Netflix's 'Adolescence' shows a teenage boy becoming a killer — did the show actually get modern boyhood right, or did it miss the point entirely?

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  Priya1mo ago

  My teenage daughter watched it and said "mom, boys at school literally talk like that, this isn't exaggerated." I almost fell out of my chair. I thought I was watching fiction. She was watching a documentary.

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  Liam1mo ago

  I work in youth offending services in England. We see versions of Jamie every single week. The show gets the family dynamic frighteningly right — the dad who loves his son and has NO vocabulary for what's happening to him, the mom who half-saw it and will spend the rest of her life wondering if she could have said something sooner. This isn't dramatic exaggeration. This is Tuesday.

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  Yuki1mo ago

  I watched all four episodes in one sitting and literally couldn't sleep after. The single-take format made it feel like you were trapped in that house with the family. I have a 13-year-old son and the whole time I was watching I kept thinking... do I actually know what he's looking at online? Do I actually know him? It shook me to my core.

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  Hana1mo ago

  I work in child psychology and the thing the show absolutely nailed is the lag between when a child starts changing and when the adults around him notice. By the time the parents see the warning signs in the show, the window has already closed. That's not drama, that's the research. We're always months behind.

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    Theo1mo ago

    With respect: if you actually work in child psychology you'd also note that the show compresses a radicalization timeline that usually takes 18-24 months into what is implied to be a few weeks. That's not a minor inaccuracy. It shapes how parents will misread their kids' actual timelines.

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      Alex R.1mo ago

      lmao okay so the complaint is that the show is both too slow AND too fast? Make up your minds critics

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  Reese1mo ago

  My son is 17 and watched it without me knowing. He came downstairs afterward and said 'that kid reminded me of someone at school.' We talked for two hours. First real conversation we've had since he was maybe twelve. I'm not going to pretend the show fixed anything but it gave us a door and we walked through it.

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  Kofi1mo ago

  I grew up with an absent father and got deep into red pill content around age 15. Someone showed me Adolescence and I sat there recognizing almost every step of my own journey. I was lucky to have a teacher who caught it. Most boys don't have that. The show is accurate, at least for me.

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  Priya 211mo ago

  As someone who works with at-risk youth for a living, this show captures something real. The slow grooming of boys by online communities that tell them they're losers who deserve to be angry — it's not fiction. I see it every week. The show is uncomfortable because it should be.

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  Diego1mo ago

  I'm a 17 year old girl and I want to say something that keeps getting left out of this conversation: the girl who was killed had her own story. Her own online life. Her own loneliness. The show basically uses her as a plot device to examine the boy. She barely exists as a character. That's a problem and no one seems to care.

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    Riley K.1mo ago

    This is such a good point and I've seen almost nobody make it. She's essentially a prop. We learn almost nothing about what SHE was going through. The show is so focused on the male psychology that the actual victim becomes scenery. That's a storytelling choice with real ideological implications.

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      Jamie 921mo ago

      The show is literally from the perspective of the family of the perpetrator, that's the entire conceit. Of course we don't know her inner life, we're not in her house. You can make a separate show about the victim's family — actually that sounds incredible — but criticizing this one for not being that show is a weird standard.

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  Priya1mo ago

  I teach high school English. I have watched three students over the past two years go through what looks like the early stages of what the show depicts. Not violence. Just the language, the memes, the "females" framing, the hostility. I reported my concerns each time. Nothing happened. The show made me feel seen and hopeless at the same time.

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  Jamie K.1mo ago

  Watched it with my husband and we had the best/worst conversation of our marriage afterward. We have two boys aged 10 and 14. We realized we have absolutely no consistent rules about screen time or monitoring. We're fixing that now. Sometimes a TV show is actually useful.

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  Hana1mo ago

  I raised three boys as a single father. No mom in the house from when the oldest was 7. None of them went anywhere near this kind of content, none of them developed misogynistic attitudes. You know what made the difference? We talked. Every night at dinner. I asked them dumb questions about their day and they rolled their eyes and answered. I knew their friends. That's it. No algorithm can reach a kid who has a parent actually paying attention.

