The wild acclaim for Netflix’s Adolescence has degenerated into ugly hate speech

Authorities, advocates, and its filmmakers insist the series’ fictional UK knife killing story is a mass statement on all “boys today.” That’s false – and bigoted.

I initially hoped Adolescence’s bizarrely muddled message was a cautionary tale warning against simplistic crusades scapegoating social media for youths’ complex problems.

It isn’t. A month later, its authors and worshipful fandom have made it clear. Adolescence is a sinister venting of irrational hatred against young people by aging Anglo establishments with zero standing to criticize youth.

Two crucial sets of scenes exposing Adolescence’s disturbing real message have gone unremarked by the herd of politicians, commentators, and advocates who have stampeded to praise the series for showing (as a typical comment states) “what is happening to our young men these days, and what are the pressures they face from their peers, from the internet, and from social media?”

One set of scenes in Episode 3 shows a prison psychologist asking the 13-year-old UK boy who fatally stabbed a girl what he thinks of women. “I like them” and find them “attractive,” the boy replies. What does he think of misogynistic “incel” sites featuring men who blame women, sometimes in violent terms, for these men’s “involuntarily celibacy”? “I had a look,” the boy said, “but I didn’t like it” and wanted no part of incel culture.

Here’s the first bizarre fact: Adolescence nowhere even pretends to show the boy patronized incel or misogynist social media sites, let alone was driven by them to kill. The 200-minute series mentions incels only sporadically; ‘80s rock bands get more attention.

No matter. Adolescence writer and star Stephen Graham’s emotional anti-youth, anti-social-media hype spurred his disciple flock’s rush to blame “unchecked online influence” led by “incels and Andrew-Tate-style misogyny” for the boy’s stabbing and the “growing problem of youth violence.” Fans demanded no evidence, even from the series’ fictional script.

Fans’ language is beyond incendiary. UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer cited Adolescence to demagogue a new “terrorism… perpetrated by loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety” (notoriety Starmer proves eager to award them).

It gets worse

The second crucial set of scenes, in Episode 4, shows the boy’s father furiously rampaging outside a hardware store against some boys he accused of vandalizing his van. The enraged father screams, hurls bicycles and then a can of paint at his van, and threatens the store manager who confronts him. The father’s crazed frenzy would have included physical violence had the boys not fled and the manager backed off.

The father’s shouting, paint-throwing rampage is identical – not just similar, identical – to his boy’s screaming, coffee-throwing rage at the prison psychologist. Father and son were both triggered by sexual insults. The father was driven to fury by graffiti on his van implying pedophilia; the boy knifed what he called a “bullying bitch” who refused to go out with him, ridiculed his sexuality, and reinforced his fears of being “ugly.”

These scenes seem a sledgehammer warning by Adolescence’s writers that there’s more to the boy’s violence. Especially after the boy’s mother tells the father the obvious out loud: their lad “has a terrible temper, but so do you.” The father then invokes having been savagely beaten in childhood by the boy’s grandfather. The family has an intergenerational history of severe anger management pathology.

Obviously, I thought, Adolescence’s filmmakers are forging a powerful lesson to chastise excitable, single-minded culture warriors, something like: “Grownups, get a grip. Look at the in-your-face blockbusters we presented – the family’s decades of male rages; zero connection between the boy and incel cites. That’s a mountain of evidence you can’t just ignore. The few boys who commit serious violence are driven by real, at-home family and mental health crises, not simplistic screen chimera.”

But no

Bizarrely, the father’s rage-storm simply disappears from the story. He doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t clean up the store parking lot he vandalized. He doesn’t get arrested. He doesn’t fret over the damage he did to his own van. The mother shrugs. Routine stuff, it seems. Maybe the father was just stressed by his son’s trouble? (wrong; the father had past “ragers”).

Graham’s ongoing comments declare that Adolescence really does intend to blame teenage boys and social media for violence, based on two UK knife-crime incidents. “Both of those incidents really hurt my heart,” Graham declared. “… What’s going on? … I’ll never understand it… to stab a young girl to death … What really stuck out… they are young boys … not men … killing young girls … I knew we were going to be making a series.”

By Graham’s words, then, Adolescence’s and its devotees’ message is more cruelly sinister than I thought. Adolescence has nothing to do with protecting girls, preventing violence, or calling attention to neglected crises among boys. It is crude, finger-pointing hostility smugly exonerating grownups while scapegoating powerless adolescents and their supposedly “toxic” social-media and peer cultures – a message that would be condemned as hate speech if hurled at any other group.

The problem is not Adolescence’s story. Murder is standard screen fare, and teenagers, like adults, display a wide variety of behaviors. If creating an honest fictional story rather than poisonous anti-youth bigotry were Adolescence’s purpose, then basic decency and ethics would require incorporating critical factual contexts.

The UK Youth Justice Board’s just-released 2025 report declares, “the number of knife crime offences committed by children [under age 18] has been decreasing since the year ending March 2019, with children making up 20% of all knife crime offences in that year to 17% in the latest year… more than 99% of [juvenile] knife offences are for possession alone.”

Meanwhile, UK child safety monitors report that cases of domestic cruelty against children doubled from 2017 to 2023. While Graham based Adolescence on two knife murders, the reality UK young people face is that homicides “most commonly perpetrated by the child’s parent or step-parent” kill 20 to 25 children under age 16 every year. The UK Office of National Statistics reports that drug-related deaths among parent-aged grownups (30-59) soared by 250% over the last decade, paralleling domestic abuse cases.

