The manosphere is mentioned explicitly for only a few minutes in Adolescence, the wildly popular Netflix show about a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering his female classmate, Katie. Its influence on the withdrawn protagonist, Jamie (played by Owen Cooper), is largely implied. Yet Adolescence’s clear reckoning with the online world that’s shaped him has come to dominate reactions to the series. Older viewers have reported recognizing similarities between their sons’ internet-shaped worldviews and Jamie’s; British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that, as a father, he found Adolescence hard to watch. Educators have noted the show’s authenticity, as have teenagers themselves. Adolescence has even become something akin to required viewing in the United Kingdom, where Netflix has made it available to stream free of charge in various secondary schools.
The show’s popularity—it is reportedly Netflix’s third-most-watched English-language series ever—and the discourse that has cropped up around it suggest a genuine desire to better understand young-male disillusionment. It also betrays a discomfort with the online spaces that are fostering this disillusionment: Many viewers have been shaken by the show’s empathetic portrayal of Jamie, whose developing attitude is captured immersively, with camerawork that’s often insistently still.
Jamie’s arc is the emotional center of Adolescence—and a key reason the show is difficult for many to watch. Over the course of four gripping episodes, Adolescence traces the night of Jamie’s arrest; the police’s visit to his school, in order to question his classmates; how he’s spending time in jail, and his family’s attempt to wrestle with the fallout of his actions. When we first meet Jamie, he is anxious and private; his social life is a mystery to his family. Later, when the series drops in on him after he has spent months in jail awaiting his trial, he is less afraid to share his beliefs on a variety of disturbing topics—such as what women owe men sexually. By the show’s end, Jamie has revealed himself to be a headstrong young man oscillating between a simmering rage and a craving to be liked.
Although Adolescence is more of a character study than the typical crime drama, one of its co-creators, Stephen Graham (who also plays Jamie’s father), has said that his interest in the subject of adolescent-male violence was piqued after he saw news of stabbings allegedly done by British teens. (His co-creator, Jack Thorne, has stated that the show is not based on any real-life incidents.) More broadly, Jamie seems to stand in for the many young men who have stumbled into the manosphere’s web of influence. In Jamie’s case, he’s developed complex feelings of confusion and disdain that may have led him to a life-altering crime. But perhaps surprisingly, the show endeavors to keep Jamie sympathetic by dissecting the root cause of those feelings. We come to learn that, prior to the murder, he regularly visited online spaces that theorized about how feminism has damaged men; they also taught him coded language, such as specific emoji use (these include a red pill and hearts of various colors, indicating sexual availability). The show suggests that this community warped Jamie’s thinking, especially about his own masculinity and relationship to women, and that his experience, and the question of how far teenage boys’ anger can take them, is a steadily more common one.
Adolescence makes this point by confronting what’s happened to Jamie head-on. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the penultimate episode, which tracks a devastating conversation between Jamie and the one person who successfully breaks down his walls. In the episode, Jamie sits across a table from Briony, a psychologist (Erin Doherty), for a painstaking therapy session. Their back-and-forth, shot in a single, discomfiting take spanning about 45 minutes—the entirety of Adolescence is shot in this unbroken manner—untangles why the teenager may have committed the crime.
The show’s single-shot approach is a stylish cinematic flourish that’s been rightly praised as a technical feat, but it also serves a deeper purpose: It allows viewers to sit with Jamie’s words, perhaps in a way that they haven’t before. The effect is especially powerful as Jamie and Briony’s conversation becomes more intense, even bordering on violence. Throughout their session, Jamie simultaneously antagonizes Briony, accusing her of trying to trick him and scaring her at several points by standing up and screaming directly in her face, and tries to win her over. The camera lingers omnisciently in these scenes, often on the characters’ faces, as though forcing viewers to make eye contact with them during these charged moments.
In a particularly alarming interaction, Jamie confesses to Briony that prior to Katie’s murder, he’d seen her bare chest via Snapchat; the images had made the rounds at his school. He’d reasoned that, because “everyone was calling her a slag” as a result of the photos, he now had a window of opportunity to take the humiliated Katie out on a date. “I thought when she was that weak, she might like me,” he tells Briony. After he asked her out, he adds, Katie rejected him and then cruelly commented on his Instagram posts, accusing him of being an “incel.” Although Jamie never admits outright to killing Katie, he does claim to feel justified in the way he handled being spurned by her. “I could have touched any part of her body—I really wanted to, but I didn’t,” he says matter-of-factly to the terrified Briony. “Most boys would’ve touched her. So that makes me better.” During this chilling exchange, the camera stays on Briony’s face, taking in her steely albeit panicked reaction to Jamie’s vindictive retelling of events.
His explanation is frank and harrowing, taken straight from the social-media niche into which he’s plunged. Although Jamie denies being into “incel stuff,” he does talk about the manosphere in specific terms that suggest otherwise—he mentions what’s known as the “80–20 rule,” which applies an economic theory to relationships; 80 percent of women are attracted to 20 percent of men, it posits. Shortly after explaining how the groups he has seen online claim “that women don’t want us and don’t care,” he solemnly states that he sees merit in this concept—a scene that also reveals Jamie’s deep insecurities about his appearance.
Through its persistent use of long takes, the show intimately engulfs the viewer in Jamie’s mindset. The mesmerizing feeling of stillness allows Adolescence to reflect upon the seductive, affirming power of the manosphere—and the difficulty that young men like Jamie may have extricating themselves from its grasp. But despite how stubbornly he upholds his views on women, even Jamie struggles with articulating them when confronted, instead turning to aggressive outbursts—it’s easier to subscribe to ideas, the show seems to suggest, than to make the case for them. Briony, understood to be the objective presence in the room in these moments, becomes a surrogate for the audience in trying to understand how ideas like these take hold. She mirrors the viewer’s horror in real time as Jamie indignantly talks about what he believes he’s owed by women; crucially, however, she never walks out on him.
Jamie and Briony’s conversation is distressing, but Adolescence doesn’t frame it as shocking. Instead, the show takes a neutral tack, proposing that these ideas are now culturally mainstream. It avoids the didactic approach to unpacking inceldom that a lesser show might use; although the audience understands that the beliefs Jamie espouses are dangerous, Adolescence doesn’t paint him as an unambiguous villain. He’s just another young man who has become unmoored from the world.
