I know i am late but I REALLY REALLY needed to talk about the Netflix series, Adolescence (2025).
Ok so Adolescence is one of those shows that pretends to be a crime story but is actually just… a really uncomfortable, brutally real look at what it means to grow up right now. Like yeah, on paper it’s about Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old who kills a girl from his school, but the show doesn’t really focus heavily on the “who did it” part. It cares about the how did we even get here—and then it just sits with that question until it starts to feel uncomfortable cause it starts to feel too real.
The first episode already sets the tone in the most unsettling way. Jamie’s arrest isn’t dramatic. There’s no cinematic build-up, no shocking twist energy. It feels almost normal. Like just another morning that slowly goes wrong and that normalcy is what makes it suffocating. Eddie, his dad, is trying to hold himself together, talking to Jamie like he’s still just his kid who messed up, not someone accused of something irreversible. You can literally see the denial happening in real time, that disconnect—between who someone was to you and who they might actually be—is one of the hardest things the show makes you sit with.
And then you get to Jamie himself, and this is where the show completely flips the usual narrative. He’s not your typical cold, calculated killer you see in documentaries. There’s no emotional detachment, no eerie calm. He’s awkward, defensive, confused—like painfully, recognizably human and a typical teenager. He fidgets, he contradicts himself, he tries to downplay things like a kid who doesn’t fully understand the weight of what’s happening and that’s what makes it worse. Because you can’t distance yourself from him. You can’t just label him as “just another cold blooded killer” and move on.
He’s not emotionless—if anything, he’s overwhelmed by emotions he doesn’t know how to handle. Rejection, humiliation, anger, insecurity… it’s all there, just completely unprocessed and the show very quietly suggests that he’s not just acting out of nowhere, he’s been shaped—by isolation, by social dynamics, and especially by the kind of content he’s consuming online. There’s this whole undercurrent of incel/manosphere ideology creeping into how he thinks. The way he talks about girls, about respect, about consent about being ignored—it doesn’t even feel fully his. It feels learned, absorbed and that’s honestly one of the scariest parts of the show.
Because this isn’t framed like some extreme, rare mindset. It’s shown as something that’s slowly, quietly becoming normal in certain spaces. Boys being fed this idea that they’re owed attention, that rejection is humiliation, that their worth is tied to how they’re perceived—and when reality doesn’t match that expectation, it turns into resentment. Not always violence, obviously, but the show is asking: what happens when that resentment builds with no emotional outlet, no guidance, no interruption? it doesn’t justify what Jamie did, but it forces you to look at the environment that made it possible and yeah, that whole incel culture thing—it’s not just “internet nonsense,” it’s actively shaping how some people understand relationships, rejection, and themselves. And that has real consequences.
Now coming to the therapy sessions with Briony, this is where you can see all of it come out. They’re quiet, almost slow, but they hit hard because you can see her trying to untangle his thought process. And the more she does, the more you realize how much of his thinking isn’t grounded in reality, but in this warped framework he’s picked up somewhere along the way. It’s not that he set out to become violent—it’s that he never learned how to deal with feeling small, or invisible, or rejected. so those feelings just… sat there, growing.
and then you’ve got Eddie, and honestly his arc might be the most quietly devastating because there’s no big emotional explosion where everything clicks. Instead, it’s smaller. he starts replaying memories, normal everyday moments, trying to find where things went wrong and the worst part is, there isn’t an obvious answer. Nothing was dramatically broken. it was all just slightly off, slightly missed and that’s such a real kind of guilt—the kind where you realize love wasn’t enough to actually understand what was happening.
another reason why Adolescence hits hard hat it’s not just about one boy doing something terrible—it’s about how that boy was built, slowly, quietly, by everything around him. and one of the most uncomfortable parts of that is how much of Jamie mirrors Eddie, even when the show never says it out loud.
Like Eddie isn’t a bad parent and that’s what makes it worse. He’s trying, he cares, he shows up. But the way he handles emotions? very controlled, very bottled up, very “keep it together.” You rarely see him actually process anything openly. Even during the arrest, he’s focused on staying composed, staying practical, not falling apart and that seems like strength on the surface—but when you look at Jamie, you kind of see the flipped version of that.
Because Jamie doesn’t know how to process emotions either. He just does it messily, impulsively, in ways that spiral. It’s like he learned that emotions aren’t something you talk through—they’re something you either suppress or react to. There’s no middle ground and that doesn’t come from nowhere.
