In Adolescence, Netflix’s new limited series, audiences are introduced to 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper). He’s a young lad growing up in your average English town. His parents are busy. He shares a bathroom with his older sister. And three minutes into the show, an armed team of police officers breaks down the door to his home to arrest him on suspicion of murder.
Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers.
The series, created by Steven Graham (Boiling Point, Band of Brothers) and Jack Thorne (Toxic Town, His Dark Materials) was made to chart the emotional impact of misogyny-based violence through one British family that dramatizes how easy it is for a boy to be radicalized online. Each of the four episodes of Adolescence are shot in one continuous take, a point of view that makes viewers feel like they are following Jamie, the Miller family, and their community through their the aftermath of the crime, from Jamie being held at gunpoint by police to the Millers’ anxious wait at the station to the grim realization that their lives have changed forever. Episode One introduces Jamie as a slight kid who hates needles and just wants to go home. But he’s also a murderer, with police providing CCTV footage of him stabbing classmate Katie Leonard to death in a parking lot.
What is first suspected to be bullying or some kind of fight gone wrong is quickly revealed to be an entirely new horror. It’s heavily implied Jamie was radicalized online by incel-like forums, which skewed his view of women and their worth — and was upset after Katie rejected a date with him and called him an incel online. Incels, or involuntary celibates, are a subculture of misogyny popularized in online communities also known as the manosphere. These spaces and beliefs have been amplified by popular men’s-rights influencers like Andrew Tate. Tate is mentioned explicitly in the series when police try to describe what kind of content Jamie might have been exposed to. “It’s the involuntary celibate stuff,” Detective Sergeant Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) says. “It’s the Andrew Tate shite.” (Tate rejected the characterization through a spokesperson in a statement to Newsweek. “The reference to Andrew Tate in Adolescence is an attempt to pin broader societal issues on one individual, which is neither fair nor accurate. Whilst online influence is a valid topic, it’s unjust for the public to make him the scapegoat for complex problems like radicalization and violence, which stem from far wider cultural and systemic factors.”)
Adolescence isn’t based on one true story, but it comes at a time of heightened awareness about the link between online misogynistic worldviews and acts of violence or mass terrorism. While interest in the series continues to grow, Adolescence has also exposed just how far manosphere dread goes online, sparking conversations online about who falls for it, and who gets hurt in the process. Rolling Stone spoke with fans of the series, experts in online misogyny, and one of Adolescence’s creators to explore why this show is hitting so hard — and what lessons they each hope people will remember once they turn their televisions off.
Allysa Czerwinsky, a male-supremacism and online extremism researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Manchester, says the manosphere is enticing because it promises to have answers to real problems young men face in modern society.
“You’ve got these pervasive narratives of victimhood, of limited agency, of limited self-worth that are festering into this emotional turmoil. Especially young kids, but also older adults as well, don’t know where to put the blame,” Czerwinksy says. “And the ideologies offer them a really easy solution. A lot of these experiences are grounded in real hurt, real harm, but then twisted to say, ‘Women are responsible for this.’”
Tate is perhaps the most recognizable face in the manosphere, well known for his misogynistic social media posts where he advocates for violence against, and subjugation of, women. (He is currently facing rape and sex trafficking charges in Romania, and is under criminal investigation in Florida. He’s denied the charges.) Tate’s name is often used as a shorthand for how popular misogynistic views have become in online spaces, but while he’s mentioned briefly in the show, Adolescence creator Jack Thorne didn’t want to single him out. Instead, Thorne made the series without one single figure at fault for Jamie’s behavior, in the hopes it would highlight just how enticing radicalization can be.
“My job was to sit in Jamie’s shoes,” he tells Rolling Stone. “But the most troubling thing was reading, watching, consuming, being pelted with this stuff, I felt like I understood the logic of it. When I was a 13-year-old kid I looked around and I felt unattractive, I felt uninteresting, I felt instinctively lonely. If I heard that the reason for this was female ideology, that would have been very attractive.”
Georgina Barker, an international relations major at the University of Edinburgh, clicked on Adolescence because she finds popular entertainment that tackles current political problems interesting. But as she watched, she found herself drawn in by Jamie’s story. Barker, 19, says she can remember just how popular Tate had become when she was in high school, and how young men around her idolized his takes on masculinity. Tate’s ideology was everywhere, which is why Barker thinks part of the answer to the manosphere’s reach is highlighting how rhetoric can lead to actual violence.
“The main character [of Adolescence] was such a normal teenager,” she says, “He had a normal family, normal school, normal friends, but he just kind of fell into the manosphere and incel culture. It showed he wasn’t born evil. He was just conditioned that way. I think that’s really important in recognizing that this could be anyone, and that’s why we need to have these conversations.”
Jaz Johnson, a 23-year-old from Brighton, is a pastoral officer (a British cross between a social worker, guidance counselor, and student support staff) at a local secondary school. So when she saw Jamie on her screen, she couldn’t help but immediately think of her students. Her job is about intervention before the worst happens, and as both a pastoral officer and a big sister, she firmly believes it’s up to family and community members to call out violent language the minute they hear it.
