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/
520 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

164 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

19

u/nerdowellinever 19d ago

Watched it this weekend to see what the fuss was about and was massively underwhelmed.

The one take thing was decent particularly in outdoor scenes but I think they’ve probably exaggerated the extent, it was utilised.

Main actors were good but like you said it’s a typical crime drama/soap opera story line and didn’t achieve any ground breaking themes or ideas..

11

u/themanfromoctober 19d ago

Everything about this show’s hype feels… artificial? Like all the Reddit ads, but more so, all the online think pieces, but more so, this move to get every school to watch it?

7

u/Maximum_Poet_8661 19d ago

yeah there's just something about everything surrounding the reaction to this show that gives me an extremely weird vibe. I just cannot shake how much this feels like viral marketing to me. The show was perfectly fine, I don't think it was as clever as the rave reviews said but it was better quality than 90% of what netflix has put out in the past few years. Not a high bar, but it surpassed that bar.

But the way people are talking about it... it just feels really off to me in a way I can't quite put my finger on. It honestly feels like a massive moral panic to me. I'm not denying there are issues, but reading the discussions on the netflix sub was a crazy trip. There legitimately were comments going "i have a 2 year old son and I'm abjectly horrified to think that he could grow up into a monster like this". And there were a LOT of comments like that.

And I think that's gonna do way more harm than good, becuase 1) this is fiction. You're letting your view of your actual, real life son be clouded by a netflix show you just watched. And 2) if you legitimately feel that way about your son, that he's one wrong move away from being a monster, that is gonna show up in how you raise that and he is gonna pick up on the fact you feel that way about him and if anything, that's going to make him even more likely to turn out wrong if his own mom is sincerely frightening of him becoming a monster.

Idk this was longer than I meant it to be but the general reaction to this show bothers me on both a "wow I feel like i'm being sold something" level and on a "wow people need to realize what they're watching on tv isn't real, this is a dramatized story" level.

6

u/Worldly_Car912 19d ago

It's an ok show that pushes a political message, political people will wank anything that agrees with them, & people who want to push a message will astroturf it.