Surprised not to see a thread on this, especially given how it was filmed: 1 single continuous take per episode.

Ignoring the story for the moment (about the murder of a young girl), I'd really love to see a making of video about this series.

I'm 2 episodes down and it's great so far - recommend giving it a watch.

Pretty impressive! The amount of planning and full cast/crew practice is pretty incredible - they even had to use crew as cast to hide them in plain sight. There's also a list somewhere of how many takes they had to do for each complete episode and what take # they eventually used for each.

Oh and that kid did a great job in episode 3. I read somewhere the woman's reaction to him in parts wasn't scripted.

How *that* scene in #Adolescence was filmed. https://t.co/jSvgVsTBSY pic.twitter.com/Qd6c3WP5lP

— Netflix UK & Ireland (@NetflixUK) March 17, 2025

It was well done. I think it was just a close up and personal story about how this tragic event affected an average family.

I agree this was a well done series. But also incredibly tragic and sad. There is no feel good to this series at all.

The ridiculous thing about the show is that it was based on a young black migrant kid who killed a young girl but they race swapped the murderer and made it about toxic masculinity or whatever.

The acting is incredible.. off the charts.

The show is boring as hell.

And then you consider the above….the intentional fictionalization of parts of a true story for political/woke purposes…..meh.

It must be out of this world. A white English conservative kid pretending to be a black immigrant is tough to pull off.

I also read that it was partially funded by the government and now Starmer wants to show it in parliament and in all schools. Completely absurd.

Absurd why? It seems like it would do a lot of good for young kids to see this show. Have you seen it?

ATX_AG_08 said:

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And people wonder why 20 yr old white males are more right-wing than 75 yr old white men, according to recent studies. Not only are they by far the most openly discriminated against group in many of our lifetimes, they are constantly demonized and villainized by all forms of entertainment and media, along with educators and politicians.

Because the major issue facing Europe right now is unfettered immigration from Africans and Muslims and the violence, rape, terrorist attacks, etc. associated with it. Not radicalized white English kids.

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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Absurd why? It seems like it would do a lot of good for young kids to see this show. Have you seen it?

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It's not clear "why" after reading several of the posts on this thread about the intentional race-switching in the show? Let me ask you this, you think they would showcase it in these venues and make it mandatory if they had left the kid black?

And there can't be more than one issue?

Personally I feel like the issue tackled in the show is a much broader, more universal issue that's affecting every single country in the world. (And the global viewership seems to reflect that.)

Not sure why whatever the real-life inspiration might have been matters in that regard. The show never claims to be based on a true story.

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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And there can't be more than one issue?

Personally I feel like the issue tackled in the show is a much broader, more universal issue that's affecting every single country in the world. (And the global viewership seems to reflect that.)

Not sure why whatever the real-life inspiration might have been matters in that regard. The show never claims to be based on a true story.

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No serious person can honestly think this.
"Toxic masculinity" isn't killing Western Civilization.
Good lord.

I'll continue to let my kids be toxic masculine but not allowed on social media just like they have been for years.

Hank the Grifter said:

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Brian Earl Spilner said:

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And there can't be more than one issue?

Personally I feel like the issue tackled in the show is a much broader, more universal issue that's affecting every single country in the world. (And the global viewership seems to reflect that.)

Not sure why whatever the real-life inspiration might have been matters in that regard. The show never claims to be based on a true story.

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No serious person can honestly think this.
"Toxic masculinity" isn't killing Western Civilization.
Good lord.

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But cyber bullying is.

This show isn't on attack on toxic masculinity as much as it is a reflection on what social media is doing to the younger generations.

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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Hank the Grifter said:

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Brian Earl Spilner said:

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And there can't be more than one issue?

Personally I feel like the issue tackled in the show is a much broader, more universal issue that's affecting every single country in the world. (And the global viewership seems to reflect that.)

Not sure why whatever the real-life inspiration might have been matters in that regard. The show never claims to be based on a true story.

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No serious person can honestly think this.
"Toxic masculinity" isn't killing Western Civilization.
Good lord.

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But cyber bullying is.

This show isn't on attack on toxic masculinity as much as it is a reflection on what social media is doing to the younger generations.

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Cyber bullying isn't killing western civilization either. That's probably beyond #10000000 on the list.

And if the show was trying to convince people to stop cyber bullying, then it didn't come close to doing that. At "best", it makes the case "don't murder people after they cyber bully you".

You're right, it's a global issue.

If you believe social media has played no role in many, if not most of the issues we are dealing with, not sure what to tell you.

The only cyber bullying I see in the UK is the govt locking people up over Facebook posts. People are getting longer prison sentences for criticizing immigration policy than immigrant rapists.

If you think cyber bullying is a major world issue then there's no point in continuing this convo. I'll tell you one thing. When bullying was more accepted we didn't have 87 genders we had to individually coddle and affirm.

The real bullies are those forcing men into women's sports and locker rooms, burning down and keying swastikas on Teslas, etc.

Calling this a convo is generous. Once again, you're completely ignoring the actual point I made and just having a conversation with yourself.

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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You're right, it's a global issue.