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    Riley 211mo ago

    I don't want to diminish what you did because clearly you're a great dad. But this reads a little like 'I didn't get cancer so clearly diet and exercise prevent cancer.' Correlation isn't causation and some kids get pulled in despite having present, attentive, loving parents. That's the exact thing the show is depicting.

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      Iris R.1mo ago

      exactly. the show isn't about bad parenting. the dad in the show is more emotionally present than 90% of fictional TV fathers. it's about systems and platforms that are specifically engineered to be more compelling than any dinner table conversation. that's the enemy

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  Leo _x1mo ago

  What I can't shake is the father's face in the last episode. No dialogue. Just a man understanding that he will never understand. Owen's performance does something in that moment that I don't have language for. I came here to read discourse and instead I'm just sitting here still kind of wrecked by it three days later.

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  Zara1mo ago

  The thing that nobody is saying loudly enough: this show is fundamentally about a father who didn't know his son. Not a bad father. Not an absent father in the physical sense. A father who was IN THE HOUSE and still had no idea who his child was becoming. That's the horror. And it's the horror that applies to millions of households right now.

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  Liam T.1mo ago

  episode 4 destroyed me. the dad sitting in the car. i don't want to spoil it but wow. Stephen Graham is from another planet talent wise.

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  Avery1mo ago

  The thing that broke me was the scene where the detective finds the boy's room. It looks like any teenager's room. Posters. Mess. A gaming chair. Nothing obviously sinister. The horror is how ordinary it all is. That visual choice said more than any dialogue.

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    Hana1mo ago

    Yes but also — that's the visual the show WANTS you to leave with. Ordinary boy, ordinary room, extraordinary violence. The danger is that parents now think anything ordinary could be covering anything monstrous. The show generates fear without generating discernment. Those are very different outcomes.

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      Liam1mo ago

      Shouldn't parents already be paying more attention than they probably are? If "generating fear" gets complacent adults to actually engage with their kids' online lives, I'm struggling to see the downside.

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  Drew _x1mo ago

  The therapist episode (episode 3) is one of the greatest single pieces of television I have ever seen. That actress deserves every award available to human civilization.

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  Nina1mo ago

  The show got one thing completely wrong and I can't get past it: Jamie's parents are depicted as genuinely caring, present, emotionally available people. That's not the typical radicalization story. Usually there's neglect, abuse, absent fathers, something. By making the family so normal the show accidentally implies there's NO solution — which is actually more nihilistic than anything the incels preach.

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    Omar S.1mo ago

    nihilistic is exactly the right word for it. i kept waiting for the show to offer something. a lifeline. a path out. it never did. and i walked away feeling like what's even the point of watching if you learn nothing actionable

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      Jordan1mo ago

      That's called tragedy. Greek tragedy, Shakespearean tragedy — the whole point is that it doesn't offer you a neat solution. Art that resolves everything isn't art it's an after-school special. The discomfort IS the lesson.

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  Yuki K.1mo ago

  The thing nobody wants to say out loud: this show would never have been made if the victim was a boy. The entire framing relies on us already caring deeply about a dead girl and seeing a boy as the monster. I'm not saying that's wrong. I'm saying notice it.

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  Ravi1mo ago

  Finished it last night and my first instinct was to call my brother who I haven't spoken to in two years. We had a falling out over stupid family stuff. Life is short and boys don't always know how to ask for connection. That's what the show did to me.

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  Theo M.1mo ago

  I'll be honest I thought it was going to be preachy lefty stuff about toxic masculinity and instead it was genuinely nuanced. The dad character especially. He's not a bad father. He tried. That's what makes it devastating instead of just political.

