‘A Howl of Despair’: The affective politics of Netflix’s Adolescence

Abstract

This essay explores the strong affective appeal of Netflix’s Adolescence for its adult audiences. It investigates the emotional response to the series, arguing that it feeds into wider discontent over the risks of smartphone usage for young people. Examining the significance of universalised white boyhood in Adolescence, the essay interrogates the cultural stakes of the imagined scenario at its heart – of violent, disenfranchised white boys, incapacitated parents/teachers and silenced dead girls. It also explores the relevance of the character of Briony (Erin Doherty), the female psychologist, and how she is aligned with the figure of the dead girl, Katie (Emilia Holliday), in an act of substitution. Finally, the essay suggests that the attempt to explore the ties between misogyny, sexually abusive behaviour among boys, and physical violence gets somewhat lost amidst the paroxysm of paternal adult emotion that bookends the series.

In a pivotal scene in the first episode of Adolescence, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), a 13-year-old white working-class boy accused of murder, is taken to a room to be examined and strip searched by police officers. His father Eddie, played by series creator and co-writer Stephen Graham, accompanies him. At this point, viewers do not yet know if Jamie is guilty – indeed, he repeatedly says he is not. The scene generates intense worry and concern over what he is made to endure as adult strangers poke and prod at him, taking swabs and blood samples. As the examination becomes more invasive and the strip search begins, the other adults in the room, including a solicitor and a nurse, turn away their gaze. The camera also discreetly turns away from Jamie at this point and instead focuses in close-up on the anguished face of his father. For just under a minute, the camera stays trained there, insisting that viewers register and absorb the play of emotions – the anxiety, stress, helplessness and anger – that twitch and flit across Graham’s face. This sustained look at the face of the father-in-pain goes to the crux of Adolescence and its mode of address to viewers.

It also relates to one of the most serious complaints about Adolescence: which is that it circles around, but never quite manages to retain focus on, the girl whose violent murder is the inciting event for its exploration of boys, social media and misogyny. I suggest that this is because what the series is ultimately most concerned with is not the dynamics of gendered violence and digital harms but the imagined scenario of adult paralysis in the face of it. By the episode’s end, it is confirmed – via grainy CCTV footage on a laptop screen – that Jamie is guilty of stabbing his classmate, Katie Leonard (Emilia Holliday), to death. While we do not see much of the father again until the highly emotive final episode of the series (at which point his perspective once more dominates), his grieving paternalistic subject position is fundamental to the series.

In other words, even though Adolescence is ostensibly about the risks that social media poses for young people, it is not actually for, or even about, them. Rather, its raison d’etre is to generate strong emotions in its adult audience over what is perceived to be happening to children in the social media age – something which it has definitely achieved. Reviewers have described it as ‘a howl of despair’ (Hogan, 2025), a ‘deeply harrowing experience’ (Mangan, 2025), and a ‘devastating watch’ (Singh, 2025). There are reports of adult viewers ‘crying like babies’ (Archer, 2025), and in the weeks after the full drop release of its four episodes on Netflix, my social media feed was a steady stream of middle-aged people sharing their feelings about it, including British Prime Minister Keir Starmer who wrote a Facebook post about how it ‘hit home hard’. A critical consensus on the series has quickly solidified, which is summed up as follows by Rotten Tomatoes: ‘Stylistically bold and beautifully acted from top to bottom, Adolescence is a masterclass in televisual storytelling and a searing viewing experience that scars’. ¹

But if the series ‘scars’, it is imperative to investigate the nature of the wound it inflicts on its (adult) viewers in the service of rendering its messages around the risks of social media for young people. Critically, it needs to be asked: what kind of political, cultural and ideological work is the emotional outpouring over the series performing? And to what extent, if at all, does this translate into meaningful collective action regarding the rising levels of both online and offline sexual and gender-based violence against girls and women?

Bringing viewers together through strong ‘expressions of sentiment’, a networked ‘affective public’ has formed around Adolescence (Papacharissi, 2015: 125). It has hit a cultural nerve at a moment in the United Kingdom when there is widespread discontent over the risks of smartphone usage for young people. The Smartphone Free Childhood movement, whose self-professed mission is ‘to provide solidarity, support and solutions to parents who are struggling with what’s become one of the defining parenting challenges of our time’, has gained serious cultural traction. ² Founded by a group of parents in 2024 through a Whatsapp group, the aim of Smartphone Free Childhood is to press ‘for more support from the government in the battle to reclaim childhood from Big Tech’s addictive algorithms and devices’. There are growing numbers of parents signing up to a pact to ban smartphones until the age of 14, and the Labour government has begun an ‘in-depth scrutiny of smartphone bans in schools in England as pressure grows from MPs to act on the effect of social media on teenagers’ (Elgot et al., 2025). While there are sound reasons for the parental concerns expressed through the Smartphone Free Childhood movement, there are also no clear-cut solutions, and the rhetoric around bans and ‘reclaiming childhood’ can often overlook the importance of children’s digital rights (Rahali et al., 2025; Livingstone and Third, 2017).

