TV: Adolescence - a message for us ALL

The gripping Netflix mini-series Adolescence screened last week. Some are suggesting it might be as influential as Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which aired at the beginning of last year.

It’s all about teenage boys, emerging sexuality, social media, Andrew Tate, online bullying, misogyny and knife crime.

Only it's about much more than that. It addresses all of us, whatever our age or network of relationship, whether or not we go near Instagram or have any idea what an ‘incel’ is.

If you haven’t watched it, and you don’t know anything about the plot, it doesn’t matter. It’s not a whodunnit at all; we know who dunn it before the end of Episode 1. Instead it’s a 'whydunnit', a traumatically masterful psychological drama which tries to unravel the tortured minds of – who knows? – untold hundreds of thousands of boys and young men who are simply struggling with exactly that: being boys and young men, today.

Stephen Graham, who co-created the drama with Jack Thorne, plays Eddie Miller, while Owen Cooper – wholly new to acting – is almost disturbingly convincing as Eddie’s thirteen-year-old son Jamie, who is charged with the murder of a female schoolmate.

The very way in which the series was filmed, with each episode being one continual ‘take’, brings the viewer right into the action. In a few minutes you’re familiar with the physical layout of the police station, the school, the Millers’ home.

Teenage boys are just as insecure

Yes – the drama is rightly named Adolescence. Many of us choose to forget our adolescent years. Who relishes looking at photos of their early teenage selves? These years can be associated with shame and embarrassment because the struggle is intensely and overwhelmingly private.

And yes, the main character is an adolescent boy. A generation ago, the consensus seemed to be that only girls were the sensitive ones, acutely conscious of body image and reputation. Sex education classes in secondary schools focused mainly on girls and their struggles. Adolescent boys, by contrast, were presented as cavalier and happy go-lucky; growing up into a man was carefree, testosterone-fuelled exhilaration.

But has that ever been true? And should we need a blockbusting drama like Adolescence to blow this theory out of the water? Many boys are acutely anxious about whether they will measure up to the typecasted manhood that is paraded before them. Jamie, being quizzed by his psychologist, recalls playing football on Saturdays, failing to meet his Dad’s expectations, and it tortures him. In a few seconds Jamie goes from banging the table and kicking over chairs to tearfully pleading, ‘Do you like me?’.

Deep insecurities inevitably manifest themselves as fabrications. Boys, in order to belong, or more accurately to convince themselves that they belong, simply tell porkies. Jamie relates a number of sexual encounters with girls but it doesn’t take more than a minute or two for these to be revealed as his wishlist. But in adulthood the same tendency can present itself in more subtle and respectable ways: how many men, engaged in a conversation about a subject they really know nothing about, are comfortable admitting their ignorance – in certain company? And is it only a ‘man thing’, I wonder?

Generational differences: part of the problem

We learn – if we didn’t already appreciate it – that the worldviews and indeed vocabularies of different generations are often mutually incomprehensible. There is a compelling scene in the second episode where Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe, who is in charge of the case, is seeking to engage his son Adam in conversation about the murder. Father and son both talk past each other, both become frustrated with each other’s blinking incomprehension. It is only when Adam takes a deep breath and begins to describe an Instagram-world that his Dad has never known – the world of the manosphere and incels (involuntary celibates) and different-coloured emojis with specific meanings only understood by the initiated - that communication and connection are restored.

And of course, the internet, digital technology and especially social media have transformed the landscape of childhood and teenage years. So, tragically, has the proliferation of knives and the tendency to use them – rather than old-fashioned fists.

Towards the final stages we see the parents, Eddie and Manda, desperately seeking to convince themselves that they have both been good parents, that they could never have suspected what Jamie was up to in his bedroom with the light on into the small hours. Any alternative explanation is too painful to contemplate.

I attended a safeguarding training day recently where it was rightly stated that children who go unaccompanied to the local park are far less likely to come to grief than children who are let loose, guidance-free, into the Wild West of the Worldwide Web.

But it is equally true that technology can only ever provide an outlet for the corruption that is already in the human heart; 40 years ago and more, boys of 11 and 12 engaged in conversations and fantasies that were no less degrading and shocking than what circulates on social media today. I know; I was one of them.

Who's fault is it?

The school depicted in the second episode is anarchic beyond description. How much of this reflects present reality in the UK, I have no idea. The headteacher – I assume that is what she is meant to be – is well-meaning and hand-wringing, obsessively solicitous towards the police and utterly incapable of recognising, let alone addressing, the pitiful state of the crumbling institution all around her. Poor teachers. Poorer kids.

Perhaps we might think we can blame the school, but we certainly can’t blame the parents. There is nothing in the Millers’ circumstances or background that would furnish any clue that Jamie might become a murderer; they are a reassuringly decent, working-class suburban family (Eddie is a plumber) who could have stepped off the set of Brookside in the mid-1980s. Jamie Miller is not Robert Thompson or Jon Venables.

The fourth and final episode is in many respects dissatisfying. Surely it is meant to be. We never get to court, we don’t get to see Jamie anymore. The scene opens with Eddie’s fiftieth birthday, and we see the remnant of the Miller family doing their best to enjoy themselves by doing as many ‘normal’ things as possible; they want to go to the cinema, they want to have a Chinese takeaway, they listen to Eighties Music on the iPhone and recall school discos of yesteryear. But the whole drama concludes with Eddie weeping inconsolably in his son’s vacant bedroom, the teddy-bear symbolising the boy who will never sleep in that bed ever again.

It is a hard lesson, but trying to paper over the cracks and sweeten the bitter pills of life simply through distractions and amusements will never deal with the issue that won’t go away.

What is that issue? Psychologists and sociologists will never penetrate to the heart of the problem: why did Jamie do this?

As the prophet Jeremiah says, ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?’ (Jer. 17:9)

I feel drawn to quote the memorable words of John Wesley when he first arrived to preach the gospel in Newcastle in 1742:

We came to Newcastle about six; and, after a short refreshment, walked into the town. I was surprised: So much drunkenness, cursing, and swearing, (even from the mouths of little children,) do I never remember to have seen and heard before, in so small a compass of time. Surely this place is ripe for Him who ‘came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’

There is no lack of ‘cursing, and swearing’, and worse, in Adolescence. The outward trappings have been transformed, but the deep problem remains exactly the same. As does the only remedy, the one which Wesley and his companions applied, and which is so needed today – for teenage boys and for all of us: the gospel of a Saviour, Jesus Christ, who alone can mend what is broken, make straight what is crooked, purify what is corrupted, and restore lost, alienated, sin-sick souls to God.

This article was first published on Paul Yeulett's Substack @paulyeulett.