A Frighteningly Contemporary Crime Drama

 

Adolescence is a powerfully gripping (and at times somewhat emotionally frightening) four-episode British mini-series recently released on Netflix.

Episode one begins with the shocking arrest of a 13-year old, Jamie Miller, at his seemingly peaceful and ordinary family home early one morning, on suspicion of murder. Jamie claims to be innocent, and continues to protest his innocence through the horrifying experience of arrest and questioning at the local police station. Most of the episode seems set up to make the audience sympathize with the traumatized young Jamie and his terrified family. Not only do we want to believe in Jamie's innocence, but the dramatic expectation built into this kind of crime drama normally leads one to expect - even as the evidence against Jamie accumulates - that at some point the case could collapse and someone else's guilt will be uncovered. Jamie meanwhile desperately wants his father to believe in his innocence, as if that could undo what has happened and, so to speak, fix the situation. Only in the second episode, set three days later at Jamie's school, when the detectives try to gather evidence (and perhaps the murder weapon) from Jamie's unruly schoolmates, do we begin to realize that this is not a typical  "whodunit," and that the drama is less about who committed the crime than about why it happened. Meanwhile, at the school (an "academy," with lots of stairs, where students wear uniforms and generally behave badly), we are  introduced into a really frightening world where teenagers appear to live primarily on-line, a world which adults (police, parents, and teachers) all seem incapable of comprehending. 

Episodes three and four take place respectively seven and thirteen months after the crime. The interesting minor characters (and sub-plots) we have been introduced to in the first two episodes, about which we might expect to see and hear more (like the story of the detective and his son, a student at that school), disappear. The tone changes dramatically from the more typical crime-drama of the first two episodes. Now that we know what happened, we are supposed to focus on the reasons why. Thus, episode three depicts the (now incarcerated) teenager's interview with a psychologist assigned to prepare a report on him for the judge. Their conversation continues and highlights a terrifying world of adolescent on-line and in-person bullying and male sexual obsession, that was earlier alluded to already in the second episode. In the course of episodes two and three, we learn about some of the factors that apparently contributed to Jamie’s crime, such as his extreme lack of self-esteem, his experience of being bullied at school, and especially the on-line world's mixed messages about masculinity and the fear of being labeled an "incel." Then, the final episode, set over a year after the crime, focuses on Jamie's parents and sister and how they have coped with this family crisis and the inevitable feelings of recrimination and guilt which these multiple tragic events have left them with. There are no family secrets to be uncovered (as one might be tempted to expect there will be), just seemingly ordinary people experiencing sadness and regret over something that can no longer be fixed.

This is a very difficult series to take in. It is depressing and at times shocking. It invites us to examine what kinds of messages contemporary on-line culture may be conveying and how such messages may further complicate the already chaotic challenges of growing up unsure of who one is or whether one is valued. It also challenges contemporary society not only about what boys may experience but also about how society should respond and better enable them to to navigate through this increasingly toxic and dangerous world of masculine expectations and pseudo-expectations.