Consider another recent series, Hulu’s imported This Is Not Hollywood, about the real-life murder of a young teenage girl by an older male family member. If you’ve heard of it, it’s not because of media worship, gushing fans, “wake-up call” warnings about older-male dangers, or prime-minister “terrorism” harangues — there are none. Graham and Adolescence fans would dismiss this girl’s murder as unworthy of mention and certainly not a statement about their own elder generations.

In the United States…

…where Adolescence is the most-watched recent series, “teenage boys are in crisis,” recites a typical commentary, in USA Today. “…The world for kids today looks a lot different than it did for their parents… the hit Netflix series ‘Adolescence’ captures just how vast that difference is.”

Yes, “the world for kids today” is “a lot different.” Back in 1993, in their parents’ adolescence, 3,600 U.S. boys under age 18 (including 213 age 13-14) were arrested for murder and 298,000 for violent crimes. In 2023, in a larger teen population, 1,200 (including 130 age 13-14) and 99,000, respectively – both down 70% by rate.

FBI statistics show teen boys murder far fewer teen girls today than in their parents’ generation. Adult men age 25 and older remain by far the biggest homicide threat to girls.

What fraction of boys do pose a violent threat? The Centers for Disease Control’s pivotal 2023 survey of 20,000 teenagers shows 31% of boys suffered violent abuse from parents and caretakers, 17% other household violence, 24% parents with drug/alcohol problems, 25% parents with severe mental illness, and 16% parents who have been jailed. Boys from violent and troubled families are many times more likely to carry guns, take weapons to school, and get into fights, the survey shows.

Again, no matter. Try getting factual points into discussion in either country. No one important is interested. The rigid official and press rule is that “youth violence” may only be depicted as a rising scourge, and adults must be held blameless other than for trusting teens with too much “freedom.” Adolescence is acclaimed for abjectly capitulating to the rules.

It gets still worse

Graham’s inflammatory series promotions and the slavish conformities by fans expose Adolescence’s primitive cruelty. Its real message is that it isn’t the dead child who matters, but how important grownups feel about a death. Graham’s statement says that the dozens’ more children, including girls, murdered by adult “men” don’t “hurt” the “heart” so much, are easier to “understand,” and certainly don’t merit doing “a series.”

Still… if that’s Graham’s full-context point, why did he blatantly show the father’s rampage and family history of male violence if not to suggest the violent-boy apple does not fall far from the violent-dad and -granddad tree? Why didn’t his fictional script just dodge that complication by depicting the boy’s parents as peaceably innocent — the image his fans surely craved?

This is where Adolescence descends into hate mongering. Its makers and fans insist the series is not merely fictional storytelling but generalizable to all boys, which means Adolescence is really saying that we privileged grownups are entitled to indulge excuses dismissing far more common adult victimizations of children and adolescents. Our violence is routine, made invisible by our higher status; teens’ violence is terrifying, outrageous, sensational, exploitable because of their low status.

In similar vein, why doesn’t Adolescence portray the boy as a cultish Tate-worshipping “manosphere” fiend celebrating violence against women, instead of presenting his disappointing statements about liking women and disdaining incel culture? That inclusion again renders Graham’s point ominous: we’re culture warriors, we don’t need facts, we can dismiss contradictions and reality as we please. We’re entitled to ignore whatever makes us feel bad and blame whatever makes us feel good. Teenagers are mere commodities in our self-exoneration and self-indulgence.

Those points are too blunt to state directly, of course. So, Adolescence deploys misdirection to rationalize turning a blind eye to the far larger numbers of kids brutalized by grownups in family violence and by governments’ austerity crackdowns starving family and community life. Just blame boys and their social-media “manosphere,” the series message shrugs.

Predictably, Adolescence’s primitive appeals to prejudice invite racialized squabble. US media/White House mogul Elon Musk protested that, statistically, Adolescence’s knife-boy should have been Black, not White. Graham and liberals indignantly rejoined that imposing collective guilt on an entire race for a few individuals’ misdeeds is shameful bigotry (proper bigotry means imposing collective guilt on the entire adolescent age group). How neatly that both the Right’s blame-immigrants and the Left’s blame-youth scapegoatings divert attention from the sins of powerful, older constituencies and officials.

Adolescence reveals the deterioration of adulthood

San Francisco Chronicle headline writers titled my op-ed right: “Reaction to Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’ tells us far more about adults than the show does about kids.”

That Adolescence’s grotesque youth-hating message ensnared so many viewers is a larger indictment of aging UK and US attitudes. The series is “terrifying”; “every parent’s worst nightmare” … “has parents talking” … “hitting people so hard” … “a wake-up call,” commentators across the spectrum huzzaed.

Adolescence is so transparently, desperately what aging UK and America want to believe about young people while excusing elder division and deterioration that mainstream media (with one exception in my case) and political discourse rigidly suppress any pushback.

Adolescence is not a commentary on “young men today.” It is fictional storytelling, just like HBO’s The White Lotus (which features three times more murders than Adolescence, one victimizing an innocent White woman – where are the culture warriors?). The White Lotus’s characters reeking of corruption, criminality, mental traumas, too-handy guns, incessant drinking, obsessive loyalties, and wholesale abandonment of principles could be depicted as a dire warning about debasement of “grownups today.” Except that wealthier, mostly-White middle-agers emblematizing power are exempt from collective guilt.

Adolescence is bad filmmaking. Its long, going-nowhere dialogues (Was A-Ha a great band? How many pointless questions can inept cops and shrinks drone? etc.) require its filmmakers to flat-out tell its eager audience what its anti-youth, anti-social-media message is, like a failed joke that has to be explained. Ultimately, Adolescence is just another dismal signature of today’s post-truth culture of hatred.