My wife has a strange way of unwinding after a busy workday. While I retreat into hobbies, she’ll be watching Real Housewives, Married at First Sight and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. I relax with lessons of military history; my wife finds catharsis in solving the travails of others. Opposites attract they say, and we’ve been married decades.

It was surprising then, that the way she found out about “Adolescence”, the new limited crime series on Netflix was from my coming across conversation about it on X.

I initially had no idea what it was about: a child-turned murderer I soon gathered, and inspired by the happenings of the news. Some said of the 2024 Southport UK school stabbings caused by Islamist extremism. I thought, maybe the school shootings in the US. Both were wrong.

It was about men.

What caught my eye though were not just its rave reviews from all walks of life but the comments of journalists. The Sydney Morning Herald for example, called it a “modern classic”. Guardian called it “powerful TV”. New Yorker called it the “most-watched television show among Americans” before labelling it “one of the more wounded shows I’ve seen”.

Hence, I mentioned it to my wife as something maybe in her genre. But then a strange thing happened. I had a sixth sense to be sure. A couple of days ago I binged it to see whether my recommendation might be right.

I’m glad I did, for unlike its flowing praise all I saw was a worrying lapse of production quality.

Let me sum it up like this: Adolescence, in just under four hours, brings the full disappointment of Game Of Thrones Season 8—particularly its finale.

It has no ending. It tells no story. It’s not paradigm-changing TV.

Yet, its subject matter is completely worrying.

Its scripting is two-dimensional; its cast tries its best with it but can’t always find the right motivation and other than a couple of cameos therefore can’t pull it off. This is particularly surprising as the show’s creator plays the lead role as the accused adolescent’s father.

This four-part TV drama offers no plot. What is a plot?

A plot is a formula that has established drama since Ancient Greece: It gives the audience a character called a protagonist who has a problem, that character must struggle to overcome that problem in a way the audience understands, that character either succeeds or sometimes fails to the audience’s satisfaction, and the audience thereby receives an end.

In Adolescence there is no clear protagonist. There is no clear journey for the audience to invest its time.

And the subject of the series—a 13-year-old boy accused of stabbing a girl seven times to death—only features in Episodes 1 and 3. Once again, there are four episodes.

So, whose story is this?

I’ll try to answer using nothing more than you’ll gather from the Netflix promo to avoid spoilers.

It begins with the viewpoint of two UK police detectives an inspector and a sergeant—but the story isn’t theirs.

It then introduces the boy’s mum, the boy’s dad, the boy’s sister, the boy (and in quick time thereafter a social worker, and the boy’s defence solicitor). Yet still we never know whose story this is.

We presume it’s the boy—but he never appears in the finale.

In other words, viewers desperately want to connect with him, see him come to justice, and understand why he killed using the central maxim of “show don’t tell”—but his removal from the finale means we can never do that—in fact, we feel that the writers don’t want us to, which is weird.

For this reason, story-wise, there is no need to watch Episode 4 at all. It leads you nowhere. It covers content that a well-written drama would leave for the audience to imagine. Instead, the audience is left to imagine how on earth this four-hour journey ends?

This poor literary technique is not unique to Adolescence. The great Stephen King drove me crazy with it after nights spent with his smartphone-virus-themed novel “Cell”. No end.

By the final credits of our Netflix show we see no court case, no justice, no outcome—and nothing of the boy who we now perceive is a sociopathic, schizophrenic, narcissist psychotic. Yet, we’ll never know.

I’ll explain what I mean using the promo scene which happens to open the story.

Bad acting out of the gate

Imagine that an 8-man SWAT team batters down your front door, clad in helmets and bulletproof kit, armed with automatic rifles; it swarms through your house upstairs and downstairs barking orders and it’s early morning in your otherwise quiet suburban street.

You’d freeze or you’d faint; you’d scream a shrill you thought you never had or you’d cry; you’d vomit, you’d cower, you’d plead, you’d comply, you’d shake uncontrollably. Well, that’s Scene 2. Let’s backtrack a couple of minutes.

Instead, we begin with two UK plain clothed police officers Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe and Detective Sergeant Misha Frank in their unmarked car, Frank is behind the wheel and Bascombe is on his comms phone. Bascombe, the presumed head of the taskforce about to smash down the door, is talking about his son who has left a voicemail that he is sick (why? from where?), while DS Frank fills the cliche of the wise, listening, patient partner. They joke about Bascombe’s breath.

So, given this intimacy Bascombe must be the protagonist right? No.

Cut to police vans roaring into scene, the SWAT team pours out. Thump! The front door swings (yes swings) open. We find that this is the home of the Millers. In order: mum Manda, dad Eddie, daughter Lisa and son Jamie.

Manda immediately throws herself on the floor yelling quite coherently whereas in reality she’d be screaming for her life. Eddie raises his hands and stands on the stair landing telling the police flying by that “you must have the wrong place”. No—he’d really be cowering at the weapon shoved in his face. Lisa appears in the bathroom doorway. She crouches with a grimace rather than chucking up in sheer panic and fear. And Jamie? Oh, Jamie the 13-year-old boy.

It’s 6:15 in the morning. SWAT catches Jamie sitting up in bed. Jamie looks like he’s just hopped on the set and been given the direction: “Action!” He shows no fear, no terror, he’s fresh faced and clean, hair combed. He shows no signs of sleepiness, no signs of shock. Though to make the point for us, the director does ensure that we see that he’s now wet his pyjamas.

We’re left to wonder then: Has this family had a SWAT visit before because they’re so blasé about it? Why wasn’t the dad hyperventilating on hearing that his son was being charged with “murder”? Yes, DI Bascombe said, “Murder”! Why wasn’t he shaking his kid by his shoulders for an immediate answer? Was this a crime family?

You’d soon learn that this show would break another rule of writing. It says that if you display a gun on a shelf in a scene, it had to have a meaning later. Well, of the many allusions given throughout Episode 1, none would have any meaning at all.

Instead, viewers would be in for four episodes of cliches and nothing deeper. Not a single character would be fleshed out. Law & Order in 48 minutes does it better.

And this is bad because the topic of the series, that we only learn midway through Episode 2, is utterly and urgently important.

This is a show about toxic masculinity. We need more insight.

We do get exposure to the thinking of a younger Gen Z. We do touch on the politics of education and social media. But as for male violence towards women, we only get a glimpse.

I won’t say more about the nuance of the subject that Adolescence projects to preserve the show if you do wish to watch it.

But as an average male with his faults and imperfections, I’m just relieved that in my world, I had no idea. I believe that the majority of men today won’t either.

Here’s the thing though. As bad as this series is as a production, its topic has left me totally haunted.

© 2025 Adam Parker.

Picture credit: Netflix promotional. © 2025 Netflix Inc.