144: Adolescence and the Failure of Grown-Ups
The System Isn’t Broken—It’s Working as Designed
This post is not meant to have spoilers, in that if you read this before watching Adolescence you can and will find yourself entirely immersed in the story, in no small part due to breathtaking filmmaking. Similarly talk of this show is everywhere in social and antisocial media. So go ahead, read on, but if you want to stop here and watch it first, we get it. 😊
Some shows entertain. Some shows provoke. And then there are rare shows like Adolescence—a four-part masterwork that slices open the zeitgeist with surgical precision and refuses to stitch it back up.
If The Wire captured the decay of America’s civic institutions at the dawn of the 21st century, Adolescence does the same for the digital age, with all its algorithmic rage and emotional paralysis. It’s not just a story about a teenage boy accused of murder. It’s a portrait of a society that has perfected the art of identifying what’s wrong—while losing the will, and maybe the capacity, to fix any of it.
At the center of Adolescence is Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old boy pulled into a web of violence, alienation, and online extremism. Played with uncanny brilliance by newcomer Owen Cooper, Jamie’s character is both deeply sympathetic and profoundly unsettling. He is not a monster. He is a mirror.
And the reflection isn’t pretty.
One of the most devastating aspects of Adolescence is how accurately it captures a society that’s become forensic in its self-diagnosis and utterly impotent in its response.
Parents, teachers, police, and social workers—each shown in unflinching long takes—aren’t villains. But they’re not heroes either. They’re human. Overwhelmed. Under-supported. Trained to follow protocols rather than listen. Jamie’s world is full of adults who mean well but act poorly, when they act at all.
We see a system that’s supposed to protect him—education, justice, mental health—function more as performance than care. The paperwork gets filed. The rules are followed. But no one connects. No one gets through.
Sincerity Is a Threat
If Adolescence has a thesis, it’s this: our social inability to be vulnerable is feeding a digital machine that monetizes our pain.
The emotional repression depicted in the show isn’t just British stoicism. It’s global. We’ve become a culture that sees sincerity as weakness. That flinches from intimacy. That prefers posting to speaking, algorithms to relationships, and memes to meaning.
And in that emotional vacuum, figures like Andrew and Tristan Tate thrive.
Adolescence doesn’t dance around the issue. The Tate brothers are referenced directly—not as fringe influencers but as cultural touchstones. To Jamie and his peers, they are prophets of a gospel that preaches dominance, suppression, and control as substitutes for connection.
Their ideology isn’t marginal anymore. It’s mainstream. When the Trump administration openly celebrates their brand of “alpha masculinity,” it signals a tectonic shift. Adolescence understands this—and doesn’t treat it as incidental. It treats it as central.
This isn’t just a show about boys gone wrong. It’s about a political and cultural order that has embraced emotional detachment and performative cruelty as virtues. The brokenness of the young is not the disease—it’s the symptom. The disease is power without compassion, leadership without care.
Much like The Wire, Adolescence is less a plot than a structure. It’s the architecture of a failing system rendered through individual lives. The use of continuous single-shot episodes reinforces the sense of entrapment. There are no cuts. No breaks. No relief. Just the slow burn of institutional abandonment and digital corrosion.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of a show like this. Not because it gives us answers, but because it refuses to give us escape. It forces us to sit in the discomfort of what we’ve created—and what we’ve allowed.
A Future That Belongs to the Alienated
If there’s a hope in Adolescence, it’s not in redemption arcs or grand revelations. It’s in the possibility that by confronting these uncomfortable truths, we might learn to communicate again. That we might build communities—online or off—where sincerity is not punished, where vulnerability is not shamed.
But first, we have to admit what Adolescence lays bare: that authority today is often indistinguishable from abandonment. That power, in the absence of care, radicalizes.
And that unless we take this seriously, the future won’t belong to the hopeful. It’ll belong to the alienated.