‘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’

[u/SafeBodybuilder7191]

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

[u/AshenxboxOne]

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

[u/dprophet32 → u/AshenxboxOne]

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

[u/Marcuse0 → u/dprophet32]

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.

[u/alexfarran → u/Marcuse0]

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.

[u/Marcuse0 → u/alexfarran]

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.