Since Adolescence’s first-look six months ago, during a winter where the teenage obituaries written at the hands of young men saturated headlines, I was prepared to be floored by its resonance having worked as a secondary school teacher in South Yorkshire. I’d set aside the day of its release for the full four-hour binge, constantly reminded of the quickly-closed browser tabs, hushed online references and coded insults of Year Ten boys I’d taught a couple of years ago.

Produced in Sheffield—where not even a month prior to release, fifteen-year-old Harvey Willgoose was stabbed to death by another fifteen-year-old boy on school grounds—Adolescence is a virtuosic reshaping of the British crime drama, much needed in a digital climate where the meeting of alt-right commentators and mouldable male minds are breeding fatal levels of apathy.

The four-part series follows the heartless stabbing of teenage girl Katie Lewis by the radicalised Jamie Miller, the thirteen-year-old only son of the Millers. From the accurate depiction of Episode 2’s teenage disengagement and disregard in our schools, to Episode 4’s shock and denial of the consequences of online indoctrination happening in our homes, Adolescence captures the unbearable burden of modern-day teenage life and the devastation that lies in the wake of unchecked misogyny thrust upon impressionable boys by the most insidious of men.

Stephen Graham is no stranger to such a story, having starred in ITV’s Little Boy Blue almost a decade ago in 2017. Paired with Jack Thorne’s history of compelling writing on timely British dramas Help (2021) and The Virtues (2019) alongside Philip Barantini’s ambitious one-shot artistry from Boiling Point (2021), the trio’s collaboration on Adolescence was poised to be a masterclass in storytelling.

The four-episode limited series has been met with a slew of incredibly deserved praise, lauding Graham as the once-in-a-lifetime talent that the British household can rely on for entertainment. However, with innumerable claims of its status as TV perfection in our news feeds, it’s the seldom overlooked comment on a BTS post from Netflix’s Instagram or a TikTok edit of Jamie, played by debut actor Owen Cooper, that hides the generational disconnect Adolescence begins to uncover.

For every middle-class culture desk that’s putting out a five-star review of the series, there’s a working-class young person sounding off in the comments section about being bored by the show, accusing it of being woke or having poor writing; not understanding what being a British teenager is like. I’m taken back to my classroom in 2022, where I remember feeling guilty for raising my voice in my English classroom for the first time, after hearing two fifteen-year-old boys call one girl ‘a Stacey’ and another ‘definitely a Becky’. As a young teacher with disappointingly high screen-time statistics to her own name during the latter half of 2022 when the Tate brothers’ reach was at its peak, I knew the boys were mocking the girls’ appearances. ‘Staceys’ are stereotypically attractive, supposedly unattainable by incels, with free choice of sexual partner. ‘Beckys’ are viewed as inferior to ‘Staceys’; resulting in incels feeling owed affection and intimacy from women. Needless to say, I’d sent the first of many safeguarding emails addressing a rise in alt-right language and male disrespect towards young girls.

In Episode 2, DI Luke Bascombe’s (Ashley Walters) son Adam (Amari Bacchus) reveals the most worrying of blindspots since Jamie’s murder charge. Where Bascombe and fellow detective Misha Frank (Faye Marsey) believe to have uncovered friendly and potentially even romantic exchanges between Katie and Jamie online, Adam reveals the surreptitiously coded emoji usage in victim Katie’s public comments to Jamie; uncovering the disguised bullying that hacked away at Jamie’s naturally unstable self-esteem, pushed further to the brink by his curious exploration of the ‘manosphere’. Barantini’s direction of Bacchus in this scene is masterful: we ask, does Adam even want to tell his dad? He seems reluctant: does it feel like a secret he must keep? Will Bascombe, so clearly disengaged from fatherhood, understand the emotional uppercut a coloured heart emoji can have? It’s these intricate improvisations in Adolescence’s younger performances that give it gut-punching quality.