There’s this subtle pattern where Eddie avoids going deeper emotionally, even when he has the chance. Like during those quieter moments—especially around the birthday scene—everything feels off, but no one actually says what they’re feeling. Like he doesn't want to have that "difficult" conversation with his wife, it’s all surface-level normalcy and that’s such a key detail, because it shows the kind of environment Jamie grew up in. Not abusive, not neglectful in an obvious way—just emotionally… limited and teenagers pick up on that more than people think.
Jamie’s reactions in the interrogation scenes reflect that too. When he’s pushed to explain himself, he doesn’t really have the language for it. He deflects, minimizes, gets defensive , starts yelling or tries to "assert dominance". It’s not just guilt—it’s a lack of emotional vocabulary. He literally doesn’t know how to articulate what’s going on inside him and that’s something you don’t just randomly lack. It usually means you were never taught how to.
There’s also this really subtle parallel in how both Eddie and Jamie try to maintain control when they’re actually overwhelmed. Eddie does it by staying calm and functional, even when he’s clearly breaking inside. Jamie does it by downplaying, denying, or lashing out. different expressions, same root problem: neither of them actually knows how to sit with vulnerability.
And the show never makes this connection obvious. it doesn’t have a moment where someone goes “he learned this from his father.” It just shows you enough that you start to see it yourself. Like when Eddie starts replaying past moments, trying to find where things went wrong—you realize there wasn’t a single failure. It was a pattern, a way of bein, something that felt normal enough to go unnoticed.
And that’s kind of the scariest takeaway: teenagers don’t just get influenced by big, dramatic events. They absorb the tone of their environment. How people talk, how they avoid things, how they react to stress, what they don’t say. All of that becomes a blueprint.
So when you look at Jamie, you’re not just seeing a kid who was influenced by the internet or by peers. You’re seeing someone shaped by a mix of everything—home, silence, expectations, and then amplified by external noise that gave those feelings a direction.
And again, this isn’t about blaming Eddie. the show is very careful about that. It’s not saying “this is his fault.” It’s saying: this is how influence works. It’s messy, indirect, and often invisible until it’s too late.
And yeah, the show has a bunch of scenes that feel almost unnecessary at first. Like random conversations with neighbors, or Eddie’s birthday celebration. They feel out of place, almost annoying, because you’re expecting the story to stay focused on the crime. But that’s exactly the point. real life doesn’t pause for tragedy. People still make small talk, birthdays still happen, routines keep going and that contrast—between something horrific happening and everything else staying normal—is what makes it feel so real.
Eddie’s birthday especially is just… hollow. Nothing dramatic happens, but you can feel how wrong everything is underneath the surface. It’s people trying to act like things are okay when they’re clearly not and that’s way more painful than any big breakdown scene.
The show doesn’t give you a single breaking point either. There’s no one moment where everything clearly goes wrong. It’s just a buildup—small humiliations, quiet resentment, emotional neglect, toxic ideas, silence and that’s what makes it so unsettling. Because it dismantles the idea that extreme actions come from extreme situations. Sometimes they come from very ordinary feelings that just keep piling up until something snaps.
And the victim being almost absent from the narrative feels intentional too. The show isn’t trying to emotionally manipulate you through the tragedy itself. It’s forcing you to focus on the cause, not just the outcome. Which is uncomfortable, because you’re so used to crime stories giving you someone to mourn so you don’t have to think too deeply about why it happened.
In the end, the message isn’t subtle, it’s just hard to accept. It’s not saying “this is why he did it” to excuse him. It’s saying this is how something like this becomes possible. It’s about how kids are growing up in environments where they’re emotionally unequipped, influenced by things no one’s really monitoring, and surrounded by people who think they understand them but don’t actually see what’s going on inside.
And the worst part (in a good way)? nothing in the show feels unrealistic. No exaggerated drama, no over-the-top characters. Just a normal setting, normal people, normal routines—and something going very, very wrong inside that normalcy.
It doesn’t leave you with closure. It leaves you with recognition like this isn’t some distant, rare tragedy. it’s something that could quietly exist anywhere. It could very much be happening around you and that’s what makes it stick.
I know this was a very very long post and i am thanking all the people who read till the end, but i just felt like i really needed to talk about this series because it was not something you see everyday.
Thank you for coming to my ted talk :) please feel free to share your inputs and takes of the series.