If you believe social media has played no role in many, if not most of the issues we are dealing with, not sure what to tell you.

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And yet that is not what this show was about. There was a small part of one episode where the cop's son informed his dad that he was misreading posts. The whole point of that was to establish motive. Not to be some sort of big picture condemnation of cyber bullying.

You mean the same amount of time they dedicated to talking about incels and the red pill?

The point of the show was actually that social media was to blame, even more so than the parents of either of the kids.

The kid was heavily influenced by whatever the social media algo was feeding him (as any kid would be), and the girl was a cyber bully who didn't consider the consequences of her words.

Obviously our main kid wasn't painted as a victim, but it's not really about him being "radicalized white kid". There is more nuance there, as there is in life.

They could've made it a black kid, but then people would focus more on the race issue than what the actual thesis of the show was, which was the social media aspect.

Nobody is saying the migrant crisis isn't an issue, but this show was under zero obligation to tackle that issue, when it never claimed to be a true story about a particular event.

Here's what I found about that. Quoted below...

"There was an incident where a young boy [allegedly] stabbed a girl," Graham, who also plays Jamie's dad in the show, told Netflix's Tudum of the true story behind the fictional show. "It shocked me. I was thinking, 'What's going on? What's happening in society where a boy stabs a girl to death? What's the inciting incident here?' And then it happened again, and it happened again, and it happened again. I really just wanted to shine a light on it, and ask, 'Why is this happening today? What's going on? How have we come to this?'"

Jamie, played by Owen Cooper, might not be a real kid in the literal sense but, to Thorne and Graham, he is a demonstration of what is happening to young men who are becoming exposed to the manosphere online.

"One of our aims was to ask, '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?'" Graham told Tudum. "And the pressures that come from all of those things are as difficult for kids [in the UK] as they are the world over."

According to the creator himself, that is not the point. He said in an interview that basically everybody is to blame:

Quote:

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There's that phrase, "it takes a village to raise a child." It also takes a village to destroy a child, and Jamie has been destroyed.

He's being destroyed by a school system that's not helping him. He's been destroyed by parents that are not really seeing him. He's been destroyed by friends that maybe don't reach him in the way that he needs to be reached. He's been destroyed by his own brain chemistry, and he's been destroyed by the ideas that he's consumed. All these different elements are in play here.

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And he doesn't say "bullying" once. When he does talk about curbing social media, it's not to stop bullying, it's to limit exposure to the likes of Andrew Tate in order to not "radicalize young men":

Quote:

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What needs to change to address the radicalization of young men?

I think we need to find a way of dealing with social media. How we do that with the people that are governing social media right now is very tough, because it's not going to come from (the platforms) policing themselves. And in America, it's not going to come from legislation either.

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When Stephen Graham approached him about making the show, he didn't say "let's make a show about the effects of social media and cyber bullying!" He said:

Quote:

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It started with my friend (series co-creator) Stephen Graham. Stephen called me up and said we should write a show about boys hating girls and about knife crime, which in (the UK) is really problematic right now.

That was the start of us talking about male rage, our own anger, our own cruelty. We were trying to build a complicated portrait of masculinity: Of how we were made and how teenagers are being made in a lot of similar ways, but with a lot of differences, too.

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You are pulling a "point" out of your ass that does not agree with the show creators.

Well, my original point was that it has nothing to do with race and that's it's a larger criticism of social media. And the show was not based on one specific event.

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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Well, my original point was that it has nothing to do with race and that's it's a larger criticism of social media. And the show was not based on one specific event.

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Well, the question that kicked off this project was to wonder why there is so much knife crime in the UK. The answer to that absolutely does have to do with Race. Per capita, Blacks are responsible for 6-10 times the knife crime than whites. And nobody in their right mind would believe that blacks are on social media 6-10 times more than whites.

And I'd point you to my earlier post, saying that the show had no obligation to focus on that specific issue.

It chose to focus on a different, equally important (if not more so) issue affecting all the younger generations, and is a big reason why it's been so popular worldwide.

And that's it's also disingenuous to call this race-swapping when it's not actually based on one particular event.

We've gone in a full circle now.

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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And I'd point you to my earlier post, saying that the show had no obligation to focus on that specific issue.

It chose to focus on a different, equally important (if not more so) issue affecting all the younger generations, and is a big reason why it's been so popular worldwide.

And that's it's also disingenuous to call this race-swapping when it's not actually based on one particular event.

We've gone in a full circle now.

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Who said it had "an obligation"? They can make the show as misleading as they wish. It's their money. But we have the right to call them out on it too.

The notion that social media is equally or more important to the cause of these crimes is ridiculous. Crime today is still now where near what it was in the 70s. And there was no social media at all back then.

It would be one thing if producers simply claimed that this show was focused on what it was like to be parents of a young murderer. But they don't. They pretend that they are delving into deeper nuances of WHY these murders occur. And yet they completely misdiagnose the problem. That's what people are complaining about. They can ban social media all they want, but until we fix the real causes, this problem will continue.

So your entire argument is that the only knife murders that shows should be about is black on white crime. And anything other than that is misleading?