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  Reese1mo ago

  been a single dad for 8 years raising my boy alone. no manual for any of this. the show hit me somewhere deep because the dad in it clearly loves his son completely and it still wasn't enough and i just kept thinking what am i missing what am i missing what am i missing

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  Reese1mo ago

  My problem is that the girl who was killed barely gets to be a character. We spend the whole show in the killer's world, his family's grief, his psychology. Her death is just a plot device. That's a storytelling choice and it says something uncomfortable about whose story the writers thought mattered.

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  Zara1mo ago

  Everyone in this thread is talking about the boys. The boys. The boys. The young woman who died had parents too. Had friends. Had a future. The show couldn't be bothered and apparently neither can this comment section.

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  Omar1mo ago

  I teach media literacy to 14 year olds and I can tell you the boys who are most at risk are often the ones who look completely fine on the surface. Engaged in class, funny with friends, good grades. The isolation is invisible because they've learned to perform normality while their inner world is being colonized by this content. The show got THAT right.

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  Priya1mo ago

  Honestly the scariest part for me was how normal he seemed at the beginning. Like genuinely funny, kind of charming, you understand why the family is in denial. Evil doesn't always look like evil and that's the whole point.

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  Morgan1mo ago

  My son is 12. He's sweet, kind, loves his little sister, makes me laugh every day. Last week I found a subreddit in his browser history that I'd never heard of. I'm not going to name it here but if you know, you know. I haven't said anything to him yet because I have no idea how. The show gave me the vocabulary but not the script.

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    Maya1mo ago

    Please talk to him. Just say you saw something and you want to understand it together, not punish him for it. The worst thing you can do is let him think that world is a secret he has to protect. Twelve is still early. You can still reach him.

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    Jordan1mo ago

    also — and I say this kindly — get support for yourself first. there are parent helplines and forums specifically for this situation. you don't have to figure out the perfect script alone. please reach out to someone

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  Taylor S.1mo ago

  Whether it "got it right" is almost irrelevant to me. The fact that millions of people are now having conversations about online radicalization, about loneliness in boys, about algorithmic responsibility — that happened because of this show. Art doesn't have to be a thesis. It has to start conversations. Mission accomplished.

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  Quinn B.1mo ago

  The show does NOT demonize boys. It literally spends an entire episode showing how a normal loving family can produce this outcome. It's asking a systemic question not a "boys are bad" question. People who think it's anti-male watched it wrong.

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  Diego1mo ago

  I'm a child psychologist. The show gets the family dynamics surprisingly right — the father who loves his son but never learned to sit with uncomfortable emotions, the mother who sees something but can't name it, the boy who got the message that feelings are weakness before he could read. That's not fiction. That's Tuesday.

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  Theo1mo ago

  My husband grew up exactly like Jamie. Not the violence — but the bedroom, the isolation, the dad who communicated through football scores and silence, the total absence of any language for what he was feeling inside. He watched one episode and had to turn it off. Said it felt like being diagnosed with something. That's not nothing.

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  Leo1mo ago

  To the 16 year old above: the show isn't saying lonely boys are dangerous, it's saying that specific communities PREY on lonely boys and that's a different thing. The villain isn't you, it's the people who found you when you were vulnerable and told you that girls were the enemy.

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  Marco1mo ago

  I've seen a few people call this show "trauma porn" and I think that phrase has genuinely stopped meaning anything. Every serious, difficult drama about real human suffering gets called trauma porn now. It's become a way to dismiss art that makes you uncomfortable without engaging with it. Adolescence is many things but it is not gratuitous. The violence happens almost entirely off screen.

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  Noah1mo ago

  Genuine question for everyone praising this as essential viewing: do you think a 14 year old boy should watch it? Because if the answer is no, then who exactly is this show for? The parents who already know something is wrong? The policymakers who won't watch Netflix? I'm not being rhetorical. I genuinely want to know what the intended mechanism of change is here.

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  Taylor1mo ago

  the single take gimmick is also the entire emotional point?? the family can't escape the moment either. there's no cut, no relief, no ability to look away. you're stuck with them the same way they're stuck with what happened. it's not a technical stunt it's the theme

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  Theo1mo ago

  The incel pipeline is REAL and this show explains it better than any documentary or news article I've read. The sigma male stuff, the red pill stuff, boys as young as 11 are being fed this content by recommendation algorithms. At least the show is putting it in front of parents who would never google this stuff themselves.