“It got me thinking about how we can know the men in our lives, or boys in our lives, one way, but they could be completely different,” she tells Rolling Stone. “It was so important to me that the show called out Tate and called out the manosphere and actually named these things instead of dancing around it. Because it gets parents talking. And if they hear their kids talking like that, it clues them in. We should be asking the men in our lives, ‘How do you perceive women? How do you see them in certain situations?”
When Aoife Mcmorrow, a 24-year old from Greater London, turned on Adolescence, she tells Rolling Stone she didn’t have to imagine a situation like Jamie’s — because one had happened a few miles down the road. On Sept. 24, 2024, a then-18-year-old teen named Nicholas Prosper was arrested after neighbors reported hearing gunshots from his apartment. Prosper had a gun and planned to commit a mass shooting at St. Joseph’s Primary School in Luton. His family confronted him before he left, and he killed his mother, sister, and brother before being arrested by police. But a subsequent police investigation into his internet history revealed that Prosper was fascinated with mass murder events like Sandy Hook and the Virginia Tech shooting — killings that are idealized on some incel forums. If Prosper hadn’t been interrupted, he could have perpetrated the first school shooting in the U.K. since 1996.
For Mcmorrow, she believes the answer could lie in governments limiting children’s access to the internet, even as cell phones and social media accounts become more popular with younger age groups. “It’s scary how many different corners of the internet there are now, and that they move so fast we can’t keep up with them,” Mcmorrow says. “To know what kids are seeing, what they’re taking in, extremes of it, they’re so incredibly accessible. Just in the last year, I could name multiple stories or events or crimes that [Adolescence] could relate to. A lot of people hide behind freedom of speech, but they’re sharing really damaging ideologies, and young kids are seeing that.”
Since its release, Adolescence has remained a top show on Netflix, with the platform reporting it as their Number One series with over 24 million views during its first four days. It’s also become a trending topic on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, and TikTok. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that he supported showing Adolescence in Parliament and in schools, and that he was already watching it with his children, because of the important conversations it highlights. On TikTok, U.K. and U.S. users are continuing to talk about moments in the show that highlight possible solutions to the problems of the manosphere. But since misogynistic online communities aren’t localized, the discourse has spread to encompass dozens of countries and their specific attempts — or lack thereof — to counter radicalization. Czerwinsky, the extremism researcher, notes that part of the show’s popularity could stem from its nuance — and acknowledgement that people are searching for answers.
“You’re seeing impacts from lockdown. You’re seeing isolation. You’re seeing an increased use of tech that then is a catalyst for [young men] feeling isolated and alone,” Czerwinsky says. “They get messaging that you should have sex by a certain age. You should have your first girlfriend at ages as young as 11 or 12. And that puts a lot of pressure on people. Young boys are in an unfortunate spot where there is messaging that makes sense of this right now. This rhetoric acts as a confirmation bias of repeated rejections, victimizations, or humiliation. That emotion is there. It adds up. And the manosphere’s rhetoric says, ‘Here is a very nicely packaged answer.’”
Adolescence doesn’t pretend that it has a tidy solution to the problem of online misogyny and radicalizing communities. In fact, Thorne tells Rolling Stone that he and Graham’s main goal with the show was to create a situation that was specific to Jamie. Other boys could experience the same exact things and not end up killing a girl, which is why who is radicalized is just as important as how. In fact, Thorne loves that people who have watched Adolescence have different ideas about what the solution to the manosphere might be.
The answer for combating radicalization, Thorne believes, is for everyone to get involved. “They say it takes a village to [raise] a child. It takes a village to destroy a child. If we’re going to change the culture, there needs to be multiple solutions,” he says. “We need everyone to lean into this problem to save these kids, to stop boys harming girls. It takes us all to do something.”
Still, for all the nuance he and Graham brought to telling Jamie’s story, the co-creators have faced some criticism for failing to give insight into the young female victim of their protagonist’s crime. It is a question Thorne says the collaborators struggled with themselves. “We’re still thinking about it, to be honest,” he says. “I brought it up with Steven just the other day, whether we should have done it. It’s always a battle writing these shows what perspective you tell it from. I think that the partial has enormous power, and that if we’d seen into Katie’s world it might have made it easier for us in some way. We could have told Katie’s side of the story, and sometimes I think we should’ve. But we made what we thought was right at the time.”
As a researcher, Czerwinsky understands the difficulty of coming up with successful solutions to such a complex and multifaceted problem. But she adds that she hopes progress in discussions around misogyny can happen without regressing into polarization. “We’re seeing [the word incel] rise in prominence, but this feels like the first time where an active conversation about how the relational, personal, and wider harms are being discussed together at the same time,” Czerwinsky adds. “It’s not an us and them.”
From Rolling Stone US
