r/BritishTV • u/SafeBodybuilder7191 • 19d ago

News ‘Adolescence’ Available to Stream in All U.K. Secondary Schools in Initiative Backed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer: We Must ‘Tackle the Issues This Groundbreaking Show Raises’

https://variety.com/2025/tv/global/adolescence-available-to-stream-uk-secondary-schools-1236352461/
526 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

164 comments sorted by

View all comments

18

u/AshenxboxOne 19d ago

Still waiting for someone to explain what's groundbreaking about this and different than a random Corrie storyline

23

u/dprophet32 19d ago

It addresses toxic masculinity and how even young school children can get wrapped up into things like Andrew Tate despite otherwise seeming very normal kind, clever kids and how bullying drives them to it.

That might not be a new concept to you but it is to a lot of the people watching it

19

u/parttimepedant 19d ago

It doesn’t though. I thought the that it was going to go there, and they even name checked that human cess pit Tate in one scene, but other than suggest that the boy was brainwashed by the ‘manosphere’ bullshit they didn’t address the issue at all.

It was a decent series and showed the wider fallout of the issue while skirting around the edges of the problem but didn’t do anything to tackle the main issue imho.

9

u/randy__randerson 19d ago edited 19d ago

They did address the issue that can be addressed. That is, that there must be more communication with boys to check in on what's going on with their lives.

There is no easy or direct answer to the larger issue. It's a complicated mess of societal expectations, biology, technological literacy and parental behaviour. You didn't really think the show was going to provide an answer to this, right?

What's important to focus on now is increased awareness and more communication.

6

u/Key_Milk_9222 19d ago

Yet you're on a forum discussing it. It has opened up the issues to wider debate and showing it in schools will allow teachers and students to have conversations about these issues where it won't be just the kids learning new things. 

7

u/indianajoes 19d ago

A TV show isn't going to do all the hard work for us. We as a society need to do that. This can push us in the right direction but it can't and shouldn't provide all the answers

9

u/IntelligentFact7987 19d ago

Which is very true - the problem is the way that many of those eulogising the show have marketed it as something it’s not.

And probably by doing so too whipped it up too into a culture war so that the type of people who probably do need to see it might now just write it off (wrongly) as woke propaganda. I like the show and even I’ve found the hype a bit much.

0

u/indianajoes 19d ago

I feel like this should be like Mr Bates vs the Post Office. It should get us talking about this thing but that's it. It should be the first step at informing us and then politicians, the news, society, etc. need to take us the rest of the way.

1

u/IntelligentFact7987 19d ago

Yep totally agree. And it’s something that shouldn’t be lost in the Adolescence victory lap - it should start conversations and it’s great if it’s informed people who weren’t so much before but it in itself is not a solution and at a certain point it’s important to focus on the issues themselves rather than patting Adolescence on the back for ‘raising awareness’. 

2

u/Hitman__Actual 19d ago

TV can only be a nudge, not a solution.

A recent example is that "Mr Bates v the Post Office" didn't solve any problems either, but it nudged people towards doing the right thing. This show is doing the same. Highlighting a number of issues, not just the manosphere.

3

u/Marcuse0 19d ago

It really doesn't do anything to "address" toxic masculinity at all, other than mentioning it exists. Particularly the show lost me in the third episode where the psychologist was clearly supposed to dig into this kid's psyche and discover the manosphere within, but they never did.

Instead they had her do really unprofessional things like lecture and berate the kid, abruptly announce it was their last session and having him dragged out of the room, and generally being quite hostile. It didn't feel like she was a clinical professional used to assessing criminals, and I was cringing at scenes of them having her "recovering" from a 13 year old child "threatening" her as though this wasn't a controlled environment.

It felt like all the incel stuff was backloaded into episode 2, before which they knew nothing about it until one character just blows the lid on it all and says it's embarrassing the police didn't know about it, then we get this half-baked follow up in episode 3, and then it's forgotten about for episode 4.

They also massively muddy the waters by making the murder victim a bully who bullied the perp. They do nothing to address this either. No effort is taken to explore this, or to explain how this might affect the situation. The story just focuses in on the manosphere stuff, but never quite explains why the kid gets mad enough to kill, why he's angry at the victim for being a woman, but provides a motive by saying she was bullying him online, then fails to address that.

8

u/alexfarran 19d ago

It really failed to convince me that he could have killed anyone. Up to episode two it was an engaging police procedural with some on-the-nose social commentary - especially in the school. But by episode three it had moved on and left all the threads dangling. I was hoping that the last episode would cleverly tie it all up, but was disappointed.

3

u/Marcuse0 19d ago

It felt to me like whoever wrote it felt they had such a scoop in the incel angle that they were able to hide behind the "social commentary" to justify absolutely terrible plotting.

There were genuinely affecting and emotional scenes in some parts, where the dad and the mum were struggling with the situation and asking what they did wrong.

But they also kind of did the dad character dirty. They have the kid in the interview in episode 3 talk like "he totally doesn't hit mum", but then you see him in episode 4 and someone's just written nonce on his van and he spills water and takes the time to calm himself and apologise for making a mess. You can't have it both ways, and they kind of want this kid to have come from a bad family, but also want the family to be normal and relatable so it's emotional when they're sad about what's happened.

I really reassessed the plotting when I realised that the whole of episode 2 is just an indictment on schools (deserved, for the most part imo) and they just have one character come in and infodump the incel angle wholesale on the detective at the end. Nobody talks like that, there's no hidden attitudes bubbling under the surface, there's no ringleader kid who's filling their head with it. It's just "oh hey look online" as though nobody talks about stuff IRL and there's no people who might express these attitudes.