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  Ravi 921mo ago

  The show never once asks why these boys aren't being taught that rejection is a normal part of life that everyone survives. Not just boys — everyone gets rejected, everyone feels alone, everyone has their heart broken. The answer isn't to explain the incel pipeline. It's to teach kids resilience before they fall into it. We've skipped a step.

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    Alex T.1mo ago

    Resilience is fine but you're describing a solution that puts 100% of the burden on children and zero on the platforms. A 12 year old shouldn't need to be resilient enough to resist a billion-dollar algorithm optimizing for his rage. That's not a parenting failure. That's a regulatory failure.

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      Omar B.1mo ago

      it can be BOTH. the either/or framing drives me insane. regulate the platforms AND teach resilience AND monitor your kids AND have conversations AND fund mental health in schools. it's not one thing. it's never one thing

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  Sam S.1mo ago

  Overrated. Sorry. It's well-made technically but the story essentially says "the internet made him do it" and leaves it there. That's a lazy explanation that lets parents, schools, and society completely off the hook. Feels like prestige TV patting itself on the back.

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  Alex 921mo ago

  I'm a boy (16) and I watched this and honestly felt targeted? Like the whole message seemed to be that boys who feel lonely and left out are basically proto-killers waiting to happen. I feel lonely sometimes. That doesn't mean I'm dangerous. It felt like the show had already decided what I am before I opened my mouth.

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  Taylor1mo ago

  The psychologist in episode 3 is the most terrifying character in the whole series and she's not a villain at all. The way she just... methodically unpeels him. Watching Jamie almost confess and then catch himself. I've seen that interview dynamic in documentaries about real cases and the writers clearly did their research.

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    Hana1mo ago

    She was extraordinary. But I want to push back gently on the idea that the show 'did its research' — it depicts a forensic psychologist having a sustained one-on-one session in a way that simply doesn't happen in the UK legal system at that stage of arrest. There would be a solicitor present. Small thing but it matters to credibility.

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      Morgan1mo ago

      you're fact checking a drama about the soul of a murdered teenager to point out lawyer procedurals. incredible use of your day

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        Diego B.1mo ago

        Procedural accuracy matters because inaccuracy is how shows accidentally teach the public that the system works differently than it does. People get their understanding of criminal justice from TV. That's not a small thing.

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  Diego1mo ago

  The real missed opportunity is that the show could have shown us what the alternative looks like. One scene. One boy in Jamie's orbit who had access to something different — a mentor, a community, a space where he was allowed to be uncertain and scared without being consumed by it. Instead we get wall-to-wall tragedy with no exit. That's not realism. That's a closed loop.

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    Yuki1mo ago

    Closed loops ARE realistic though??? Not every story needs a 'here's how it could have gone differently' hatch for the audience to escape through. Some situations don't have obvious exits. Demanding hope from a tragedy is asking the story to comfort you instead of tell the truth.

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  Marco 211mo ago

  OK honest question that I genuinely want answered: what is a parent ACTUALLY supposed to DO after watching this? I've seen so many articles saying "start the conversation" and I want to shake whoever writes that. Start it HOW? Say WHAT exactly? Does anyone have a concrete script that has actually worked?

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    Maya1mo ago

    this is actually brilliant. flipping the power dynamic so the kid isn't being interrogated. going to try this.

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  Omar S.1mo ago

  The fact that this is NUMBER ONE in dozens of countries simultaneously means the anxiety it taps into is universal. Parents everywhere are scared about the same thing regardless of culture. That's significant.

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  Drew R.1mo ago

  This show is why I support phone bans in schools, age verification for social media, and algorithmic accountability laws. Full stop. We know what the rabbit holes lead to and we keep doing nothing because tech companies lobby against regulation. The show should make people angry at policy makers not just at a fictional teenager.