Adolescence is a series that is trying to grapple with these issues, as evidenced in the second episode which is set in a secondary school. Feeding into the discourse over smartphone bans, the episode shows unruly school children on their devices, making TikToks and being rude to teachers who are portrayed as being either woefully out of touch, sadly resigned, or overcome with anger. The UK charity, the School of Sexuality Education, has praised Episode 2 for capturing the dynamics of the school as a gendered institution and for depicting casual, normalised misogyny against school staff (School of Sexuality Education, 2025).

But while critical attention has centred on how Adolescence shoots all its episodes in one take, an aesthetic and a technique that is seen to be tied to its much-praised social realism, what I find most worthy of consideration and scrutiny is not its so-called authenticity but the kinds of fantasies of childhood and adulthood it evokes and produces. Issues of race, as well as gender, are relevant here. In the weeks following its release, social media debate emerged over the decision to cast a white actor in the role of the murderous adolescent. Elon Musk made the inflammatory claim that Adolescence was based on the real-life case of the Southport murders and ‘race swapped’ a Black boy for a white boy for purposes of ‘anti-white propaganda’ (Ritman, 2025). This claim was taken up by some X users, who used the occasion of the show’s virality as an opportunity to air racist ideas about crime which position Black and brown bodies as inherently criminal.

In response to Musk and the discourse that arose from these accusations, co-writer Jack Thorne proclaimed that the series is not about race, but masculinity (Ritman, 2025) – an understandable retort perhaps, but one that glosses over the significance of Jamie’s whiteness and how it is tied to the series’ exploration of masculinity and gendered violence and its emotional address to adult viewers. Although Adolescence includes a mix of different races in its cast, it does not reflect on race as an intersectional vector of identity. Jamie’s whiteness is, therefore, both unremarkable and representative; he stands in for a universalised ‘lost’ boyhood in a way that a brown or Black boy would not be allowed to, with his whiteness integral to the adult anguish expressed both in the series and the cultural responses to it.

As a feminist media studies scholar who has done empirical research in schools with young people to explore their gendered responses to sexual and gender-based violence, my concern is with how the potent imagined scenario evoked in Adolescence – of violent disenfranchised white boys, incapacitated parents/teachers and silenced dead girls – might impede more nuanced understanding of gendered power dynamics, relationships and behaviours in a postdigital age in which ‘offline’ interactions are ‘shaped in and through the digital’ (Evans and Ringrose, 2025: 2). One worrying consequence of the emotive response to the series, for instance, is Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s suggestion that Adolescence should be shown in schools to ‘help students better understand the impact of misogyny, dangers of online radicalisation and the importance of healthy relationships’ (cited in Orlando, 2025). This has been strongly criticised by sex education charities and it is important to take heed of their response. To quote again from the School of Sexuality Education (SSE): ‘while Adolescence has been a great way of getting adults’ attention and interest in the issues, it is absolutely not appropriate as a resource for teaching young people about misogyny, relationships, violence prevention or digital harms’. Noting how the series is ‘framed from an adult’ and heavily masculine ‘point of view’, SSE questions its relevance to youth, and points to its limitations as a teachable object (School of Sexuality Education, 2025).

Some of the clunkiest and least convincing moments in Adolescence involve its didacticism about social media. In one scene in Episode 2, Black student Adam (Amari Bacchus), the 17-year-old son of Detective Inspector Bascombe (Ashley Walters), the lead police officer on Katie’s case, explains to his father what various emojis mean on Instagram. Bascombe expresses astonishment over what his son is telling him, as though the notion of an emoji is a revelation, and it leads to a bonding moment for the pair which is in stark contrast to how communication between children and adults is represented elsewhere in the series. Indeed, in scene after scene, intergenerational communication is shown to fail, as young people storm out of classrooms, away from the adults who are painfully labouring to speak to them. What these young people are thinking is not explored, and the series seems to portray these failures of communication only to further cement the overwhelming sense of adult confusion and despair.

