The strange void at the heart of Netflix's 'Adolescence'

The show that had me weeping also left me wanting more

SPOILERS AHEAD! (But who am I kidding? Obviously you’ve seen it.)

It’s pretty rare that a TV show gets people talking the way Adolescence has. Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne’s hard-hitting drama about a thirteen year old boy who murders his female classmate has taken the world by storm, prompting parliamentary discussions about incel culture, masculinity and life online, as well as receiving a swathe of well-deserved five-star reviews. And it’s so well made: if you’ve been living under a rock, each episode is filmed in a single take, taking us inside the claustrophobic worlds of a police station, secondary school and interrogation room.

Afterwards I rushed to Substack (the way you used to go to Twitter) to see what everyone was saying about it. I loved

Cristina Carmona Aliaga

’s essay reflecting on the parallel worlds inhabited by adults and teens nowadays (i.e. physical vs. online), and I also loved this piece by Y.L. Wolfe, which deftly summarises the statistics behind the drama, in particular the rise of male-on-female violence in England. Like me, Y.L. felt there was one thing Adolescence’s creators got wrong - but for her, it was an aspect of victim Katie and perpetrator Jamie’s backstory: the fact that Katie has left emojis on Jamie’s Instagram prior to her murder, which mock him for being an incel. Y.L. argues that setting up this quasi-‘justification’ for Jamie’s violent crime allows (misogynistic) viewers to believe she deserved her death - and obscures a harsher truth about femicide. In reality, women are killed by men for doing nothing more than rejecting their advances, or less: ‘when it comes to male-on-female violence and the growing influence of radical online misogyny, a woman’s mere existence is all it takes for some men to snap.’

Y.L.’s argument is a powerful and necessary reminder of the senseless cruelty that accompanies femicide. Personally, however, I’m not sure I agree that Adolescence should have done anything differently in this respect. If we insist that T.V. shows only portray ‘perfect’ female victims, then we leave a different space for misogynists to occupy, instead: one in which there’s sympathy with femicide in principle, but in practice women are still blamed for their fate after any perceived infraction (where they were out, the fact they got into an argument with their murderer, and so on). What I thought was powerful and terrifying about Jamie and Katie’s story was its demonstration of the way that a lack of emotional regulation coupled with baiting by an aggressively masculine online culture encourages men (or teenage boys) to find minor snubs so existentially threatening. What’s more, the relationship between the two teenagers is not simple - Jamie has been complicit in looking at nudes of Katie, distributed without her consent. I didn’t feel at any point that the show supported a theory she was asking for it: the abject horror of what Jamie has done is evidenced by his dad’s reaction at the end of the first episode, and multiple discussions between Jamie’s parents frame his actions as the product of too much time online and low self esteem.

But. Even though I didn’t mind that Katie had left that mocking emoji on Jamie’s Instagram, what I did mind was that it was almost the only thing we learned about her. For me, this was Adolescence’s missing piece. A troubling facet of the ‘manosphere’ is its dehumanisation of women into types and categories - why not counter this with a three dimensional portrayal of Jamie’s victim? Katie’s absence from the show was so total it felt like a statement: we never see a picture of her, let alone a video, and we never hear any in-depth discussion about who she was, what she liked, or what made her tick.

I’d say there was ample opportunity to build this in to the series. There’s a scene where Jamie’s dad goes to lay flowers at the sight of Katie’s murder - he could have had an encounter there with her parents that would have let us witness not just the grief experienced by Jamie’s family but also by Katie’s. And, one thing the show dwells on is the huge online presence teenagers have nowadays: it would have been easy to show us Katie’s Tiktok, her Instagram, or any filmed content of her before her death. I just really wanted to see her face. It felt strange that we didn’t get to.

There’s a discussion in the show between two police officers working Jamie’s case that demonstrates a kind of self-reflexive awareness of this issue. DS Frank, the female copper, says to her male colleague: “Do you know what I don’t like about all this? The perpetrator always gets the front line… Everyone will remember Jamie, no one will remember her. That’s what annoys me.” Evidently, then, Thorne and Stephen thought about this issue with insight and clarity, so they must have kept Katie blank for a reason. Is she meant to be an everywoman, someone we can project our personal experience of loss onto? Did they just think it would be too harrowing if we got to know her? I’ve tried to search for interviews with the creators which speak to this decision, and the closest I’ve come is this one, in which Thorne says there will not be a second series from Katie’s perspective because ‘I don’t think we’re the right people to tell Katie’s story… I think there are other makers out there that could tell beautiful dramas about Katie or girls like Katie’.

I don’t follow this argument. The show is full of well drawn women and teenage girls (as well as people from minority backgrounds whose lived experience is different to that of the creators). Jamie’s mum, Jamie’s sister, that brilliant turn from Katie’s best friend: the female presence in this show was powerful, complicated, raw, and original. Thorne and Graham are two of the most brilliant creatives working today - I’d have trusted them to create a truthful identity for Katie. If nothing else, both men are parents: I think they could have felt their way into what it would be like to lose a daughter, and brought that loss to the foreground.

Excising female victims from shows about crimes committed against them is nothing new. Funnily (not that funnily) enough, I remember having this exact same reaction to Jack Thorne’s equally brilliant 2016 show National Treasure, one which presciently foreshadowed the explosion of the MeToo movement the following year, and dramatised a series of rape accusations made against a beloved British comedian (played by Robbie Coltrane). Here, again, focus was on the impact the trial was having on Coltrane’s character and his family, while its effect on the women accusing him remained almost entirely absent from the narrative. In the case of Adolescence, hiding Katie from the viewer means the fact she once bullied Jamie ends up being all we know about her. In this light, Y.L.’s argument against the emoji detail feels more than understandable - if it’s all we know, it becomes easier to label Katie ‘mean girl’ and leave it at that.

Adolescence is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant show; devastating and artistically stupendous. And criticising incredible shows for the one thing they left out is generally a crap thing to do; a practice that quickly slips into whataboutism and bean soup commentary. It’s impossible for a single work of art to address every issue; meaningfully represent every person’s experience; be everything to everyone. But in this instance, I do think Adolescence could have remained tight, focused and engaging while letting Katie have a bit of presence. Because at the end of the final episode, when I was crying my eyes out, I was weeping for Jamie’s parents, living with the guilt and grief of having raised a child who has done something so horrifying. I should have been crying for Katie, too.

If you enjoyed this piece, please comment, share or give it a like. I’ll be back next week with more traditional Fictional Therapy. In the meantime, if you want to submit a problem to me, you can always do so here.