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  Jordan1mo ago

  counterpoint to everyone calling this a masterpiece — it's four hours of a white british family. where is the version of this story set in a poor neighborhood, or an immigrant family, or somewhere that doesn't look like a bbc prestige drama? radicalization doesn't only happen in nice kitchens.

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  Marco1mo ago

  it's a 4 episode limited series not a policy document. you don't have to walk away with a 10 point plan. sometimes the point is just to feel the weight of something and take it seriously. why does TV have to solve everything for people to say it was worth making

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  Taylor1mo ago

  I am so tired of the 'but what about the BOY' discourse completely overwhelming any conversation about what this show says about girls and how they're treated in these communities. the girl who died was presumably also a real human teenager with feelings and friends and a future that no longer exists. she gets to be a plot device so we can have nuanced feelings about her killer

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  Taylor1mo ago

  Genuine question: should parents actually monitor their kids' phones and social media? Because after watching this I desperately want to. But everything I read about teenage psychology says surveillance damages trust and drives behavior underground. What's the right answer? Show doesn't say.

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  Avery1mo ago

  i had to stop watching halfway through episode 2 and i'm 34. not because it was bad. because it was too good. like there's a thing where fiction hits so close to a real fear that it becomes physically uncomfortable. had to walk around the block and come back to it. finished it. still processing.

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    Noah1mo ago

    I made a comment above about this very thing and you're absolutely right. Her absence from the narrative is a choice. And choices have messages.

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      Diego R.1mo ago

      Watching from South Korea and I can tell you the online radicalization pipeline is completely universal. The sigma male content, the same memes, the same red pill vocabulary — my students encounter it in Korean AND in English because the platforms are global. The British specifics are window dressing. The algorithm has no borders.

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        Elena1mo ago

        What worked for me was not making it about the show or about them specifically. I said something like 'I saw something online that I didn't understand and it made me feel weird, can you explain this to me?' Put yourself in the position of asking them to educate YOU. Boys especially will open up when they feel like the expert instead of the suspect.

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  Ravi1mo ago

  Stephen Graham co-wrote this with his wife and they have sons. This was a personal project born out of actual fear for their own children. That authenticity comes through in every scene. This isn't social messaging from executives, it's a parent screaming into the void.

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  Nina T.1mo ago

  The psychologist scene is the best single piece of television I've watched in years and also the scene most people I know found unwatchable. Make that make sense.

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  Drew1mo ago

  The show completely ignores that girls are also being radicalized online, just in different directions. Eating disorders, extreme beauty standards, even far-right content. If we're going to have this conversation it needs to be about ALL kids not just boys. The framing feels incomplete.

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  Alex B.1mo ago

  I'm going to push back on the idea that the show 'started conversations.' In my experience it started arguments. My brother-in-law watched it and concluded that smartphones should be banned for under 18s. My sister watched it and concluded boys need more emotional education. My dad watched it and concluded it was liberal propaganda. Same four episodes. Three completely different shows. What exactly is the conversation we're all supposedly having?

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  Quinn 921mo ago

  Can we talk about how the detective character was also brilliantly written? He's not a hero either. He has his own blind spots. The show refuses to give you a clean moral authority figure to stand behind and that's brave.

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  Diego R.1mo ago

  The fact that this show exists and is this successful is proof that streaming has genuinely changed what serious dramatic storytelling is possible for. Ten years ago this is a BBC Two prestige drama that 400,000 people watch and forget. Now it's a global conversation starter. Say what you want about Netflix but that distribution matters.

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  Casey T.1mo ago

  The show is important. The conversation it created is important. But I'd push back on anyone who thinks watching it makes them understand radicalization. Spend five minutes actually researching what these communities say and what they recruit with. It's far more sophisticated and seductive than the show conveys.

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  Casey R.1mo ago

  Hot take: the show is good but the social media discourse around it has been more harmful than helpful. Now every parent is convinced their shy quiet son is secretly being radicalized. Most boys who are awkward and into gaming are just... awkward and into gaming. The moral panic is real.