The most sustained communication we see between an adult and a child in Adolescence takes place in Episode 3, which is set 7 months after the murder and revolves around the interaction between Jamie and a young white woman psychologist, Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty). This episode is of interest for two reasons: (1) it attempts to grapple with the connections among misogynistic attitudes, digital harms and gender-based violence and (2) it is the only episode to extensively engage with a woman’s subject position. These two things – the wrestling with discourse around gendered digital violence and the inclusion of a female subject position – are closely related in ways that need to be unpacked. After the psychologist Briony asks him a series of personal questions around masculinity and his sexual interest in girls and women, Jamie admits that he and his male friends shared non-consensual intimate images of girls on Snapchat – including nude images of the murdered girl, Katie – from their school. During this discussion, Jamie makes a disparaging remark about Katie’s ‘flat chest’, and then adds the line – ‘no offence’ – directed at Briony, in demeaning reference to the size of her own chest.

Reviewers have pointed to how this moment indicates Jamie’s misogynist, sexually objectifying views. However, what also bears discussion is how it puts the adult Briony in the place of Katie, the murdered schoolgirl. Throughout Adolescence, girls’ experiences are strangely elided; it is troubling, for example, that across its four episodes the series cannot find a way to humanise Katie or her family. There are uncomfortable moments when Jamie – but also arguably the show itself – needs to be reminded of the fact that a girl is dead. For example, many commentators on Adolescence have noted a fleeting observation made by the woman police officer in Episode 2 that ‘no one will remember’ Katie, and that victims sadly always get lost in the focus on perpetrators – an accusation that could be made against the show itself (Fehr and Ringrose, 2025).

However, I want to take this point even further and consider how when Katie is remembered and evoked in Episode 3 it is through an act of substitution. The casting of Erin Doherty as the woman psychologist is significant because she is young and of a slight build; the episode makes much of this in the moments when Jamie gets angry and towers over her, screaming and enacting violent masculinity. Part of the work of the psychologist is, of course, to find ways to evoke this anger, and to position Jamie in such a way that he reveals himself to her. But it is also necessary to ask what kind of work this positioning and symbolic substitution is performing for Adolescence and its viewers in terms of the psychically charged scenario I outlined earlier of violent white boys, incapacitated adults and silenced dead girls. Viewers could be said to indirectly engage with Katie’s suffering in this episode, through close-up images of Briony’s frightened and emotional face when Jamie directs his rage at her. In aligning Briony so strongly with the position of the dead girl, I argue that Adolescence further cements the terms of its address to an implicitly white adult viewer who is positioned as victimised. After a distraught and emotionally disturbed Jamie – who shows no remorse for murdering Katie – leaves the room, a shaken Briony cries, and then regains her composure as she tidies up her papers to prepare to leave. She goes to pick up the sandwich she had earlier given Jamie, which he took a small bite of, and then instantly pushes it away in what seems to be a gesture of disgust and revulsion. Briony looks as if she is going to throw up, covers her mouth, says ‘oh god’, and shudders. It is a moment that has stayed with me, and I think this is because it exemplifies the visceral position Adolescence is asking adults to take in relation to its subject matter. Sara Ahmed (2014) has written that: ‘The limits of disgust as an affective response might be that disgust does not allow one the time to digest that which one designates as a “bad thing”’ (p. 99). After this episode’s attempt to expose the close ties between misogyny, sexually abusive online behaviour among boys, and physical violence, the show ultimately pulls away from this critique to root itself back in a paroxysm of adult emotion. This emotion becomes intensified in the fourth and final episode which assesses the damage done to the family unit and returns to the paternal howl of anguish it began with.

To quote again from Ahmed (2014), ‘Emotions should not be regarded as psychological states, but as social and cultural practices’ (p. 9). Emotions, in other words, are not only personal; they also have political implications and do not always lead to greater understanding of social injustices. My worry with Adolescence is that it focuses on making adults feel bad at the expense of asking us to feel critically involved in the struggle to change the long-standing and damaging gendered norms and ideals that lead to the ‘systemic dehumanisation of women and girls’ (Fehr and Ringrose, 2025). Furthermore, while Adolescence may have initiated necessary cultural conversation about boys, misogyny and the manosphere (Ging, 2025), it is important to reflect on why the ensuing public discussion over the societal salvation of young masculinity has seemed unable to attend to race and its structural inequities, leaving the whiteness of the universalised figure of the male ‘adolescent’ uninterrogated.