of her small dog around her wrist. He was stabbing away, methodically plunging one of four kitchen knives into her all over, and then putting one knife down and switching to another.
What felt like both a short time and a lifetime later, a gun went off. Off-duty police officer Gregory Chin shot Coleman. Police and ambulances arrived. My friends watched rapt and I took off. I vividly remember not wanting to watch anyone die, though I learned from the cover story of the New York Post the next day, “SECOND AVENUE SLASHER,” that Barron had survived the dozens of knife wounds and was in intensive care and Coleman survived the bullet. I learned just as I was writing this that Coleman’s family had tried to warn police that the soon-to-be slasher was dangerous and off his meds. “Coleman’s brother, Craig, said that in the hours before the attack,” the New York Post reported the next day, “Lee had been babbling about ‘demons.’”
I have thought about that attack every time I have picked up a kitchen knife for 18 years. And I thought about it while watching the captivating but deeply flawed miniseries Adolescence, which, per the New York Times, Netflix says “was the most watched show on the platform in dozens of countries after it debuted, including the United States.” The show’s four episodes each comprise one long, single shot, a triumph of directorial difficulty that sweeps the viewer into the gushing river of drama that ensues after a kitchen knife stabbing in Britain of a teenage girl. As the first episode begins, we ride along with the police as they batter down a door and arrest the innocent-seeming 13-year-old Jamie Miller, reassuringly follow legal protocol as they remove him to the police station, inform his parents of their rights, and secure legal representation for the accused. Only by the end of the episode, during a witness interrogation in the presence of Jamie’s father, Eddie Miller (Stephen Graham, in an unbelievably moving performance), do we come to understand that Jamie’s protestations that he didn’t do it can’t be true. Like almost everything that takes place on British public streets, the crime is on video. We see Jamie following a girl for hours, then accosting her and stabbing her repeatedly. “What have you done?” his father can barely bring himself to say.
The second episode follows the arresting officer, DI Luke Bascombe (actor and rapper Ashley Walters, in a performance that will only be overlooked for awards because of Graham’s show-stealing turn) and his partner spending time at Jamie’s school, also his own son’s school, trying to figure out why Jamie could have possibly been driven to do such a thing. Here we run into the problem with Adolescence, which is that for such a well-made piece of art, it is not a piece of art at all; it is a very beautifully wrought PSA. DI Bascombe, interviewing Jamie’s classmates, finds with his son’s translational help that in the social world of the young British teenagers, a confusing and impenetrable culture has taken hold, expressed in emoji and with the action taking place as much in Instagram and YouTube comments as in the classroom or on the playground. The young boys have fallen prey to something even they themselves call the “Manosphere,” though it is usually only called this by researchers into online radicalization. And right-wing masculinity influencer Andrew Tate is namechecked. The boys, lacking much real-world experience of sexual relations, are uniquely vulnerable to buying radicalizing claims such as the “80-20 rule,” namely that 80% of women go for 20% of men, so the rest of the guys are out of luck dating market-wise.
Is it true that young boys are interested in this kind of thing, partly because their own intense yearning for attention from girls is so new that they don’t have a great way to sort reasonable claims from provocative BS on the internet made by criminal pimps trying to juice them for ad bucks? Maybe! There is certainly something to the idea, propounded most convincingly by Jonathan Haidt, that over the past couple of decades, parents have become much too concerned with dangers in the real world and too unconcerned with online dangers to children, leading to a world with little free play and damaging levels of time online during children’s formative years.
The third episode depicts a psychological assessment of Jamie, who explains that his eventual victim had bullied him, calling him an “incel” in online comments after he asked her out, and showing him flashing with anger when he can’t win with charm. The fourth episode, by far the most moving, shows Jamie’s parents and sister dealing with the fallout. They don’t want to believe that what happened happened, and they are trying to figure out how to lead a normal life in the wake of this horror. His father, in many ways an exemplary man, is just trying to hold it all together while simultaneously trying to compartmentalize, questioning whether he is responsible for his son’s monstrous deed. I won’t describe in more detail so as not to ruin it, but the acting and directing is as good as that in any show you’ve seen.
The problem is that despite the verisimilitude Adolescence achieves through its one-shot style, the entire sequence of events it describes is simply not psychologically plausible. Supposedly, it only takes about as much force to bite off a human finger as it does to chomp a carrot in half, but grab the nearest hand and try it: There is deep programming in the human mind that makes doing the former not just unthinkable but viscerally impossible. Sure, it is possible to become violent and accidentally kill someone by punching them, not realizing that head trauma is as damaging as it is. (If you’ve ever taken martial arts classes, they really drill this home.) But the murder depicted in Adolescence is not a crime of passion or an altercation gone wrong. And harming another human being in some premeditated, bloody way, like repeatedly stabbing her with a kitchen knife, is something a person has to be deeply disordered to do. Human beings just have something in us that stops us from doing things like that, which is why in boot camp soldiers have to be basically broken down and brainwashed. And even then, research shows that more than three-quarters of soldiers in active combat, under fire, intentionally shoot above the heads of enemy soldiers because they can’t stomach the idea of killing another human being — even one shooting back their way. Jamie, while he is depicted in the show as a troubled child with an anger problem, isn’t crazy or a monster, even if he isn’t as ideologically even-keeled as he may have been if he’d been kept offline. He isn’t babbling about demons.
Which brings us to why Adolescence told its story the way it did. In the United Kingdom, knife crime among teenagers is not just a problem but A Problem. Last summer, the last time I was in my wife’s home country of Wales, Axel Rudakubana, 17, stormed into a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport and killed three girls with a knife, wounding seven other children and adults. The BBC and other British news outlets that covered the tragedy often dedicated more space to the concern that the perpetrator (who was born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents) would be misidentified as a Muslim immigrant than to the victims. It was only the latest stabbing incident in a relatively gun-less country where an ID is required to buy a new set of steak knives. Real-world incidents like that one in Southport prick at the racial neuroses of the British media class, which overlap with but do not replicate those of Americans. Adolescence gives the country’s rulers the perfect case study without all the messiness of real life: a black police officer who does a procedurally perfect job during the arrest, a white perpetrator and victim with no problematic racial dynamics between them, and a motive that can be “addressed” by doing something that was their favorite thing to do anyway, namely censor the internet.
Here the critic need not speculate. “I want it to be shown in schools, I want it to be shown in Parliament,” co-writer Alex Thorne said, describing his didactic and political rather than artistic goals for the show. And more than that, Thorne said he “wanted British lawmakers to do more than talk about his drama: He wants them to pass a law that bans young people from accessing social media until they are 16.” At least some of the wish has come true so far. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a recent session of Parliament that he is “watching Adolescence with our children” and supported the idea of the show as a sort of prophylactic for misogynistic violence. It grabbed British political focus for a remarkably long time. On March 31, Starmer tweeted, “As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard. We all need to be having these conversations more. I’ve backed Netflix’s plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.” This marked the third week of moral panic that can be viewed in a series of British headlines that seem to be reacting to the fictional events depicted in the Netflix show as though they were real news events. The Daily Mail: “Schools to give boys anti-misogyny lessons to stop toxic masculinity in wake of Netflix hit Adolescence.” The Guardian: “Adolescence reveals a terrifying truth: Smartphones are poison for boys’ minds.”
If we are going to have a moral panic — and I would suggest we do not — it should be about real life rather than a fictional show written by someone who wants to create one. Because while Adolescence is moving, incredibly well made, and full of tremendous performances from its cast, it is also propaganda.
Nicholas Clairmont is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.