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  Taylor1mo ago

  The show is a masterpiece of craft that is also slightly overrated by people who have never engaged with the actual literature on male radicalization. Johann Hari, bell hooks on masculinity, Kimmel's work on aggrieved entitlement — the show is depicting maybe 30% of what those books explain. That's fine! But let's not pretend it's the full picture.

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    Nina1mo ago

    Cool, so you want a 4 episode TV series to cite its bibliography. Some of us don't want to read academic papers. The show reached 40 million households. Kimmel has not.

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      Feli1mo ago

      nobody is saying cite a bibliography lmao the point was that the show is a starting point not a complete analysis and treating it like a definitive document has real consequences for policy and parenting. nuance exists

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  Leo1mo ago

  The mother character is criminally underwritten and I refuse to accept that as anything other than a flaw. The father gets a whole cinematic episode of grief. The mother gets reactions. That imbalance undermines the show's own message about who we center.

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  Taylor R.1mo ago

  The show is British and it's specifically about the British experience of boyhood. Cramped houses. Working class financial pressure. School systems that identify boys as problems. Emotional stoicism as a cultural inheritance from fathers to sons. I wonder how much of it translates if you're watching in, say, Brazil or South Korea, or if it reads as a universal story.

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  Feli S.1mo ago

  I don't think the show missed the point but I do think it ended too soon. Four episodes and then... what? What are we supposed to DO with all that? The final episode felt unresolved in a way that was frustrating rather than thought-provoking.

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  Morgan1mo ago

  okay but can we talk about how the show completely sidesteps the question of the GIRL? she was a real person with her own story and the whole narrative uses her death as a catalyst for the boy's journey. she barely exists as a character. that's not a small problem.

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    Ravi S.1mo ago

    That's intentional though? The show is told from the killer's family's POV. We're not supposed to get her full story — that absence is the point. She's been erased from the narrative the same way victims get erased in real cases. It's uncomfortable because it should be.

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      Jordan _x1mo ago

      Intentional or not, 'her absence is the point' is a very convenient defense that also just happens to mean the writers didn't have to write a complex female character. I can hold two things at once: the artistic justification AND the structural laziness.

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  Yuki1mo ago

  schools should literally show this in PSHE or whatever the equivalent is in your country. not to scare kids but to open up conversations. the problem is schools are too scared of parent complaints to touch anything real

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  Morgan 211mo ago

  ok so calling it 'trauma porn' is genuinely intellectually lazy. trauma porn is when suffering is aestheticized for the audience's pleasure. this show is uncomfortable and unpleasant to watch ON PURPOSE. there's a difference between exploitation and confrontation and conflating them is how we dismiss art that challenges us

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    Theo R.1mo ago

    Trauma porn doesn't have to be aestheticized. It can be brutal and grey and realistic and STILL be exploitative if the suffering exists primarily to provoke a reaction rather than illuminate something. The question isn't how it looks. It's what it's FOR.

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  Jamie K.1mo ago

  Stephen Graham co-created and co-wrote this. He's been talking about male loneliness and radicalization for years. This isn't a prestige drama that discovered a trend, this is a writer who went deep into something real and then made art from it. The craft and the intention are inseparable. Watch his interviews before you critique the research.

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  Theo1mo ago

  The show gets the online dynamics basically right but massively oversimplifies how radicalization actually works. It happens over months and years with constant reinforcement. Compressing it into a backstory that fits a 4-episode drama means a lot of the real mechanism gets lost. Good drama, somewhat misleading sociology.

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  Maya R.1mo ago

  genuinely curious how many of the people calling this 'the most important show in years' have actually spent more than thirty seconds talking to a teenage boy. because a lot of this discourse feels like adults processing their own anxiety about kids they don't actually interact with.

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  Jamie T.1mo ago

  Beautifully shot beautifully acted and ultimately kind of toothless on solutions. Great art about a crisis it's not sure how to solve is still great art but let's be honest that it doesn't really tell us what to do next.

