Adolescence – The New Lost Boys – Anticapitalist Resistance

>> originally posted on Anti Capitalist Musings

Adolescence begins in the worst way. For Jamie Miller, it begins at dawn, with armed police storming his suburban home. They find him in his bedroom, thin arms wrapped around his knees, paralysed in shock. He has wet himself. Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) reads him his rights. Jamie is thirteen. He looks younger.

From there, Adolescence unfolds in relentless real-time. The first episode stays with Jamie as he is processed, fingerprinted, photographed, and questioned. Apart from the presence of an appropriate adult, he is alone. He chooses his dad.

Eddie (Stephen Graham) arrives, wary and defensive. DI Bascombe, firm but measured, asks if he wants a solicitor. What, one of yours? Eddie snaps. A solicitor is agreed. In the interview room, Jamie’s father leans in. I don’t care if you did it. Just don’t lie to me. Jamie meets his father’s eyes. No.

Then, CCTV.

Jamie with his friends. Later, a girl, walking alone. A few moments pass. Jamie follows.

Eddie straightens. What’s this?

Bascombe exhales. We have CCTV.

A boy. A blur of movement. A frenzied attack. It looks like Jamie.

A Brutal, Unflinching Drama

Written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, Adolescence is structured around single-take episodes, an unbroken, claustrophobic lens that denies easy edits or narrative escape. Jamie (Owen Cooper, astonishing) is taken from his bedroom to the police station. The next episode shifts to his school, where the murder has ruptured the daily order. Seven months later, he is in a secure training centre, a space stalled between punishment and rehabilitation, clinical but underfunded.

We see little of the other boys. A fight caught on CCTV, Jamie mid-punch, staff rushing in. The institution is less a place of correction than a failing school with locked doors. The only suitable place for Jamie?

Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty, mesmerising) is here to assess Jamie for sentencing. She meets him with a hot chocolate, small marshmallows floating on top, a child’s drink, a quiet offering. He drinks as she speaks, answering in careful half-truths. But later, when she presses him, the mask slips. His face twists, the boyishness gone. He leans forward. His voice is sharp, cutting.

The misogyny is visceral, instinctive. A moment earlier, he was withdrawn, calculating his answers. Now, he sees Briony not as a psychologist, not as an adult, but as a woman, someone trying to control him. The unchecked fury is chilling. It echoes the power-plays of Andrew Tate, the incel forums Jamie has absorbed. The fantasy of dominance, of making a woman afraid.

Jamie admits to being bullied—tripped over, pushed—but his real torment is online. He has an Instagram account, not for posting, but for following models, for tagging his friends. But the comments are the crucial bit, missed by the police. It takes Bascombe’s son to explain the emoji code: red pills, skulls, frogs. The alt-right shorthand for indoctrination, despair, and toxic masculinity. What looks like nothing to his parents is a labyrinth of radicalisation.

Too Young to Understand, Too Old to Ignore

Jamie is not watching porn. He looks at semi-naked models on Instagram, filtered images, not real bodies. He is asked what he would do with a girl. He hesitates. He can’t even describe a perfect date. He fumbles, says a girl touched his cock. Then he backtracks, admits he made it up.

Why does he feel the need to do that?

He is thirteen, still a child, yet already expected to know things he hasn’t experienced. In the room with Briony, he performs a version of masculinity he barely understands, parroting things he has heard, mimicking bravado. It is the same bravado that fuels his online world, where boys compete to sound experienced, to sound hard, to sound like they have control.

But Jamie doesn’t have control. He is a child drowning in an adult world. A world that tells him he must be dominant, that being powerful matters more than being kind. A world where vulnerability is shameful, and sex, whether real or imagined, is currency.

In the hands of Adolescence, this is not just a subplot; it is the foundation of everything. A thirteen-year-old boy is told what it means to be a man before he even understands what it means to be himself.

And when something happens, something violent, something brutal, who is responsible?

The boy?

Or the world that raised him?

No Edits, No Escape

Each episode of Adolescence unfolds in a single, unbroken take. There are no cuts, no flashbacks, no shifts in perspective. We are locked into the moment, forced to experience everything in real time.

This is not just a stylistic choice, it is a psychological trap.

When Jamie is taken from his home, we are in the police van with him. When he sits in the interview room, we watch every second pass, every twitch of his fingers, every flicker of fear. When he is confronted with CCTV, there is no reprieve, no time to look away before the next horror arrives.

The lack of edits does something else, too. It robs us of processing time. In a conventional drama, we would get reaction shots, pauses, a chance to absorb what has happened before moving on. Adolescence denies us that comfort. One moment bleeds into the next, and we are dragged with it, breathless, overwhelmed.

When Jamie is asked a question, we feel the weight of the silence before his answer. When Eddie snaps, when Briony pushes, when violence erupts, it happens without warning, just like in life.

This technique is punishing, but it is also the show’s most powerful weapon. There is no distance, no safety net. We are trapped, just as Jamie is trapped. And when the worst moments come, we cannot turn away.

A Family Unravelling

Thirteen months later, Eddie Miller wakes up on his birthday. There is a plan. A special breakfast, a day of normality. His daughter Lisa (Amelie Pease) refuses to leave town, despite the harassment. If we do, it’ll be okay for a bit, but then someone will find out, and it’ll be worse.

Then, the van. NONCE spray-painted across the side.

Eddie scrubs at the paint. The boys who did it cycle past, jeering. He gives chase, but they are quicker. He stares after them, chest heaving. He turns back to the house. Start the day again. A mantra. Therapy talk. They will go to the DIY store. They will talk about music. They will pretend things can be rebuilt.

But the tension lingers.

At the store, a stranger recognises Eddie. You’ve got a lot of support. A crowdfunder for a proper lawyer. The incels see Jamie as a martyr. Eddie nods, says nothing. He buys a tin of blue paint. It won’t do the job. The van needs a respray. But this is about covering, not fixing.

Then, the boys again. This time, Eddie catches one, screaming in his face. Spittle on his lips. The screwdriver still in his hand.

Later, on the bed, his wife asks: Where did we go wrong? We made him. We are to blame.

Eddie shakes his head. We can’t blame ourselves.

But we made a good one too.

One good. One bad. How many parents have sat here and thought the same?

How Do You Know What Your Child is Becoming?

Jamie, in the assessment room, is asked about his dad. Did he ever get angry?

Yeah. He ripped a shed down once.

Briony pauses. And how did that make you feel?

Jamie barely thinks. I thought it was funny.

How do you know what rage is safe? How do you know what your child is becoming, when their bedroom light is on, when they are at their computer, being poisoned by Andrew Tate, going deeper into a world of online fury?

A world hidden from you. But not hidden now.

Necessary Television

This is impact TV, the kind the BBC used to make. It has the raw social realism of Ken Loach, the sharpness of Alan Bleasdale. It understands the working class, the pressures, the language, the way anger simmers beneath the surface.

Stephen Graham is devastating as Eddie Miller, a man barely holding it together. Owen Cooper is unsettling, carrying the weight of Jamie’s role with quiet, unnerving intensity. Erin Doherty brings a quiet precision to every scene.

Yet Adolescence does not offer easy answers. Is Jamie a victim or a threat? Are his parents responsible, or is this something bigger, something that has seeped into the cracks of adolescence itself?

The show forces us to look.

It is not just timely, it is necessary.

Simon Pearson is on the Editorial Board of the Anti*Capitalist Resistance and is a Midlands-based political activist.