There’s a moment where Bascombe (Ashley Walters) questions trainee teacher Mr Malik (Faraz Ayub) who’s not just unequipped to handle the fallout of a student’s death but more importantly, untrained. I felt that way when young boys would shout back at me, denying my condemnation of their language as offensive, calling me a “snowflake” and “too woke”—something I truly believed I’d only ever read about and would never be an experience of my own. Cooper’s improvisation with psychologist Briony (Erin Doherty) showcases the radioactivity of Jamie’s mind and the minds of those Year Ten boys. He holds dear to him truths he has crafted about his ugliness and unattractiveness, yet his desire to carve and chip away at his own identity is bursting through in raised voices and fists-on-tables and curt expletives that quickly erode the youthfulness he deserves to embrace.

I’m reminded of the sheer aggression of boys I’d once taught and the subsequent righteous, cocky and snarky attitudes when questioned. When Jamie realises Briony’s discomfort with him, he’s pleased. Young men are encouraged to seek power over women even in the most minute of social exchanges. Once in early 2023, I’d called a young boy’s parents in regards to his obsessive referencing of alt-right streamers Adin Ross and Sneako, concerned about his online activity. It wasn’t groundbreaking: I’d complicated the image of their ‘little angel’ as expected. But come 9am the following morning, the boy who once laughed along with me now felt comfortable to shout and point fingers, blaming me for his parents’ brief removal of his internet access. I knew then I’d lost influence over him and as I suspected, needed my male colleague to intervene for the rest of the year.

Speaking to an ex-colleague about the show, it’s clear that diverging personality shifts between home and school hold the key to understanding dissonant feelings towards women in young male minds and Adolescence honours that truth: once directly, when Briony needs security guard Frank to restrain Jamie and several times indirectly. Jamie pays little mind to his mother (Christine Tremarco) and sister (Amelie Pease) when discussing his mum’s roast-making skills as her only notable skill in Episode 3, to Episode 4 when he makes the incredible admission of changing his plea from innocent to guilty, but only to his father. Jamie Miller is a boy stuck between the desperation to be liked and the desperation to be in control, and Owen Cooper is an actor who has secured his early career legacy with a milestone performance for young audiences.

The continued artistry in the series is expertly hidden in the crevices of Thorne’s script, imbued with his subtle genius: Jamie’s initial denial that he’s “done nothing wrong” rather than protesting his involvement at all, the omnipresence of the smartphone screen during the school’s fire drill sequence, or the DIY worker’s references to online conspiracy forums where the ‘manosphere’ thrives. All this is compounded by the painful realism of Barantini’s continuous takes: for an hour at a time, we must live Jamie’s story and its consequences.

The question of whether Adolescence will educate the clueless adult more than the exposed teenager still hangs in the balance. The show clearly understands the threat of unchecked online exposure and the dangers of a family uninvolved in a young boy’s school life, but I can’t help but feel that the show skims over education’s failing role in the dismantling of incel culture. If we only have one teacher in her twenties for every ten teachers in their forties, we’re bound to miss the signs. We’re bound to be confused by the tunnels young men inadvertently dig for themselves, exposed to self-proclaimed truths from video-game streamers meant to entertain them or faceless Twitter accounts meant to inspire them.

Episode 2’s Mr Malik asks Bascombe, “What am I supposed to do?” when questioned about Jamie’s unhappiness, and I had often felt this way when a Year Ten boy felt Ebenezer Scrooge was right to hoard his money in A Christmas Carol, or that Tybalt was justified in his aggression and violence as the only ‘real man’ in Romeo and Juliet, or that Gerald Croft was a ‘normie’ for wanting Eva Smith over Sheila Birling in An Inspector Calls. Our innocent English lessons together were often tainted by the chokehold of incel language, undetected by their parents and most certainly unshakeable by their teachers. The truth of my experience as a teacher—and the truth of the show—is that when a teenage boy’s self-doubt meets the proclamations of a thirty-year-old man on a twelve-hour stream, he will struggle to shake its grip.

While I spiral in reflections on where those Year Ten boys are now, I’m somewhat put at ease by the way young audiences are embracing the show’s unravelling of masculinity; even if it is via the medium of a TikTok edit set to the gentle tones of Frank Ocean.