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  Jordan1mo ago

  The single-take cinematography is impressive but it also becomes a distraction. I kept thinking about the logistics of filming it instead of feeling the emotions. Like yes technically amazing. Emotionally I was somewhat removed because of it.

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  Feli1mo ago

  I think people are confusing "well made" with "accurate." The show is extremely well made. Whether it accurately represents why boys become violent is a completely separate question that requires actual research not a Netflix drama. Conflating the two is how we end up with bad policy.

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  Sam1mo ago

  Those questions aren't as separate as you think. A show can be flawed AND important. Requiem for a Dream is clumsy in places and it still scared a generation into thinking twice. Effectiveness is part of quality when we're talking about social commentary.

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  Feli1mo ago

  anyone else notice netflix dropped this right when there's huge political debate about phone bans in schools? feels like extremely convenient timing. not saying its bad just saying the algorithm knows what its doing

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  Casey1mo ago

  sorry but episode 3 with the psychologist felt completely fake to me. no real forensic interviewer talks like that. she was basically a plot device to explain the theme to the audience. the show was so disciplined in ep 1 and 2 and then just... handed us a lecture. disappointing.

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    Morgan1mo ago

    I actually work in forensic psychology and episode 3 is more accurate than you'd think. The 'lecture' moments you're calling out are real techniques — you create an environment where the subject explains their own worldview so they feel understood enough to reveal more. She wasn't telling us, she was getting him to tell himself. Rewatch it.

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  Jordan1mo ago

  The show says incel content radicalizes boys. Research actually says the pathway is more complex — social isolation comes first, then the content finds you. The show reverses the causality slightly which matters because it implies content moderation would fix things when the loneliness epidemic is the actual root. Interesting drama, slightly wrong diagnosis.

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  Omar1mo ago

  its good but people are acting like no show has ever addressed this stuff before. have they never seen euphoria? this isnt revolutionary its just british and filmed in one take so critics lost their minds

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• E

  Elena1mo ago

  I've seen people describe this as 'important' about forty times in the past week and I'm starting to think calling a show Important is how we avoid asking whether it's actually good. Like those are different questions??

  38Reply
• MT

  Maya T.1mo ago

  phones away from kids at 13. FULL STOP. i don't care what the show is saying about algorithms and radicalization and culture. remove the vector. we did it with cigarettes near schools we can do it with this

  38Reply
  • H

    Hana1mo ago

    The cigarettes comparison doesn't work because cigarettes don't run the social infrastructure teenagers need to navigate school, friendships, and increasingly their futures. Removing a kid's phone in 2024 isn't protective parenting, it's social isolation with extra steps. There's no simple lever here.

    71Reply
• T

  Theo1mo ago

  watched the whole thing in one sitting and honestly felt nothing by the end. not because it was bad. because i was so exhausted by the relentlessness of it. sometimes a show can be so determined to make you feel something that it squeezes all the air out of the room

  34Reply
• JB

  Jordan B.1mo ago

  counterpoint to everyone praising the accuracy: i know actual teenage boys and the dialogue is written by adults imagining teenagers. some of it lands but some of it is SO clearly a 45 year old's idea of how a radicalised teen talks. real boys are weirder and funnier and more contradictory than this. the show flattens them a bit in the name of making a point

  29Reply
  • J

    Jordan1mo ago

    I'd push back on this actually. The weirdness and contradictoriness you're describing IS in the performance, especially in episode 3. The kid laughs at completely wrong moments. He's vain about his hair while discussing something horrifying. That flatness you're sensing might be the writing but the actor is filling in a lot of texture the script doesn't give him.

    55Reply
• RK

  Riley K.1mo ago

  Can we talk about the fact that a 13 year old committing this crime in the UK would face a very different legal and welfare response than what the show depicts? The show kind of blurs the system into something more American-feeling. Not sure if that was intentional or lazy.

  22Reply

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